 So, this afternoon, we'll continue expanding on the histories of plastics and we have two more panelists that will expand our understanding on plastics and their effects in urbanizing, in the urbanizing of Hong Kong or in the constructions of cheapness embedded in Victorian plastic substitutions. In this panel, we have one online, so it'll go a little differently. I'll introduce our first speaker. Take a little pause. We'll get the Zoom on and then we'll start again with a second. So I'll start by introducing Hoy Tsé, who's the 2022 Curatorial Fellow at the Royal College of Art. And her talk today is Plastic Prosperity in Growing Hong Kong. And Hoy is a social art historian with degrees from UCL and the University of Amsterdam. And her dissertation really focused on contemporary museum collecting practices in relation to art, history, and design collections. And she's currently in London looking at digital platforms to create community-engaged spaces for co-curating and collecting contemporary design objects in London and Hong Kong. And she also participates in projects that digitally reproduce cultural artifacts and historical sites. And today, her work looks at the relations between prosperity and plastics. So, welcome. Good afternoon. Thank you, Jessica. Thank you, Jessica. Today, I want to talk about the relationship between plastic as manufacturing material and the British colonial past of Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, we always say that even the richest man of the city, also one of the richest man in the world, Li Ka-shing, owns his wealth to plastic. The prosperity of the city and the plastic industry in colonial Hong Kong formed a tight connection in the 20th century. The bloomed of the factories manufacturing plastic products in the 1950s and 60s was the heyday of Hong Kong's economic and social development. Based on this association of plastic as an industrial material with the development of Hong Kong, I'm going to discuss the ways in which the plastic products represented the prosperity of Hong Kong colonial past and how these objects created the collective memories of this past. I will also refer to some of these plastic objects produced by Hong Kong companies in the M-plus museum collection and show why these objects are important for recalling local memories about the prosperity of the city in the past. First, I think it could be useful to contextualize this growth of the Hong Kong plastic industry a little bit. It was in the post-war period that Hong Kong began its industrialization and commercialization. Such a transformation was caused by status as a British colony during a series of major international and transnational political events. After the online victory in the Second World War, the fall of European imperialism led the Chinese nationalist government to request the return of Hong Kong from Britain. But the defeat of the nationalist government in the Chinese Civil War allowed Britain to defer this request. With the communist regime's rise in power in 1949 and the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong the capitalist colony became a hotspot of immigration for the mainland Chinese. There were an estimate of 1.3 million of refugees from different parts of China and these immigrants include the industrialists from Shanghai who had the capital and leading knowledge of industrial production in Asia. Moreover, the embargo on China imposed by the US further challenged Hong Kong's role as China's entry port at that time. The unbridled capitalism promoted by the British colonial government also facilitated the local industrial base to dramatically expand and produce an economic miracle. The plastic industry was undoubtedly one of the key light manufacturing industry that contributed to this miracle. The unique circumstances allow Hong Kong's rapid industrialization within just three to four decades. As you can see here, the changes is exactly the same place, but within this around four decades, that's how the harbor friends become after that. So to valorize the industrial heritage of Hong Kong, Magi Leung and the Detroit Sui proposed a rethinking of the Eurocentric notion of industrial heritage. They call for stretching the existing cultural heritage concept and developing more inclusive and dynamic context-sensitive approaches. Specifically about the heritage, like the industrial heritage in Hong Kong, they emphasize on the importance of appreciating the multiplicity of the heritage itself. The city's identity was represented by the different stories and cultures of the diverse local communities who contribute to the industrial and economic prosperity. In other words, to understand the significance of the plastic industrial objects to the local culture and memories, we must look from a local perspective and examine how the experiences related to these objects divide the identity of Hong Kong during its post-war colonial period. So the development of the light manufacturing industry in Hong Kong began with the import of foreign technologies and industrial knowledge through the existing network of the Shanghai industrialists, as I just mentioned. Cliff Sun, the current chairman and the son of the founder of Kid Him, Metal and Plastic Factory, said it was with the assistance from Europe that the industrial and technological capability of Hong Kong advance at that time. This includes not only the import of European plastic making machines, but also the knowledge of repair and development of more efficient production technology. Kenneth Tang, the current chairman of Kidah Industrial Company, also based in Hong Kong, recalled that when they're molding the plastic, the mold after long-term use will have cracks. So they would usually send it back to the US for repairment, but it would take more than a year to sustain the production of their company. They start expanding itself and begin to produce the plastic mold themselves by learning from the western plastic mold making technology. Apart from manufacturing the products, the plastic products in the small-scale labor-intensive factories, another characteristic of Hong Kong plastic production was its residential production sites. The density of Hong Kong plastic production was intertwined with the social and urban processes. As I mentioned earlier, the large influx of mainland Chinese immigrants had provided a large supply of cheap labor, which include child labor, female workers, and undocumented immigrants. From a process-oriented perspective and perhaps like cost and benefit perspective, this low-skilled yet low-cost labor offered favorable conditions for manufacturing like consumer goods like plastic toys, flowers, and daily utensils. Manufactories at that time subcontracted simple painting, sewing, and assembling tasks that require no help or machine to hundreds of thousands of local individuals and households. The willingness to spend the time on taking this subcontract, possibly making tasks at home, was probably due to the unpleasant living conditions at that time, as you can see here, this quarter, next to the factory. And also partly because of this mentality of making some extra money. So Feng Jishun, a retired medical pathologist and crime writer, in his memoir talked about the mindset of earning some extra money for the family. Living in the Squatter Village in Diamond Hill in the 1950s, he described the reason why he would take teenage summer jobs as a domestic piece worker in the plastic file industry. He said that it was just this very idea of having some extra cash that motivated him to work during his summer holidays. He knew that it was not to make his family rich, but to improve their living conditions in whatever way he could. The former colonial governor of the city, Alexander Grantham, labeled this mindset of earning extra money as the hot-working nature of Chinese, which of course was not limited to only the male workers. Shelley Zey, a Hong Kong-born American contemporary artist, also talked about her own experience as a woman worker in the plastic flower industry. Before the colonial government subsidized primary and secondary education, many low-income families in Hong Kong work in the plastic and garment industries, or took subcontracted tasks from the factories to make extra money for their living. A division of labor that emerged with a majority of female workers working in the plastic flower factories because women were regarded as more skillful at manual craft work and delicate manual assembly. The experience of manufacturing plastic products of these young workers, the time and energy they spent on making plastic products as well as the presence of plastic making at their home, as you can see here. These are not factory at all. It's just like a shop nearby a village that waiting for people to pick up their orders like from factories. So all this contributed to the stories of how Hong Kong became a prosperous industrial city at that time. So that behind all this experience, there was also the British colonial government's policy of accepting a large number of Chinese immigrants before depending on how to support this huge growth of population with social security and benefits. Other than the experiences of being part of the plastic manufacturing process, the experiences of using and consuming fabrics locally produced plastic products also contributed to the memories about the prosperity of Hong Kong plastic industry. Jessica Lern, the current brand development director and the granddaughter of the founder of Star Industrial Corporation, explained how the company evolved from a small brand specialized in producing brushes to an enterprise producing a wide variety of plastic household products in the 50s. The most known brand of the company was the Red A brand, which was familiar and popular among the local Hong Kong families for their cheap household items. In the Amplus collection, however, there are also 16 items of a particular series. These are some of the items called the plastic crystal series of the Red A brand. About the development of this product series, Lerns explained the inspiration came from the fashionable, expensive glass products in the 60s. So her father created a cheaper alternative with plastics and test it in the local market before exporting it to other countries. A major event for the Red A brand to open up new export market was the Hong Kong brands and products exposition. The exposition was inaugurated in the 1930s as the first Chinese product exhibition organized by the Chinese Manufacturers Association of Hong Kong in Singapore in order to explore the Southeast Asian market. With the growing popularity of Hong Kong industrial products, the association starts staging the exhibition locally to promote Hong Kong factories and industrial production. The exposition offered foreign and local businesses to network with each other and promote Hong Kong industrial products to the overseas and local consumers. The growth of the plastic product exported to the foreign market through this event then turned May in Hong Kong into a brand. Rather than household products, plastic toys and flowers were some of the most popular manufacturing products that Hong Kong plastic factory exported to the West, particularly to