2:09 PM, Thursday

Final post--Today I wandered around campus with my five cigarette rocks in search of locations for the building of rock piles. I chose four locations that are important to me in some way. No one passing by asked what I was doing, probably because I looked too weird to even talk to. It took longer than I expected to actually build the piles. That tumultuous Troy wind kept blowing over the piles right as I was about to take photographs. Luckily Sarah was there to help retrieve the ones that kept rolling down hills. Surprisingly though, it was quite a meditative experience. I felt a sense of accomplishment after every pile I built. It was nice to just walk around campus, reminiscing, not worrying about being late for class, and freezing our faces off. So that's all, folks. No more nasty smell in my clothes or on my hands, though the stench may stay embedded in the carpet for a few more weeks.


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1st Location:

Right outside of BARH, on top of a plank of wood...that was on top of a pile of rocks. (Coincidence?) BARH is a nice place to live. Good food.

2nd Location:

The hill near the gazebo on Freshman Hill. Used to sled down this hill last winter on Commons lunch trays. We later upgraded to an actual snow tube! No longer were our fingers scraped and bloody after every run!

3rd Location:

Hall Hall. Last year I "lived" in Quad, but all my friends lived in Hall. Naturally, I spent the better part of freshman year in this dorm. Good times fitting way too many people on one side of those tiny rooms.

4th Location:

I've always found the little garden up the stairs from West Hall to be quite quaint. A semblance of nature in the midst of Troy is a nice change of scenery. It took me a while to get it into my head that the pond was frozen and I could walk right out into the middle to build this last rock pile. So there it stays, I decided, until some environmentally conscious person with a sense of duty comes around and dumps it in the nearest trash can. It had a good life.

1:10 AM, Thursday

The fifth rock is complete! I tried a sort of lean-to method with the angled cigarettes. Then once I covered the rest of the styrofoam, it came out looking like a strange mohawk thing. Pretty hardcore.

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And here are the latest two together exemplifying a mini-rock pile. Tomorrow (or later today in this case) I'm going to travel around campus scouting for locations to build my rock piles, take photos of them, and that will be the next and final upload!

5:02 PM, Wednesday

Rock number four... Sort of a yin yang pattern attempt here to match the circular structure of the styrofoam. The cigarette smell is starting to become embedded in my sweatshirt and jeans. Not cool. Tomorrow, though it's absolutely freezing outside, I'll start putting them around campus in their piles...or pile.

And the final result!

2:11 AM, Wednesday

So here's the third attempt at creating this rock-like thing out of cigarettes and styrofoam. I wanted this one to be a checkered pattern because that day I found tons black cigarette butts, which I didn't really know existed. Everything's cooler in black, I guess.


Row...

...upon row...

...upon row.


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Pretty menacing.

7:41 PM Friday

Second rock complete... I tried an end up technique so all the singed ends of the cigarettes were pointing outward. I found that the Marlboro's flat end proved superior for gluing purposes. Some of the other brands (i.e. Parliament) had a paper rim that was hard to get to stick, because there was less surface area in contact with the styrofoam. Took probably 2.5 hours total--look for photo updates of this one in the next couple of days.

1:39 PM Thursday

I have always been fascinated by rock piles that I stumble upon while hiking in the mountains or through the woods. People take the time and effort to stop their hike and create these rock formations right there on the trails. They build them not only for themselves but for passer byers to appreciate as well. There is definitely something soulful, maybe even spiritual about the act of creating rock piles.

For my process art project, I'm creating cigarette sculptures in the forms of rocks. These will eventually become rock piles that I will build in locations around campus that have some importance to me. I'm using a hot glue gun on cigarette butts I've collected around campus and attaching them to styrofoam blocks that have some semblance to rocks. Maybe this will say something about the abundance of cigarettes that litter our campus as opposed to natural things that should be abundant instead.

These are photos of the first "rock" I constructed. I decided to take pictures of it in its natural environment.

10:39 AM Thursday

Smells as bad as it looks... I found a landfill of them on the ground up in front of my dorm. Tonight I'm going to start the attachment process with my trusty Mini Glue Gun.