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Previously: Daimlerstrasse 38 or How to get a fox to shoot portrait of itself.
Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009, an exhibition that opened a few days ago at the Barbican in London, brings together Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. Artists and architects have always been moved and inspired by the beauty and mysteries of nature. Since the 1960s and even more unreservedly over the last five years, the increasingly evident degradation of the natural world and the effects of climate change have brought a new urgency to their responses.
There is sincere commitment in artists' efforts to raises consciences about the eco-drama our planet is going through... even if sometimes, while visiting artshows on a similar topic, i've found myself in front of art works or events that smelled a bit too pungently of opportunism. But if those artworks help us change the world that's a good thing, right? My answer is "yes of course but how can i avoid being cynical?" As long as these artworks do not step out of museums and galleries most people hardly ever visit (i'm not talking about you and me but about my old friends, most of whom have no time nor inclination to follow the visual art scene), i fear that the impact of their work might be somewhat limited. Besides, setting up a contemporary art exhibition, whether its theme is eco-awareness or Bronze Age jewellery, is everything but a 'sustainable' activity. Laudable exceptions, however, are slowly emerging.
Right! That didn't prevent me from enjoying Radical Nature. Unlike the many shows i've seen over the past 2 years on the exact same topic, this one is more than the sum of its parts. The pieces found on the first floor are mostly flashy, easy to love artworks. The most thought-provoking pieces occupy the gallery upstairs. Many of them are remnants of performances, photos and videos of actions, models of projects and other paraphernalia.
Back in 1999, Simon Starling was working on an artwork in Scotland when he learnt that rhododendrons were to be uprooted and destroyed in the country. Considered weeds in the UK, the plants were due to be removed by government agencies from an environmentally "pure" zone of native vegetation and destroyed. Starling took seven rhododendrons and drove all the way from Northern Scotland to southern Spain, reversing the introduction of these plants to England in 1763 by a Swedish botanist. The work, called Rescued Rhododendrons highlights all the subtleties, complexities and paradoxes of nature, or rather what we regard as 'nature.' It is also a political piece, one that echoes the sometimes openly xenophobic ideas of ethnic purity found in many parts of Europe. The work included in the Barbican exhibition builds upon Rescued Rhododendron. Starling's Island for Weeds is a floating island that hosts the plant that Scotland is adamant it should be eradicated. Starling had first hoped to install the floating structure on the famous Loch Lomond but his idea was rejected. Island for Weeds astutely questions the ability (of nature, of a nation or any system) to absorb new organisms and ideas.
Henrik Hakansson displaced nature too but in a much more shocking way. His Fallen Forest is a 16-metre-square segment of rainforest re-planted in black plastic pots and flipped on its side as a comment on the unbalanced relationship between man and nature. Powerful lights pointed towards this portion of nature enable the plants to grow horizontally, though some of them didn't seem to be in excellent shape when i visited the show.
In 1982, Agnes Denes planted a two-acre field of wheat in a vacant lot in downtown Manhattan. Wheatfield -- A Confrontation yielded 1,000 lbs. of wheat on a ground worth fortunes to comment on "human values and misplaced priorities".
It took her about a year to prepare the site, removing junk and debris from the construction of the nearby World Trade Center. She even installed an irrigation system. After that, trucks after trucks brought in organic matter to make the topsoil. The harvested grain then traveled to 28 cities worldwide and was symbolically planted around the globe. As part of Radical Nature the work is restaged at an abandoned railway line in Dalston, East London (opens on July 15.)
One cannot dream of a more suitable guest at the exhibition than the co-founder of Germany's Green Party. Barbican is indeed showing the remains of Honeypump in the Workplace, a performance that saw Joseph Beuys pumping two tons of honey through 17 meters of plastic tubing, using motors lubricated with over 200 pounds of margarine. The action lasted for the 100 days of Documenta 6 and was accompanied by talks and debates that all together highlighted his expanded notion of art.
Honey takes an important place in Beuys' work, it is the product of bees who, for him, represented as ideal society of warmth and collaboration.
The Dolphin Embassy was an unrealized sea station that American architects Ant Farm had imagined to build in Australia. The project aimed at researching the possibility of establishing non-verbal communication between dolphins and humans using the new video technologies. Interspecies communication was for them a means to reach a shared vision for a harmonious co-evolution. As usual, Ant Farm's practice made an innovative use of technology, this time by making video equipment the intermediary that would enable humans to connect with dolphins. (more info at this video of a press conference where Doug Michels and Doug Hurr are presenting the Dolfin Embassy to the media.)
In the '70s, Wolf Hilbertz developed the mineral accretion process which consists in the electrolytic deposition of sea-shell-like minerals from seawater that creates a construction material. Sunlight would then turn the minerals in seawater into limestone for underwater and dryland constructions.
Hilbertz's Autopia Ampere project was an island that would grow in the Mediterranean Sea. It would house, feed, and employ 50,000 inhabitants. No one does Philippe Rahm like Philippe Rahm. His Pulmonary Space is a form made to inflate when 5 musicians blow into their wind instrument. In his statement about Pulmonary Space, Rahm refers to Hegel who considered music the most beautiful art form and architecture the lowest art form. According to the philosopher, the more an art form goes beyond its materiality, the less it is constrained by the natural world and the closest it is to pure spirit, the more elevated and transcendent it became. Today we know that sound or voice are not abstract nor dematerialized. They possess a physical, biological and chemical dimension. Pulmonary Space gives a visible, physical presence to music. Video of a Pulmonary Space performance: More images: Barbican, flickr and The Guardian. Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 runs until 18 October 2009 at the Barbican Art Gallery. Events focusing on a similar topic: Day 1 at the VivoArts School for Transgenic Aesthetics: Seed broadcasting workshop, Open Sailing, drifting lifestyle to cope with looming disasters, How to Save the World in 10 Days at Vooruit in Ghent, Transmediale 09 - Survival and Utopia, Interview with Ulla Taipale from Capsula, Greenwashing. Environment, Perils, Promises and Perplexities , Ecological Strategies in Today's Art (part 1) and (part 2). |
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In London until tonight for the RCA show and a couple more exhibitions. Yesterday was Sunday. Barbican day to check out Radical Nature. Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009. "Yawn! Do we really need to read about yet another exhibition around that theme?" will you ask. Yes! It is a great show. A bit on the spectacular side but really intelligent, i'll detail that later on this week. Not because i'm a big fan of suspense (i always pause thrillers and go online to see how it ends) but because i'm short on time. Here's a project i liked a lot:
Danish artist and environmentalist Tue Greenfort's series, Daimlerstrasse 38 (2001) lured foxes living in the industrial area in eastern Frankfurt with frankfurter sausages towards a hidden camera.
Greenfort made "traps" using garbage he found in the area. He put a camera inside. At the other end of the camera flex is the sausage. When a fox bit in the sausage, it activated the camera and made an auto-portrait of itself. One week later the animals had learned to eat the sausage without being photographed. |
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Haarlem was a city i associated so far with OTT Dutch cuteness and with the novel The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas.
Haarlem is just a 20 minute train ride from Amsterdam. I was there a couple of weeks ago to see an exhibition called Green Revolution at Nieuwe Vide, a new art space located in an old industrial area turned into a hotspot for all kinds of creative practices.
Green revolution is an agricultural revolution of the 50's that encouraged the use of industrial and biological technology in agriculture. Not in order to create alluring black flowers but to feed nations. Today, some agronomists state that the Green Revolution has allowed food production to keep pace with worldwide population growth while others believe that it caused the great population increases seen today. What is sure is that the Green Revolution has had major social and ecological impacts, making it a popular topic of study among sociologists.
The exhibition Green revolution, which invaded the walls of the Nieuwe Vide art space until last June 13th, offers a broader, contemporary and decidedly darker take on the idea of a green revolution. The show brought together artists whose work investigates and comments on the current, complex and often hard to fully grasp mutations in our environment, whether it's the environment in its green and eco sense or more generally the new political climate. Some of the artists selected use or comment on man-made disasters, others bring about distressing scenarios of a future life, others investigate the field of biotechnology, opening up new perspectives and questioning the world we live in. That was a lot to take in in one go.
The Bureau of Inverse Technology's Antiterror line accumulates audio reports on civil liberty infringements and other 'anti-terror' events. You make a simple phone call and leave a message. Your audio recording is automatically uploaded to an open online terror database, thanks to BIT's uphone system which enables any phone to act like a distributed microphone. The audio files can also be monitored, syndicated or remixed for your purposes. An audio accumulation of micro- incidents which individually may be inactionable but en masse could provide evidence for a definitive response.
Akos Maroy's project bio.display is of a more playful and experimental nature. Its purpose was to create a dynamic display made of millions of genetically modified fluorescent bacteria. The project is inspired by GFPixel, a static display made of fluorescent and non-fluorescent bacteria and created by Reinhard Nestelbacher and Gerfried Stocker. Unlike its precursor, bio.display would change its contents with time. The display used using E-Coli bacteria that has TorA-Green Fluorescent Protein mutant 3* (TorA-GFPmut3*) added to it. The pixel of E-Coli can be turned 'on' and 'off' by changing the pH value of its surroundings.
Other works in the exhibition include Jon Ardern's project Design Solutions for Post-Crash civilization that stems from the discrepancy between the mounting body of scientific evidence that reveal the dangers inherent in continuing with our current lifestyle and the fear of impeding the current economic paradigm. His project is echoed in drama and aesthetic by Alice Miceli's photographies of Chernobyl's exclusion zone (check also the interview with Miceli, Chernobyl Project - Images of the Invisible).
I was also glad to see again Immolation, a video installation concerned with the use of incendiary weapons on civilians after the Geneva Convention and the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons of 1980. The U.S. have refused to sign the convention and make regular use of firebombs in the Middle East. This video highlights the major war crimes of the United States involving these weapons on a ( macro) landscape level, and contrasts it with the damage done to the body on the (micro) cellular level. To reach the cellular level, the Critical Art Ensemble grew human tissue at SymbioticA, and using high-end microscopy shot the micro footage of skin cells dying by either exploding or imploding. In parallel, CAE shows film footage of present and past wars that have used immolation against civilian targets as a strategic choice for the sole purpose of terrorizing entire populations. Green Revolution, curated by Emilie Oursel, closed on June 13th, 2009. See also Transmediale 09 - Survival and Utopia, Sk-interfaces (Part 1). |
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The May session are dedicated to EcoArt. September will focus on biology and bacterial transformation in particular. November will tackle embryology, zoology and body art. There will be labs and courses on hybrid DNA isolation, discussions on ethical issues, non-human relation explorations, but also radical food preparations and field trips to the slaughterhouse, the pet store and the zoo. People tend to divide the world into separate categories: ecology, food, non-human species, body, etc. If you try and mix them together (in practice or theory, for example by asking questions such as "Do plants have feelings? Conscousness?") , people get nervous. Yet the workshop is going to study these five topics one after the other and then mix blend together in the final session of the classes. I could only participate to the first day of the Eco Art session but i do intend to come back in September for the lectures and workshops on bio-ethic, bioart and DNA sequencing.
Tomorrow Tuesday 26, Andy Gracie and Brandon Ballengée are going to give EcoArt lectures at 20.00 at Waag. This is going to be good, take my word for it.
Adam started the workshop by a lecture, reminding briefly a few points:
Adam recommended the reading of an essay he wrote back in for the CIAC's magazine dedicated to Bioart. See also the Live skype talk he gave at the Retool the Earth conference in Brussels on October 2008. That's it for the quick intro on bioart. Then came a few words about the topic of this month at VASTAL: EcoArt. EcoArt is just another name for a series of practices that exist for decades. They have also be known as ecovention, land art, earthworks, environmental art, ecological art, etc. A great place to get an idea of the breath of projects that can be labeled as Ecoart is greenmuseum.org. Adam named a few of his favourite projects. One of them is Buster Simpson's Hudson River Purge. The performance addresses the problem of acid rain with giant limestone antacid tablets which neutralize the pH of the Hudson River. The river is like a gigantic human organism suffering acid indigestion, only a big pill will alleviate its pain. However, no matter the size of the pill, the source of the problem persists.
According to the book, the biggest ecological threat of our time is mass extinction of animal species caused by humans. Recent discoveries in conservation biology call for wildlands networks instead of isolated protected areas. The final section describes specific approaches for designing such networks (based on the work of the Wildlands Project.) A first step would be to re-introduce African and Asian megafauna in western North America - that includes lions, elephants, cheetahs, and camels- to create a facsimile of species that disappeared from the continent some 13,000 years ago. These large mammals need to roam and the parks and natural reserves humans have conceded them are clearly not sufficient. They need to get out of the borders. Wildlands Networks proposes to connects the parks together through corridors accessible for non-humans. Areas of shared use by humans and wildlife would have to be implemented as well as animals will inevitably run into shopping malls, golf courses and railways while migrating from one wild areas to another. We need to de-program ourselves from our own culture in order to be able to deal with this new kind of living conditions. For the hands-on part of the course, Adam teamed up with Theun Karelse from FoAM & FoAM Lab Amsterdam. Our assignment of the day was to create sculptures made of earth, fertilizer, clay and seeds and distribute them throughout the city of Amsterdam.
The workshop is in fact inspired by the practice of seedballing that aims to return native and often vanished flora species to cities and suburbia. The most eco-friendly version of seedball, developed by Masanobu Fukuoka, consists in mud-and-clay balls that contain a mixture of organic compost and different seed species meant to complement each other.
We set up our working space right in the middle of the organic market on the Nieuwmarkt.
Adam, Lucas and Lipika from Waag kicked off their shoes and mixed the clay, fertilizer and seeds with their feet wine stomping-style while the rest of us started making sculptures and rolling little balls. Almost immediately people came to us, asking what we were doing, putting on gloves and helping us shape seed balls.
Once we had collected enough seed balls we went on a guerrilla gardening walk to spread them in the city in places where they might thrive. The workshop was actually a crash version of seedballing as the balls should be left to dry for a couple of days before being released in the urban wilderness. When the rains come, the mud and clay will break apart, exposing the seeds to elements that lead to their growth. In each location whichever seeds are best suited thrive in their protected mud starter-home. The 'seedballed' sites will then be mapped by Theun and added to google maps of urban edibles.
The workshop was a great success, its simplicity attracted all sorts of passersby and the majority of them were happy to go pass the fun of seeing us getting covered in mud and enter a more in-depth and meaningful conversation.
Here's my flickr set of the event.
Related stories: How to Save the World in 10 Days at Vooruit in Ghent, Dangerous Liaisons and other stories of transgenic pheasant embryology. |
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Back to the Interactivos? Garage Science series. If you have missed the previous episodes (Interactivos? Garage Science: Interactivos? Garage Astrobiology - Microbes and EMF and the Fruit Computer Laboratory), here's a little blurb: Garage Science is one of Medialab Prado's latest Interactivos? workshops. It took place in Madrid in early February and was inspired by those home laboratory-type experiments that rely on web-based communications to give rise to real and virtual communities of amateur scientists. Interactivos? Garage Science explored the practices, where art, science and technology meet. During two weeks, Medialab was turned into a temporary garage laboratory where low-cost, accessible materials were used to develop objects and installations that combine software, hardware and biology.
One of the projects i found most interesting was re:farm the city by Hernani Dias (in collaboration with Belén Illana, Tiago Henriques, Eduardo Meléndez, Gabriela Troncoso, Dani Quilez, Mar Canet and Varvara Guljajeva.) The project aimed at developing a series of tools that would enable city-dwellers to grow and monitor an urban garden using open-software and as much recycled materials as possible (mostly city waste that may include computers, printers, traffic lights or plastic bottles.) re:farm also brings on a series of important aspects: attention to biodiversity and to finding the native fruits, herbs and vegetable species that are best suitable for each city; visualization of the network of beneficial associations among plants and other species depending on geography, time and size of the garden; etc.
Your project re:farm aims to 'develop tools to manage/monitor/research an urban garden with open-software and open-hardware'. How did you come up with this idea? Why was it important to you? I first started to think that I should know where my food comes from, so I built a garden in our terrace in Barcelona to have a local production. My older sister that long lives on eco-educational projects helped me with the first seeds and knowledge. Then came the Summer, and we went on holidays. Everything was ok when we left, but when we returned our farm was the driest -urban-farm-cemetery in all city. And this was the turning point. To make a urban farm possible you must have the tools to design, manage and monitor a farm. At the end we, those who live in the city, are now urban animals not farmers. In the last century we lost almost all the farm knowledge, centuries of sustainable agriculture, thousands of years on vegetable domestication and food quality research. I've learned a lot during the research for this project: 4 months ago I didn't know which were the best tomatoes for a gazpacho soap and neither how or when are they planted or even how the photons are collected on nano-antennas to produce energy on a leaf.
Why would anyone need software to cultivate a garden? Hehe, we shouldn't :) but if you ask to someone next to you in the street what is the best vegetable to plant or eat today, now, this week? Or what is the fruit of this season? Where did it came from? What are our local resources? What are our local varieties? What is the name of cucumber in other languages? How is it cooked in different cultures? What are best refreshing tea herbs for a hot summer day? Which fruits have a specific vitamins group? Software could give some help on this ;)
re:farm was already started before you applied to the Medialab Prado workshop if i understood correctly. Which part exactly did you develop during the Interactivos? workshop? In Medialab we dug a lot and the subject started to spread complexity. I've started in Hangar with the idea of building a urban farm made of city trash and with a watering system based on open software and open hardware. When I applied to Medialab I had almost the big picture of the project in my head, and during the 15 days of the workshop in Madrid despite the fact that we were 7 persons working day and night with some beers also I realised that what we didn't had, was time. During the 15 days we built a DIY low budget hydroponic system and we designed 2 farms on botanical garden. One is a gazpacho farm made with local varieties and on the other are the vegetables ingredients to make a recipe of a Spanish cook, Rodrigo de la Calle. We also started to make the software application but we didn't finish the 0.000047 beta version :)
You live in Barcelona. Is there an existing or growing culture of growing urban garden in that city? In the city there are some urban gardens and they are forming a growing community. There are some amazing squat initiatives, some city-council farms and also small home farming. But what is the most impressive thing around here is the local biodiversity. There are like 8 different kinds of tomatoes for 8 different recipes. The Catalans are very connected to the land and to cooperative social movements; and this is a good starting point. Isn't pollution a problem if one wants to grow a garden in a city? Pollution? What can I say about that... pollution is bringing vegetables from the other side of the planet on a large scale. Pollution is when you go to the supermarket and buy the same tomato here, in Madrid, in Andalucia, in England, in Holland, in Germany or in NY... Pollution could be producing vegetables that are designed to be beautiful, bright, round, cold resistant, and hold 4 weeks on a supermarket display and are environmentally expensive. Pollution is also the rain that grabs all the atmospheric contaminants and brings then to soil that in most cities is already heavily contaminated. We can't escape it. But there are some oasis in every cities and it is easy to create many more. that's also one of the goals of re:farm. re:farm the city is global knowledge to local problems at the end we are all humans with more or less the same nutrient needs. One of our biggest "problem" is that we are raising the number of humans but we can´t call that pollution :) One of the objectives of re:farm is the creation of "instructables" on how to build an open-hardware watering and illumination system with