Barney thus created works from the critical and intuitive collection of the detritus of the cultural practices of a consumer society that was just beginning to manifest its devastating capacity in the early eighties. She provided a gaze that we are only beginning to see in contemporary reflections, the relationship between cities and the environment, their intimate and harmful relationship. As an ethnographer, she began to recognize and travel through space as a collector of information, without a fixed address, only as a witness to everyday events, and her diaries were a collection of garbage and traces of the human footprints in space: