Five media artists are on Midway Atoll near the apex of the North Pacific Gyre, a huge circular current in which vast quantities of floating plastic trash are trapped. Artists Chris Jordan, Bill Weaver, Jan Vozenilek, Victoria Sloan Jordan and Manuel Maqueda are exploring the beaches, shooting photographs and video, writing poetry, and trying to respond to what they find, says Brooke Jarvis in YES! Magazine (9/16/09). The island of trash is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area twice the size of Texas where tiny bits of plastic outweigh zooplankton seven to one. They've found thousands of bird skeletons with piles of plastic where their stomachs had been. In some cases, the skeleton had entirely biodegraded; the plastic remained, unchanged. The YES! article is linked to the project's Web site. See video on CANtv. [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham