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Another prototype spotted at the RCA work in progress show a few weeks ago in London. This week: In Memory of the Sparrow
As new wireless technologies are introduced, using various frequencies and power levels, an invisible energy is increasingly altering our habitat. There are no conclusive results from research to indicate the influence of this energy on our health or our environment, but studies have shown that sparrow populations are decreasing in areas that are affected by electromagnetic communication.
The object harnesses the very force that drove birds away, and transforms it into subtle bird-like sounds, acting both as a comfort to those who want to remember the sparrows, but also as a poignant reminder that our surroundings contain a level of complexity that surpasses our senses. They are "memorial to the sparrows." I asked Cathrine how exactly the bird-like sound was created. "In the exhibition the bird sound was orchestrated, because to work the radio would have to be grounded and this was not possible within the exhibition space," she explained. "However, in the future scenario I envisioned, these memorials would be mounted to trees and tuned to pick up bird sounds transmitted on an AM frequency bandwidth. The antenna would be a long wire spiraling up the tree to pick up the radio waves." All images courtesy of Cathrine Kramer. |
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Michael Mandiberg and Brooke Singer are two wizards of eco-data visualization. Eyebeam alum. Brooke Singer is behind Area´s Immediate Reading and the Superfund 365, A Site-A-Day. Superfund 365 is probably my favourite project from 2007. Each day for a year, this online data visualization application visits one toxic site active in the Superfund program run by the U.S. The contaminant, the responsible party and the people involved with or impacted by Superfund are represented in the project. Michael Mandiberg is a 2007-08 Fellow in the R&D OpenLab and the author of two eye-opening dataviz plug-ins: Oil Standard converts all prices from U.S. Dollars into the equivalent value in barrels of crude oil and Real Costs inserts emissions data into travel related e-commerce websites. Think of it like the nutritional information labeling on the back of food... except for emissions.
As members of the Eyebeam Sustainability Research Group (which began in July 2006 as a forum for residents, fellows, and staff to engage in a critical dialog about environmental sustainability) the two of them have launched Eco-Vis Challenge, a competition which was previously mentioned on the blog (Eyebeam's Ecovisualiz Design Challenge panel, part 1 and part 2). Based on the idea that being aware of the current environmental crisis doesn't mean that it is easy to recognize its extent and complexity, the "Eco-Vis Challenge" invited artists and designers to submit projects which make meaningful patterns emerge from the mass of environmental data. The first challenge asked for new "Eco Icons" that "make visible environmental or ecological concerns". The second one called for an eco-visualization based on at least one set of the ecological impact data.
The winners of the Eco-Vis Challenge have been announced a few weeks ago and their projects are on view at Eyebeam until the end of the week, as a preview for the March 13 - April 19 Feedback exhibition, which will feature the realized proposals alongside work by past and current Eyebeam artists, with others. Both events are part of Eyebeam's ongoing Beyond Light Bulbs programming series, which grew from the conversations and findings of Eyebeam's Sustainability Research Group.
If you can't make it to the exhibition, here's a link to the winning projects and a couple of questions i asked to Michael Mandiberg and Brooke Singer. The competition is part of Eyebeam's ongoing Beyond Light Bulbs programming series, which grew from the conversations and findings of Eyebeam's Sustainability Research Group. Can you tell me what is the Sustainability Research Group? What is its origin? Its aim? BROOKE: There were several artists at Eyebeam in 2006 doing work addressing environmental issues and the Sustainability Research Group was at first casual meetings to meet and share research. Initially the group was Ben Engebreth (Person Kyoto), Michael Mandiberg (Real Costs), Jeff Feddersen (Earth Speaker) and myself (Brooke Singer">Brooke Singer, member of Preemptive Media, AIR) as well as several Eyebeam staffers (Amanda McDonald Crowley, Paul Amitai, Emma Llyod, Liz Slagus). Over time, as new fellows, residents and commissions entered Eyebeam, the group's membership expanded and we started thinking about events, actions and programming along with keeping up the discussions. The ECO VIS Challenge was one of the first events we planned as a group and Beyond Light Bulbs is a larger, more ambitious programming series.
Eyebeam has put emphasis on sustainability issues recently, is it something you want to pursue in the long run or just another chapter in the series of eyebeam's commissions and exhibitions? BROOKE: I think as artists we see what happens, where our interests lead us, and I am not sure what Eyebeam would answer as an institution. But some of our conversations within the group are about how to make the conversation itself "sustainable" and not just a fad. In the US there was a big environmental movement in the 1970s which we all know of as fact but few of us in the group have firsthand memory of it. For instance, President Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof (last week you mentioned an interesting artist project that goes on a hunt for those very panels which were de-installed in 1980) and today there is such a resurgence of interest in solar. But what happened to solar power for those 25 years? I think many of us are highly skeptical of the current hype and media machine around "green." We are looking for alternative ways to engage ourselves and the public in the important issues of global warming, toxic dumping, public health, air quality -- among others.