city waste: computers, printers, traffic lights, large plastic bottles, etc. Can you give us an example of this? One example is the low budget hydroponic system that we built: a plastic tube found on the street (we went hunting for materials:) a water pump from a car (a repair car store gave us an old one for free), a big bottle of water 20L some wires and an arduino. We are also testing some re:farm boxes and soon there will be more instructables on our web. You are going to work on THE ALLOTMENT PLOT in Sweden. Can you tell us what your plans about it are exactly? Yep, we are refarming on Sweden. Annika from The Allotment Plot invited us to design some farms and we have proposed 4 ideas for 6 farms. swedish husmanskost (traditional food) basic food global gastronomy / local production indoor health
Any other upcoming steps for the project? The project is on his spring time! lets see how it grows and what can we have In Autumn. We are now applying for grants to continue the development and the community is also growing. So spread the word: any help is welcome :) Thanks Hernani! All images re:farm. |
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Been slacking a bit with my reports on the work in progress show i saw wow! months ago at the Royal College of Art in London. As you might guess i'll keep on focusing on the works from the students of the Design Interactions department. Meet Cesar Harada! Together with , Hiromi Ozaki, Martin Gautron, Nasser Moustakim, Adrien Lecuru, Valérie Pirson and the help of a whole range of collaborators and experts, Cesar is currently busy developing the Open Sailing project, a floating architecture that evolves like a living organism, a laboratory for techno-social experiments. The aim of Open Sailing is not to fashion new kinds of entertainment for your holidays but to propose a way to cope with impending natural and man-made disaster, while stimulating people's ingenuity, fostering hyper-connectivity and sense of solidarity. To make the project all the more relevant, a map has been compiled that visualizes areas of looming crisis: overpopulation, tsunami risk, violent conflict, nuclear fallout, pandemics, global warming, etc. No place on Earth appears to be safe. Except maybe a few large spots above the ocean. And that's the area where Open_Sailing villagers would drift and live. Each village unit is made of comfortable shelters surrounded by ocean farming modules : reconfigurable, sustainable, pluggable, organic and instinctive. The Open_Sailing_01 is about 50 m in diameter, for 6 persons. Open_Sailing aims to ask questions about the way we currently inhabit our planet. Can we reach a harmonious dynamic state of interdependence with each other and the earth? Is this the next step for civilization? Will we disassociate our concept of progress with rigid infrastructure and metropolis?
The prototype Open_Sailing_01, currently under construction, will set sail in May 2009, attempting to drift from London to the Netherlands. If the first journey goes well, Open_Sailing_02 will embark on a trip around the Mediterranean with enhanced fleet operating and hardware system, then Open_Sailing_03 will head to the Azores Islands (Portugal). Finally Open_Sailing_04 will set sail from The Azores and drift to Brazil.
I was fascinated by the mix of Archigram-esque vision, the gutsy ambition behind the idea, the sheer beauty of the installation at the London show, and that hint of micronation ambition i thought i could smell (but how wrong i was!) around the project. So, as usual, i had to ask a few questions... Why 2012? Does it have to come so soon? Do you want to spoil the London Olympics euphoria? Ollie: We're not particularly in the market for disrupting athletics events! Instead of seeing this doom and gloom as something negative, we have taken the fears and used them as design constraints, designing for the apocalypse. By compiling a list of the fears surrounding 2012, and overlaying these onto a series of maps, we have created a series of safe_zones where you can be assured to be free of pandemics, earthquakes, tsunamis, pole shifts, nuclear disasters, violent conflicts, etc. The recurrent safest places are in the middle of oceans : open_sailing aims to make the ability to live there comfortably a reality. Cesar: I hope the open_sailing is going to continue long after 2012, and actually by 2012 we may have a series of serious prototypes ready for a real sport challenge, steading an ocean for good for example!