Britain and the US. Although the features attributed by the British media to Hong Kong toys were not as positive as the Hong Kong industrialists intended, they often mentioned about the possible toxic material they use and or the low qualities they have in terms of the graphics or the face. The toys were still some of the most popular goods brought by the British people even though. David Cannondine, the British art historian, the biggest historian, sorry, remembered his childhood with the toys, as he said, which were identified as empire made, often in euphemism for made in Hong Kong at that time. During the Cold War, the US supported British imperial claimed with Hong Kong as a base for monitoring the communist China. The US government set up its largest consulate in Hong Kong and then hence its trade engagement with Hong Kong factories. In fact, Hong Kong's plastic industry was begun with Qin Hanqiu, the Shanghai industrialists who opened the China plastic company by importing the ingestion-moting machine from the US. This business relationship between Hong Kong plastic industrialists and American plastic machine suppliers then changed in the late 1950s again. Hong Kong plastic factories start to take over the American plastic consumption market. By 1958, 99% of Hong Kong produced plastic flowers were exported to the US. By the 60, Hong Kong exports of plastic flowers account for five million US dollars, which is approximately 44 million US dollars nowadays. This prosperity of plastic firemen and fetching and export could bring us back to Li Ka-shing, as you can see him here when he was young. The Hong Kong tycoon who started his business empire with a plastic flower factory. In a Bloomberg television interview in 2016 when he was announcing his retirement, he mentioned that he bought a copy of an American trade magazine called More Than Plastic. At that time, every month to keep himself updated with the latest plastic making technologies and products. So as a conclusion of my discussion today, the interconnection between the Hong Kong manufacturing industry and its products were complex, certainly, because of how it relates to Hong Kong people, not just to the industrialists, but as I show you some of the situation like people are making plastic goods at home. So it's connected to Hong Kong people of different social class from different Chinese origins. So looking at the plastic objects collected by the M Plus Museum, I think this object could serve as a good starting point for the museum to diversify the stories about the local cultural identity and industrial heritage. But as I mentioned, Maggie Lerng and Dietrich Suwaii also suggest that the relevant stakeholders in the preservation of this local heritage are extremely diverse. There are still plenty of engagement opportunities that a local museum like M Plus could use to localize the knowledge about the Made in Hong Kong brand. To end my presentation, I want to end it with this quotation from, again, Jessica Lerng, the granddaughter of the founder of Star Industrial Corporation, talking about the human touch of all this plastic for the produce in the 50s and 60s. Thank you. Thank you, Hoi. And now we'll go online, but I'll start with an introduction and hopefully the Zoom will pop up as I'm chatting. So today we have Amy Woodson Bolton, next, who is a professor of British and Irish history and past chair of the Department of History at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, California. We're switching places. I'm generally normally in LA. So today her talk is Design Plasticity Before Plastic, Victorian Substitutions, Truths of Materials, and the Deceptions of Cheapness. Amy is widely published, including the book Transformative Beauty, Art Museums, Industrial Britain from Stanford University Press. And she's currently working on a book-length study of 19th century anthropology and the social role of supposed primitive art, tentatively titled Explaining Art, Nature, Authentic Culture, and the Search for Origins in the Age of Empire. So welcome, Amy. Can you hear us? You're on whenever you're ready. I think you're muted. There you go. Can you hear me? Yes. You're all set. Thank you so much. And again, I just want to thank all the people behind the scenes who made it possible for us to join in a hybrid way. Sorry, that was a necessary little cat walk by. It's really fantastic to be able to join you from Santa Monica, where I am on Gabrielle Neo Tongue by the Lands. So today, I want to think about some of the continuities in the logic of industrial production over the last 200 years, from cast iron to plastics, material substitutions, mass production, the push for raw materials, the unequal distribution of both wealth and toxic effects, and pervasive and destructive ideas about toxic cities and pristine wilderness. Art and social critic John Ruskin's writings are especially helpful here, along with some specific examples from the 1862 London International Exhibition, which celebrated industrial production and colonial extraction with trophies of gold and timber, for example, that I'll be using to illustrate this design plasticity before plastic. John Ruskin was one of the 19th century thinkers who helped craft a popular language of natural theology, of sacred nature, and the artists and writers whom he championed and inspired spread the conception far and wide. Back in the first volume of Modern Painters in 1843, the work that first brought him prominence, he urged accomplished painters to take on the challenge of painting the Alps. We do not want chalets and three-legged stools, cowbells and buttermilk. We want the