Audience interaction has been essential to the evolution of this project. What started as a solo inquiry into the afterlives of discarded corrugated cardboard has transformed into a participatory system of circulation, speculation, and storytelling. By reintroducing used shipping boxes into the postal network as postcards, the project invites audiences to engage not merely as recipients but as collaborators who interpret, alter, and occasionally even misinterpret these objects.

One postcard was lost, likely mistaken for trash en route. Some were ripped open, suggesting a strong cultural script that associates corrugated cardboard with containers, not communication. These moments of misrecognition surfaced as valuable feedback: cardboard, when stripped of its commodity cargo, becomes strangely illegible. In response, I designed parody labels such as “NOT TRASH” and “这不是垃圾” (This is not trash) to protect the object while also highlighting its in-betweenness: neither waste nor message, yet both.

These mailings became experiments in visibility and value: How does something so ubiquitous go unnoticed until reframed? Audience feedback revealed not only curiosity but also critical insight. One participant called the project “a research method disguised as a message,” which helped clarify its dual role: part speculative documentary, part tactile publication.

In the next phase, I will archive all the sent and returned postcards by scanning them and documenting their journeys, including folds, creases, stamps, stickers, notes, and delays. These will form the foundation of a digital archive and a physical publication that contains accompanying narratives: where the postcard originated, where it travelled, and what changed along the way. Each scan serves as a visual record of interaction, wear, and transformation, while the book and website will act as living archives of these shared stories.

Inspired by conceptual and mail artists such as On Kawara and Eleanor Antin, along with the systems-critical work of artists like Martha Rosler and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, this project explores the poetic tensions between logistics, labour, and ephemera. The postcards are no longer static objects; they unfold as correspondences, resisting closure.

Audience engagement will continue to shape future iterations. I plan to expand participation by inviting people to send their used packaging as responses, contributing to a growing map of shared infrastructures and overlooked materials. This network of correspondence – messy, incomplete, sometimes lost – prompts not just “what is cardboard?” but “what can it carry when it’s no longer useful?”

Feedback

• What did you learn by sending out this cardboard postcards
• This project needs more DEPTH
• This project places high value on cardboard. Why you care about it? This project touched on reusing, but why cardboard among all the things?
  • Cardboard is the connection between consumers and the system of manufacturing
• Cardboard and its delicate threshold between durability and disposability
• The intention of this project needs to be clearer. This project touched on recycling and manufacturing but it was either about the recycling nor about the manufacture
• This project turns a three-dimensional box into this flat postcard but something feels unresolved
• The change in the postal system
  • Denmark retiring letter
  • UK uses stamps with QR codes and stop using the stamp marks
• This projects is also hinting that hasn’t be explored thoroughly: the shipping labels and visual language of the labels
• What produces these labels and its visual language?
• Stickers is another printing / publishing method that are very different from screen printing
• Iterate, iterate and iterate
• What does this produce as a research?