The exhibition has been running for a few days now, which kind of public visits it? I'm asking because i assume (maybe wrongly) that you probably have visitors who come mostly from the new media art field and i wonder what the impact of the eco-viz challenge can be outside of its usual circle of converted?
MICHAEL: I see the exhibition from where I work in the R&D Lab, and am fairly frequently speaking with visitors who are lost elsewhere in the building (and trying to find the exhibition.) Two types of people seem to be visiting the exhibition: the Chelsea gallery crawl crowd who come in because Eyebeam is the next space on the South side of 21st past Paula Cooper, and people who have come specifically to see this exhibition (who are more likely to be inside the "circle of the converted.") The exhibition is only one part of the overall part of the challenge. When we were conceiving the challenge, we saw the potential for creating an impact at each stage of the process. Just by creating the situation where so many designers and artists created works for the competition, we were able to help direct focus on representations of the many environmental crises. Likewise, we are keen putting these works out into the world (if they were not already.) Thanks Brooke and Michael! The projects are on display at Eyebeam until January 26 and will be part of the art and tech center's upcoming exhibition on sustainable practice: Feedback, March 13 - April 19, 2008. Images of the entrants to the eco-viz challenge. Members of the the Sustainability Research Group are currently contributing to Eyebeam's reBlog website. |
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Alejandro Tamayo is an artist-engineer and a teacher working in the intersections of design, art and new technologies in Bogota. A year ago, i interviewed Alejandro about the lab he's currently directing in Bogota. The v*i*d*a lab, part of the Aesthetics Department at the Javeriana University, is focusing on the development of new design products and ideas. Guided by a reflexion on life itself, the course proposes to engage with organic (biological) and "post-organic" (electronic, digital) visions, trying to identify new relationships and interrogations that could be translated into the realization of concrete projects.
I stumbled upon the projects of the latest v*i*d*a lab over the weekend and liked some of them so much that i thought that it wouldn't hurt to cover some of them on wmmna. Which meant pestering Alejandro with some more questions: What was the brief you gave to students at the beginning of the workshop? Was there a particular theme to explore? We don't start with a particular problem to be solved, instead we always begin with a very broad question: what is life? Students are then encouraged to explore and contrast scientific and mystic approaches. some liked ideas and characteristics derived from considering living organisms as open systems, others reflected about life as a particular organization of matter, others were interested in concepts derived from thermodynamics, cybernetics, etc., while others liked ideas about chance, causality, teleology and so on. After this phase students had to look for ways to apply their findings and interests in their own contexts looking for ways to draw connections to their every day lives. The idea is that they start to confront their "objective" findings with their subjective and personal experience. And this is the way all the projects start to appear. For some it took a long time to come up with something while others found interesting connections easily.
Who are the students? What are they studying and what is their background in electronics (if any)? They were all students of industrial design and they were in their 7th semester. None of them had a previous knowledge in electronics. We try to make them appropriate very rapidly the basic language needed to understand an electronic diagram, to play with electronic components and sensors, to break them, and to try to overcome the fear of disassembling electronic objects. The also start messing up with microcontrollers (pics and the arduino platform) from very early in the program. The projects are detailed on a webpage but here are some of my favorites:
The T-shirt that sweats, by Mariana Rivera. Sweat, a natural phenomenon present in most forms of life, is usually regarded as unpleasant and something to hide in most western countries and in America especially. There is one exception: futbol (soccer, football) T-shirts. Considered as a fetish object, a sweated T-shirt worn by one's favorite player is considered of great value. T-Shirt That Sweats proposes to provide the football supporter --who couldn't attend the match but follows it from afar, on his or her tv-- with a more intimate contact with the action that takes place on the field. The project could thus enrich and expand the communicative power of the tv set through a t-shirt that sweats according to the sound levels of the TV screen during the game. Working prototype: a microphone captures the sound signals coming from the tv set. The sounds are then filtered using a microcontroller. When the sound goes beyond a certain level, a water pump hidden inside the garment wets the t-shirt. Programmed using Arduino. The second project i wanted to highlight is less "in your face" but it is also very endearing and fascinating: Cafetera VLF (aka VLF StreamCafe), by Andrés Vargas, refers to 2 projects i liked a lot (although one is much more credible than the other): - Jean-Pierre Aubé's VLF Natural Radio which underlines how the growing use of the frequencies necessary for digital and wireless communications is overriding the naturally produced waves of the northern lights and other climate-related signals. According to Aubé, "eventually, VLF waves will be completely drowned out by the signals of various telecommunication systems."