pure and holy hills, treated as a link between heaven and earth. The need for pure and holy hills could seem desperate during the rapid urbanization of the 19th century. Reformers in multiple industrializing countries set aside areas of particular beauty, organized trips from cities into the countryside, and set up institutions and infrastructure for bringing nature into cities. And even art museums found a justification this way. What historian Joaquin Radclow calls the modern religion of nature, but hand in hand with nationalism, and even with aspects of industrial development, as railroads could bring people more efficiently from cities into countryside escapes. The division between city and countryside then, as old as cities themselves, took on a new meaning, a new mass audience, and new technologies and symbolism in the 19th and 20th centuries. As urban pollution became a feature of modern life and leaders either moved out into leafy suburbs or moved industry out of leafy centers, the real and symbolic differences between industrial and natural terrain even started. The legacies of slavery, colonialism, and segregation left these racialized as well as the media class, social class, and politics. And finally, however, wrestling called the pension in provocative ways. Amy, we're having trouble hearing you. Can you hear me? You're muted at the moment. It wouldn't be a Zoom hybrid event if there wasn't one of these. Can you try talking? Yeah, I think it's the headphone switch and the cat. It gets really the cat. I'll give you a second. Hello, I think it was your AirPods that you took off after my phone. I think yeah, your AirPods. We can only hear your lips, see your lips moving, we can't hear a word. Yep, try talking again. Okay, can you hear me now? Yep. Okay, my AirPods is telling me that it's dying. So even though it's also saying it's at 99%, it's never happened before. So I'm so sorry about this. So you can hear me now. Yep, I'll stay up here too, just to help, just in case. Okay, thank you. I'm so sorry, what, okay. So I'm not quite sure where you lost me. But I was saying that John Ruskin's famous design ethos of truth and materials shows us that the economic logic of plastic was already at play in the 19th century. In the seven lamps of architecture of 1849, he railed against the substitution of wood for marble or plaster for stone, laying out three types of what he called architectural deceits. First, suggesting a false structure. Second, the painting of surfaces to represent some other material than that of which they actually consist as in the marbling of wood or the deceptive representation of sculptured ornament upon them. And third, quote, the use of cast or machine-made ornaments of any kind. As Ruskin wrote about painting wood to look like marble or mass-produced ornaments meant to look made by hand or molding stucco to look like carved stone, he described the architecture of the new cities, the increasingly mass-produced decoration for homes, churches, shops, train stations, hotels, offices and factories built in a proliferation of historical styles. Mass-produced design meant taking shortcuts. It also meant treating certain people, being enslaved, colonized subjects, industrial workers and landscapes, colonies, industrial cities as disposable. 10 years later in 1859, Ruskin gave an address called Modern Manufacture and Design to the Bradford Mechanics Institute published in The Two Paths later that year. This lecture raised questions closely connected to our own time and the plastic crisis, particularly in terms of the purpose and limitations on economic growth and the potential loss of any unchanged natural spaces. In addressing the possibility of making art and in being careful to say that, quote, all art may be decorative and that the greatest art yet produced has been decorative, Ruskin made the point that it was becoming the essence of his social criticism. That is that art is a product of its society. What, Ruskin asks, can art, design or life mean in an economy based on constant expansion? If you will tell me what you ultimately intend Bradford to be, perhaps I can tell you what Bradford can ultimately produce. As matters stand all over England, as soon as one mill is at work occupying 200 hands, we try by means of it to set another mill at work occupying 400. That's all simple and comprehensive enough, but what is it to come to? How many mills do we want? Or do we indeed want no end of mills? This image of Bradford in 17, sorry, 18, 73, gives us a taste of what he meant and how much his predictions turned out to be true. After imagining all the uses that might be put to the various regions of Scotland, England and Wales, he continues, is this then what you want? You're going straight added at present and I have only to ask under what limitations I am to conceive or describe your final success or shall there be no limitations? There are none to your powers. Every day puts new machinery at your disposal and increases with your capital, the vastness of your undertakings. Therefore I must necessarily ask how much of it do you seriously intend within the next 50 years to be coal pit, brick field or quarry? After suggesting the picturesque lake and mountain landscapes of the island to development, he imagines a future nightmare industrial landscape, a vision of a fully industrialized world, a vast continuous megalopolis. Ruskin's thought experiment of a fully industrial and urban England, a land where there's no area deemed sacred and all land is equally available to defilement, we can see both the similarities and differences with our own moment. His thought experiment of draining all British lakes and turning the mountains into quarries was likewise meant to shock, contrasting, beloved and beautiful areas with accepted industrial expansion. Like Ruskin's iron and coal economy, we now see a plastic country emerging, visibly covering the land and invisibly invading our air, water and bodies. But we can also see that some of this literal and symbolic pollution is widely understood as socially acceptable at the cost of doing business and some pollution causes public outrage for its rupture of our current illusions. That is, if we are in positions of global North privilege, we imagine that we can outsource toxicity to others. Meanwhile, we can fantasize that there are still regions of the world outside human influence, wild and pure, and that a consumer economy built on exploitation and unlimited growth with little or no regulation can somehow confine the toxic effects and waste produced. That is, in the wealthy parts of the world, the dominant discourse establishes that there are meaningful differences between a national park and a landfill and between the people in those spaces. In thinking about the theme of today's conference and as Professor Liwan and others have taught us, we can see plastic pollution as a demarcation of colonial geographies. There are many, many examples of 19th century design that could illustrate design plasticity and the logic of deceptive materials and material substitutions. Here are just a few from the 1862 International Exhibition in London. For instance, these artificial stone garden ornaments. The 1862 catalog also has many examples of what you see here, an illustration of Cartain-Pierre, enrichment for architectural purposes. Cartain-Pierre was paper pulp resin and glue molded to resemble wood, stone, or marble, an excellent option for cheap, quickly made new suburbs. Ruskin's rule against cast iron reacted to the mass production of work that used to be handmade, giving the worker, as Ruskin imagined at least, joy in the satisfaction of producing beautiful original work. The 1862 exhibition included this extraordinary example, a cast iron church. This made me think of the doomed glass and iron church in Peter Carey's novel, Oscar and Lucinda, about the brutal colonization of Australia. These kinds of mass produced, molded objects combining new types of materials put appearance and superficiality over substance and put short-term profit over the experience or health of the workers or the longevity of the object itself. Their similarity to the original objects they mimic is only in their appearance, like Dickens's Nouveau-Riche couple, the veneerings from our mutual friend, which appeared 1864, 65. Simulating other materials molded by new combinations of ingredients or chemicals is also, of course, the logic of plastic. Its plasticity is that it can mimic shapes, textures, and colors. Chemistry has been at work over the last century, creating the ability through numerous additives that make this possible. How often have we picked up an object wondering and judging mostly by weight, whether it is wood, stone, or plastic? We've gotten used to laminate polyvinyl flooring and furniture and plastic architectural ornamentation of all kinds. Here in Los Angeles, people cover their yards and sports fields in plastic fake lawns. These deceits spawned a whole movement in opposition around truth to materials, a concern not just with good design, but with the conditions of production and, of course, wealth and status. Concerned for workers turned into a style. And arts and crafts exponents rarely considered the global connections and injustices of imperialism or legacies of slavery or the conditions of workers beyond the industrial hands at home. The arts and crafts became a style connected with the moral critique, but that style also remained only accessible to the few, despite the hopes of radical and innovative designers like William Morris. In looking for an arts and crafts example, I came across this wonderful illustration of the pull and cachet this still has, Morris and company now at Harrods. That said, the very multiplication of movements that combined an aesthetic and moral critique of the conditions of product production or the authenticity of materials tells us a great deal about the sense of disconnect that a growing consumer and mass production-based society created between producers and users, access to reel as opposed to airsats or simulated goods has been a sign of privilege for a long time. As he battled his own bouts of mental illness, Ruskin wrote about the storm cloud of the 19th century as both visible and invisible, a fretful wind and anxious fluttering of leaves, but also a darkened sky and a changed dull gray light. He linked it with the soot of the coal-fired mills all around him as he wrote, even as he saw it as a kind of haunting. So too now I suggest we are also haunted now by the persistent chemicals and for some mothers I know the fear that their exposures harmed their children. We have visible and invisible storm clouds of fossil fuel particulates this time in the ocean and in our own blood, the visible gyrs and the invisible swirling storm of microplastics now in our water, air, soil, in our breast milk, blood and lungs and in the deepest ocean. The same operations of industrial capitalism that Ruskin identified in the 19th century and which the arts and crafts movement apparently stood against would drive chemists of the 20th century to develop synthetic polymers applicable to numerous uses and available through the apparently endless supply of fossil fuels. It can be helpful to think of