Is it a project you plan to pursue as your final project at RCA? Can we expect to see a more advanced version of it come June? Cesar: This is just the beginning of the project. The bigger picture is to develop technologies and everyday life solutions for a future International Ocean Station. We have an International Space Station, we need an International Ocean Station, there is so much to discover about the blue planet! At the 25th of June 2009 at the Royal College of Art SHOW in London, we want to show prototypes of the tested shelter, energetic modules, aquaculture facilities etc. We are working on the design of the prototype at the center for the study and practice of survival technics in Lorient France. In April we are building it, in May we will depart from London river Thames and attempt to drift across the north sea escorted by a regular boat for safety. Follow us on the blog. We are still looking for scientists, partners, sponsors, funders : please contact anyone you think could be interested by this project. I suspect that your project might have given way to feedbacks, questions and reflections during the work in progress show/ How did people react to your project so far? Abigail: One big difficulty we've had so far is creating an explanation of what the project's about, simply because there are so many different parts to it. There are a lot of people working on this project, a lot of new ideas. Some people seem to have misinterpreted Open_Sailing as being some kind of crazy 'Apocalypse Boat,' but it's not like that at all. This is a very real, very exciting project where we're developing a lot of innovative technology. Non-sustainable living; overpopulation; global warming... The way we've been doing life so far could do with a rethink, don't you agree?
Cesar: Most people are very excited by the idea to live on the sea, most of them think it is impossible. The people who started to dig and understand a little bit more about our project were fascinated, there are so many different perspectives! The Open_Sailing is a floating laboratory in the first place, we are attempting to address many issues in "labs":
Abigail: Instinctive_architecture behaves a bit like a sunflower. It opens out when there's lots of light and nutrients, and closes in on itself when weather is bad, stretches to move quickly. Cesar: There is a lot to do, we address many real problems and people are interested because we are developing all these hardware and software technologies open-source. Can you describe and explain the vessel prototype you were showing at the RCA work in progress exhibition a few weeks ago? Cesar: What we showed was a 1/20 model, one open_sailing "family" facility, for 4 to 6 people. From afar, it looks like a "floating bunker" surrounded by a large ocean farm (~50m diameter), lines of algae, inflatable fish nets, plankton basins, floating gardens, underwater sea-shells pods, energy_animals...
I know you'd rather shun the reference to art but have you heard about the floating cities of Tomas Saraceno? Cesar: I don't shun the work of Tomas Saraceno at all, I think it is beautiful and visionary. We are sharing a very similar perspective about the transformation of the society with technology. We are trying to make the open_sailing exist as soon as possible, so we'd rather show shorter term objectives and use a simpler vocabulary to appeal both general public and partners. Please find more details in the pdf on our website. Have you thought about the status of Open Sailing villages, would they have some sort of sovereign independence similar to one of the micronations? Abigail: That's a really interesting question. In short, we're not interested in establishing any sort of sovereignty. We don't have a political agenda. Cesar: We are trying to avoid problems. Sovereignty is a problem, as it implies that you're being recognised by other states, we are people, we are not a competitive group, our perspective is more practical. Maybe our status is closer to the one of the International Space Station... Ollie: We're a floating socio-technological experiment. We're part of many disciplines (art, architecture, science, etc) but not really bound by any. We're an international team, and we don't feel allegiance to any country or political stance - at least within the framework of this project. Cesar: When you develop a technology, you can't predict how people will use and modify it. We don't want to determine how Open_Sailing is used by other people, that's the openness of it, or a form of respect, an invitation. There must be something more advanced than "nation". Nation is constitution, hierarchy, pride, it is slow, inefficient - we don't have the time to be a nation! Hiromi: We have a sort of operating system, the "swarm search engine", it is an object oriented politic computer program, managing in real-time weather, available resources (food, water, energy etc.), people's desires and fears (threats, attractors), moving the fleet into its optimum geographical positions and proposes a general arrangement of the structure. Ollie: A country by definition has an intrinsic value - in the form of minerals, farming space, infrastructure, buildings, etc. Open_Sailing doesn't. Open_Sailing is more like an organism. The whole thing is alive - it moves, it reacts to its environment, it evolves, it grows. The people onboard are its source of energy - if you take the people away, it would be like starving an animal of food. In this way we're different to a country, we are neutral and don't want to become involved with unnecessary legal issues... for now. Thanks a lot for your time Cesar, Ollie, Hiromi and Abigail! All images Cesar Harada. |
