The Dumpster Decipher

Instagram, Mixed Media. 2013-2019.

In 2013, I was walking around Downtown Los Angeles and stumbled upon a dumpster. It was covered in stickers and tags. Of course this is a common sight when you’re walking in an urban environment, but that particular dumpster ended up changing my life.

I took several photographs of it, and hurried back to my office. At my desk, I decided to write a couple of poems about the dumpster. Around that time, I had started writing poetry as a way to cope with the stress of running a small business.

The Job Is Never Done

After writing the first poem, I almost forgot about the project entirely. One day, a friend wanted to hear some of my recent work while we were out having a beer. I pulled out my notebook, stumbled upon the poem, and re-read it. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly proud of the poem, but I was obsessed with the concept behind it, and enjoyed writing it. As I continued, I became fascinated by the idea that poems like these are not mine. Instead, these are translations of something that’s either already existing, or already replaced. Often, the space I translated by night would have already changed into something new by the morning. The job is never done. And yes, I may have been sipping a bit too much Mezcal that night.

Because of my work with verynice, I would get asked to come and speak, or facilitate a workshop, all over the world. Wherever my travels would take me, I’d walk the streets in search of something interesting to photograph. Either on-site, or later that same evening, I’d write a poem to accompany that photo. Poetry has a unique ability to make the most mundane things in the world beautiful and interesting. Dumpsters, on the other hand, have a unique way of representing a community. Not just through the scribbles and wheat paste, but also the ripped up junk mail and bags of dog shit. These are artifacts that serve as indicators of a place. Poetry and dumpsters actually have a lot in common. Both, full of words, yet starving for readership.

After collecting these poems and photographs for a while, I thought it’d make for a hilarious Instagram profile. With consistent content coming out just about every day, the profile attracted over 25,000 followers at its peak. The response was a bit addicting… I found myself looking for tags and dumpsters everywhere I traveled. I ended up publishing over 900 of these, and the process remained experimental throughout the life of the project. I’d occasionally rely on acronyms; sometimes the environment itself would play a role. I even bought a few books on handwriting analysis to see if I could better understand the emotion of the tags. I won’t lie, the work gets goofy at times, but that’s part of the fun.

The First Poem

I wrote the first poem at some point in 2013. I was living in South Pasadena at the time, but had moved my office to the then “up-and-coming” area of Downtown LA’s Arts District ,the year before. I really enjoyed wandering around the neighborhood, drinking boba, discovering new murals, and eating lots of sushi. Having grown up in the suburbs, the idea of working in an urban environment always sounded exciting to me.

Around the time I wrote the first poem, my then girlfriend (now wife) and I were thinking about moving to the Arts District. We loved the idea of driving less, walking more, and living in a big building. In 2014, we packed up our things, and made it happen. We moved into a loft just a few months before getting married. The first poem was based on a dumpster I found at 738 E 3rd Street in the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles. The original, unedited version of the first poem is featured below.

Experimental Style

Throughout the project, I consciously switched up the style of my writing. I was interested in using this growing platform as a way to experiment with new approaches. Early on in the project, I was interested in writing as objectively as possible. I took phrases and letters directly from the dumpster, and resisted any kind of interpretations. It wasn’t until my wife and I went to Barcelona that I really felt like I found something that was interesting. It was a mix of objective description, and stream-of-conscious interpretation. The poems also ended up much shorter than the first poem. Each, averaging about 4 lines.

Other Works

Aside from photography and poetry, I explored the Dumpster Decipher concept in a wide range of media, including block printing, animation, graphic design, acrylic painting, and drawing.

The Process

The slideshow below gives a sense for the process of writing a Dumpster Decipher poem. It all begins with a photograph of a dumpster, or other object that may be covered in stickers and tags. Next, each individual element is isolated and transformed into a poem. Finally, the individual elements are combined to create a narrative sequence that results in a finalized poem. This one in particular is called “The Cosmic Opera Singer”, and it is a bit longer than the average poem published on the @dumpsterdecipher account.

Related Past Work

Elements of the writing method used in the Dumpster Decipher project are inspired by a past project I did in collaboration with Salvador Orara: Oumédpo. We created a series of 8 poems by translating instrumental music, and audio Captcha into the English using Google Voice. While Sal created sound for Google Voice with his guitar, I turned to the audio version of Captcha (if you haven’t tried it before, you must).

The results of the translations were peculiar, but beautiful. The typography was done in a way to mimic the aesthetic of spam Captcha graphics. The poems were performed at the ArtCenter College of Design, and at an open mic night at a random bar in the San Fernando Valley.