the logics of exploration and exploitation that we see in 19th century European imperialism and so bombastically trumpeted at the world's fairs as continuing through and around and next to the cast iron, the artificial stone, the carton pierre and the new synthetics of the late 19th and then the 20th centuries, new opportunities for material substitutions and new design possibilities opened with late 19th century celluloid and then as we've heard early 20th century Bakelite propelled by and proliferating alongside combustion engines and the technological innovations of the world wars, disposable fossil fuel-based plastics and synthetics supplemented and made cheap imitations of whalebone ivory, silk, tortoise shell, wood, leather, fur and wool. Plastic has now reached such a global saturation that some geologists consider it a measure or evidence of the Anthropocene, its presence in the rock strata, a golden spike marking the beginning of a new geological epoch. This omnipresence embodies multiple aspects of our own current crises, our disposable economy, reliance on fossil fuels, rapidly changing climate and the unevenly distributed toxic effects at all stages of plastics extraction, production, use and disposal. These negative externalities fall along historically constructed racialized lines of inequality and such disparities continue to make plastics seem deceptively inexpensive, hailed for its cheapness and its adaptability to extraordinarily varied uses. Plastic is the perfected logic of industrial capitalism. It's triumph and as we're increasingly aware, it's toxic trap. Thanks so much. Okay, we'll see if we can master this Q&A online. Amy, just holler if you can see us or if you can't but wave if you have any issues, okay? Otherwise, I have no idea. Okay, so thanks both Hoey and Amy for really, I think pulling to charge these questions that design history is really reach into issues of labor or exposure and that art, architecture and design histories are not a part of, but a part of, not apart from, but a part of colonial geographies. And so I have a question, I'm gonna start with a question for Hoey and then expand from beyond that. I thought what was really important about your work is that it really unflattens this big question of plastic and really humanizes further this conversation on plastics in Hong Kong of economy and interest, but mostly labor. And so I'm interested in the case studies. I think so often plastic is depicted in these humanless environments beyond the extraction zone and sacrifice cities that we know of. But the case that you have in the 1950s and 60s where plastic comes home in terms of labor and painting, I wanna hear a little bit more about how that is an exceptional case in Hong Kong or how you see it relating and what are those stories? How did you recuperate the sort of painting objects at home? I think just it's such a different story than we hear. I think for me, the first time I heard about that was from my parents. So they were born in the 50s, 60s and when they talk about when they're kids they are very poor because basically most of the immigrants from mainland China, they had nothing when they came to Hong Kong. So it's also the era of the baby boomers. So they have seven, eight children to feed like my grandparents. So most of the time I remember like my mother talked about her older sister might work in one of the plastic flower factories and then they will have like large orders from the US, from the Britain all the time. So how this kind of small factories can cope with all these orders is to ask around basically as simple as that. It's like, for example, my aunts will say like, yeah, maybe I'll just bring up, I don't know how many pounds or like kilos of plastic flower material back home and say that like my mom at that time could be five years old, six years old. It's like, okay, we just do it at home. After I left work, we came back, I teach you how to do it and we start showing all this plastic flower petals together at home before and after dinner, something like that. So that's how I start learning about all these kinds of stories. And I think as Jessica just said, it's so different perhaps from what we think about plastic nowadays. We think about the factories, we think about all these mechanical actions which were done by human at that time in Hong Kong because of how small the city itself was. I mean, right now it's not much bigger but at the time it's even smaller before all this land reclamation. And it has been like an issue for Hong Kong forever because when we think about industrial facilities, we think about large scale. But for Hong Kong itself, it doesn't have that land resources to do it. So at that time, it become all this kind of manual labor at home and home-making plastic products happen. Great, thanks. And I'll ask a question of Amy, can you hear me? No. Yes, I can. Just making sure. To sort of expand on that industrial question, that really the work that you presented brings forth this question of Bradford and the effects of industrialization, not just plastics as like a monolith, but the replacement and production writ large much bigger, right? So this process of industrialization being implicated in about a larger project of production and industrialization was really part of a larger problem. Like plastics is one part, but project processes and steel cast iron and beyond just sort of the replication and production of more products at faster speeds. And so I'm interested in just how you think this fits in the plastics conversation. Is it just one part of a larger critique of industrialization or something beyond that? Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think for me, one of the things that I love about, I mean, Ruskin is very problematic in many ways, but one of the things he does show us is this conversation over economic growth. And I think you really see that in the speech you gave to Bradford, right? When he's talking about, okay, so the goal seems to be you have one mill, then you have 200, then you have 400, where does it stop? And why are we, like, what is the point of it? Like, what are we aiming for? And I think that plastic for me is the perfect embodiment in its disposability and in the fantasy, right, that you can use it and that there is a place you can dispose it to of economic growth, of endless economic growth. And I think in the discipline of history and in economics right now and in the climate movement and in environmental justice spaces, people are, you know, talking about like, how is it that economic growth has become the only way that we can conceive of being in the world? And this is absolutely, as people have said already, you know, this is settler colonial logic, that there's always somewhere else you can go. I mean, right now, the most extreme vision is, okay, well, we're done with Earth, we have to go to Mars. But these are connected ideas, right? That there is a place you can go and that the goal is endless growth. So for me, plastic is part of that logic. And I think as somebody who specialized in the 19th century, but teaches really broadly, right? Like, teaches modern global environmental history 1500 to the present. You can see the operations of these logic and they go back further, they go to colonization initially in the Americas, they go back to slavery, but I think we then see them in industry and plastic. Yeah, absolutely goes. I'd love to open it up to the audience to make it a little bit more of a conversation. And also feel free to ask questions. I feel like the last panel got a little bit shortchanged, but as larger questions of what is our architecture history and design history's role in this larger question of the ethics of plastics. And if there's no question, I can always pull forward, but I'm gonna leave a little bit of awkward silence. There you go, thanks. And say your name too, it helps. Hi, my name is Clémence. I've got a question for Amy. Well, I could have a question for both of you and we could be there all afternoon, but I'll start with Amy. So you talked a lot about Ruskin. It was really interesting and quite daunting actually to see that today some people have the exact same discourses and he did, and we are not much advanced. So I was mainly wondering how, what he said was received at the time, what answer he got from Bradford or from other people that maybe made that, you know, it did not progress or did he get some positive feedbacks as well? That's such a great question. I think the people in Bradford were a little bemused because they had specifically asked him to kind of like advise them on how they should build their city. Like they put some very specific architectural advice and he was like, you need to like rethink everything you're doing here. One of the things that I found, I didn't mean to write about Ruskin. I've ended up dealing with Ruskin a lot more than I ever wanted to. I started trying to write the histories of art museums in industrial cities. As Jessica said, that was my first book project and what I found was that people, there was a subset of reformers who were super into Ruskin. They loved what he was saying. He inspired all kinds of people. And I think, and this is, I think a really interesting question that Jessica's raising for people who do architecture history, art history, sign history, et cetera, the people took his ideas to mean, we need to make the world more beautiful and we need support to support art. And so they started like building art museums in industrial cities and taking working people out to the countryside and kind of wanting to, like a very liberal idea of like, we can reform at the edges. And Ruskin's response was like, you've totally misunderstood what I'm saying. I am against this entire system where, and this is nearly a quote, but he's like, we're one out of every thousand people in Britain has a decent life. And he says, like give people clean air, clean water, good housing, and then worry about art. Like art can't happen in this complete, this system of radical inequality. So, he became much more radical as he went on, whereas they kind of took his ideas as, oh, let's build a city art museum. But that's all we can do. So I think a lot of the issues are still really pertinent today. Structural change, not just beauty. Right, right. Great, another question there in the center. Thanks so much. Hello to both of you. What a fascinating talk about craftsmanship in a way and changing the notion of what craftsmanship is. And I like the problem, the way that you, in a way, challenged us to rethink plastic, 50s and 60s. And I just wondered whether you might want to say something about also beauty and Ruskin, but his notion of beauty in the dignity of labor. Yeah, I mean, I think the part of what's, part of what's so interesting actually, and thinking about the other talk and the way that plastic could be involved in and can be involved. And as we've heard, plastic can be a basis of art and kind of what that means for the experience of the worker in terms of expression, right? Like are the people sewing flowers, like, you know, is that a sense to, and I'd love to hear like, did they have a sense of this is a creative endeavor? Did it have any kind of sense of creativity for