MOVE 02 — The Waste Launcher

Viet Ngo’s practice often begins by transforming objects, technologies, and materials originally designed to serve practical purposes into artworks, while preserving almost entirely their inherent nature and mechanisms of operation. The Waste Launcher continues the spirit of Duchamp’s ready-made, but shifts the focus from the concept and ontology of the object toward its function and operational mechanism. While Duchamp transformed found objects into artworks by altering their context, placing ordinary objects within the white cube, Viet Ngo does not remove the machine from either its original function or context. Instead, he preserves both and renders the process of its operation as a performance. The viewpoint, camera angle, and act of documenting the performance become the artist’s minimal aesthetic interventions, a strategy for reframing context that differs from the conventional lineage of ready-made art.

Entering the 2020s, as the boundary between humans and technology becomes increasingly blurred, the question is no longer what machines are capable of doing, but whether they can act autonomously, generate meaning, and exist as independent subjects beyond human control. This is at once a source of anxiety and a fascination with the seemingly limitless possibilities of technology.

With The Waste Launcher, Viet Ngo does not answer this question through an argument, but through performance. Guided by material empathy, the artist approaches the machine not merely as a tool, but as a subject capable of generating its own meanings and aesthetic experiences through its mechanical operation. Here, the machine does not illustrate the artist’s idea it acts, produces forms, and performs as an autonomous entity, generating meanings beyond the artist’s initial intention. The artist and the technology thus become co-authors.

The visual performative potential of The Waste Launcher is immediately apparent. Plastic bags in a spectrum of colors are successively propelled into the air, suspended, colliding, and traveling across space, forming a bright, almost dreamlike choreography within the faded environment of a plastic waste-treatment facility, where everything is steeped in shades of copper brown.

Alongside the artist and the machine, the viewer is also invited to participate in the production of meaning through this process of co-creation, entering a playful and imaginative field of association. Collective imagination and the repository of images held within the cultural memory of a “community,” images and tools saturated through popular culture, continue to generate meaning from what unfolds before them.

The performance’s straightforward, non-explanatory narration leaves open a network of associations between waste, fireworks, festivals, movement, and visual pleasure. The viewer is invited into a game of “co-authorship,” in which the conceptual framework of the work expands to accommodate even the most spontaneous and uninhibited associations.