David Belt wants you to hurl beer bottles at friends and strangers, alike — and he wants you to be unashamed while you do it. He also prefers that you be sober, too.
From the man who brought you dumpster pools last summer, comes “Glassphemy!” Together with the development company he co-founded, Macro Sea, Belt has designed a 20-foot-by-30-foot container of tube steel and bulletproof glass, which sits in some undisclosed parking lot in Brooklyn. The idea is this: a group of people stand outside the protective glass at one end of the installation while another group chucks empty bottles of Budweiser, Heineken, and Miller High Life — hey, no beer snobs here — at the initial group from an elevated platform on the opposite end. Glass shatters, lights flash, and everyone is excited to be there.
The purpose behind all this cathartic mayhem? To make recycling cool.
“This whole recycling and green thing has gotten so damn boring in recent years that we felt we had to do something,” reads a line pertaining to the project from Macro Sea’s website. “Ideally, people will think it’s interesting, and they’ll want to do something with the broken glass,” said Belt in a New York Times article. “If not, it’ll be fun, and we’ll just break some glass.”
Belt plans to find innovative ways to recycle the shards of glass. His company is teaming up with ReadyMade magazine to solicit design ideas from readers, which Macro Sea will then take and develop into usable products. So far, some ideas have been to smooth the beer bottle bits down into pieces that can be incorporated into the project’s lighting system. Another has been to crush the glass down into sand for a future beer garden Belt plans to build adjacent to the project.
“Glassphemy!” cost Belt around $5000 to build, and is not open to the public. Starting May 20, however, guests will be invited to come get their juvenile-delinquent on.