Ruskin and Morris and, you know, the many people that they inspired artists and craftspeople? The essence of the critique was so much about not just the creation of beauty, but the experience of the worker, the experience of the artisan, their ability to express themselves. And the logic of something like cast iron is exactly that you just have a mold and you just make many, many, many of them, right? This is mass production as opposed, and then you can treat the workers as disposable in doing that. So I think it's like the thing that is still so compelling about Ruskin's analysis and the kind of this reaction that we see in the 19th century is that sense of a combination of the product and the conditions of production. But I'd love to hear about, I don't know if you have thought about it. Also, I think whether Hoey's work really talks a lot, I'll just speak just because I wanna frame this question a little differently is that, you know, there's something in a hard day's work that's not always, you're receiving the money or the pay, but plastics, it's not always a choice, right? It's an economic means to an end. So something that might be, you might feel pride in bringing home a good day's labor. And I think that's the problem with the economics of plastics which is attached to the economics of the pesticide industry and beyond. These are situated in economies where people need a job. And so this is sort of one of the big problems. I think that your work highlights is that some, yeah. Yeah, I think so definitely because particularly like what Amy said about, there's supposed to be some kind of artisanal skills behind it but at the same time the laborers are disposable because I think it's definitely related to the cheapness of the product itself as well because for example, Hong Kong product at that time are known to be cheap. Like what I said, like the British media described some of the products might be toxic, they have inferior quality, maybe dangerous for children to play with toys like this but at the same time they still import a massive amount of toys from Hong Kong. So it's because I think definitely this kind of capitalist values behind all these products make the artisanal kind of absence or people just simply didn't think about who are the people spending time drawing all these features on the toys or like all these flowers, how are they sewed up? Because I don't know if you remember sometimes when I was a kid in the 90s, I can still remember sometimes when you look at some toys, you can see like they're supposed to be the same product but you can definitely see the differences between the quality in terms of how it was paint or it was assembled. So yeah, I think that's definitely. Any questions online or in the room? Sort of slightly out of time. Is that a direction to stop? One more. From the powers to be. Yeah, one online. Thanks. Sorry, one more just came in. So good doing the hybrid. I can barely follow chats on these things. So yeah, so one that just arrived is how should we contextualize the social value of plastic objects like those of imitated molded glass against maybe more bespoke and artisanal pieces which might be seen as less acceptable. Yeah, the value question, Amy, is probably directed to you how to contextualize this. Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting question because I think, I mean, we saw it. It was really interesting to see the, I love the way, I mean, I'm thinking about papers we've heard already from Elizabeth Darling and Charlotte's Matter, was it? The question of like, is a, I think this idea that everyone should have access to beauty that became so much a part of the arts and crafts movement and that you could, but the reality was that that only happened with mass production, which is I think so much the problem that we're facing now, the issue like we, like how do we imagine a world where we could all have enough and we could all have access to beautiful objects and where we are living within the limits of our world and kind of understand that it's a bounded world. But in so many ways, the reality of bringing beautiful objects to people and in terms of like whether they thought they were beautiful and enjoyed and gave them pleasure only really became possible with mass production. So I think that's where you see the line to like Bauhaus and the modernist movements to embrace design and with those bakelight radios, right? But suddenly modernism can come beautiful objects and can come to everybody. So I think in the question of value, I mean, we're so awash in mass produced objects, but and yet that's also how so for so many people they've achieved a standard of living that allows them to make, to have choices. The question is, do we like the illusion of living in a world of infinite choice? I mean, that is an illusion, right? Because sooner or later we run out of places where we can be safely. And I think more and more we're realizing that we've lived in an illusion of safety, whether it's gas stoves or the fact that we're breathing air that's dangerous or drinking water with microplastics, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, big questions of value and what we need and what we don't. So we have a couple minutes for a comfort break. Is that right? And then we'll come back and start the next in I think we have about five minutes. We might extend that just a little bit, but it's up to you. Thank you all for your questions today and thank you for all of the panelists over the last two panels for really complicating this question of what can architecture and design history really do with plastics? Thank you.