- Masaru Emoto's theories and experiments on our thoughts, words, ideas and music affect the molecular structure of water. The Japanese researcher claims that if human thoughts are directed at water before it is frozen, images of the resulting water crystals will be beautiful or ugly depending upon whether the thoughts were positive or negative.
The earth is constantly emitting a variety of sounds ranged in the VLF spectrum (very low frequency) which are the result of electromagnetic activity taking place in the magnetosphere. Some compare these sounds with spontaneous Earth Songs and we may also interpret them as an evidence of our planet's activity as a living organism. To listen to these sounds we need a VLF radio receiver (D.I.Y. example by Stephen P. McGreevy). Inspired by this phenomena and by Masaru Emoto's research (that reflects about the profound sensibility of water to the subtleties of its surroundings). The concept would thus materialize in a coffee machine able to transmit the emotions, feelings, songs and energy of our planet through the coffee, reminding us of our intimate relationship with the planet we live in. The tiny vibrations generated by the sounds wold be captured by a VLF receptor and transmitted to the water used for the coffee. In February, the first public exhibition of v*i*d*a* will take place at the Alliance Française, in Bogota. In March, Alejandro will be in Helsinki to give a presentation at the Pixelache festival.
Images of the projects, courtesy of Alejandro Tamayo. |
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Ecological Strategies in Today's Art (part 1). Ecomedia - Ecological Strategies in Today's Art, currently running at the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg, presents projects founded on progressive ecological models and conceive utopian horizons in the process.
Talking of which, there was a raft made of plastic bottles on the grass outside of the Edith Russ Haus building. It's Natalie Jeremijenko's office. At the exhibition opening, she invited people to jump on it and share with her their environmental anxieties. Best is to have a look at the video presentation that GOOD magazine made of the Environmental Health Clinic project. GenTerra, by Critical Art Ensemble with Beatriz da Costa, used a harmless form of gut E. coli to educate the public about genetically modified organisms. If you scroll down the page you'll be able to see a video of a GenTerra performance which is currently screened at Edith Russ Haus.
GenTerra is a fictional biotech company dealing with "transgenics" and driven by profit, but also by a sense of social responsibility. Products created through this process---for example, transgenically modified foods---have often caused controversy. GenTerra claims to produce organisms that help solve ecological or social problems
This form of participatory experience attempts to make the whole issue less abstract and distant and by doing so, it provides the public with the critical tools to reflect on how significant the transgenic issue is and how it is going to reflect their everyday life. The Critical Art Ensemble defense fund page informs that the FBI is still refusing to return most of the tens of thousands of dollars worth of impounded materials. The reason for that is that the art collective was using the harmless bacteria and materials in several of their projects, one of them is GenTerra. Andrea Polli had two projects in the exhibition, the beautiful The Queensbridge Wind Power Project is a video (which you can watch online) for transforming the Queensborough bridge into a site for gathering clean, renewable energy.
The second project she was showing is a collaboration with Joe Gilmore. N. is an artistic visualization and sonification of near real-time Arctic data. Franz John's Turing Tables takes live seismological data and turns it into pictures, sound and movement. Seismological institutes measure the vibrations of the Earth and exchange the data collected among themselves via automated internet-transfers. Turing Tables feeds into this human-machine-communication data stream and translates it into an installation which bathes visitors in audio renderings and projections of live measurements made by seismographs all over the world.
The project is not about the catastrophes that cause these movements in inhabited areas, but instead about the archaic feeling and consciousness that the earth is an organism, that it moves and that it can be understood as an organism in constant flux.
I liked 01.org's Reenactment of Joseph Beuys' 7000 Oaks, 2007. My first reaction when i saw the project was "oh! No, not flugly Second Life agaaain!" but this "synthetic performance" has the merit of bringing the spotlight on a very inspiring work. In March 1982, Beuys was at Documenta 7 in Kassel with a mission: planting of 7000 trees, each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high above ground, throughout the greater city of Kassel. The last tree was planted posthumously in 1987 by is son. Beuys intended the Kassel project to be the first stage in an ongoing scheme of tree planting to be extended throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect environmental and social change; locally, the action was a gesture towards urban renewal. 25 years exactly after the planting of the first tree, Eva and Franco Mattes of 01.org (or rather their avatars) started stacking virtual basalt stones on Mattes' island in SL. SL inhabitants are invited to participate to the performance by placing stones and trees on their land.
Infossil had a huge banner hanging above the reception desk of the art space. The white on black text reflects about the dependence of electronic communication, that is of the "infossil", on the energy resources available, the fossil: coal. Also on show: Sabrina Raaf's Translator II: Grower was painting grass on the wall; EcoScope, a communication tool developed by Transnational Temps, provides a context for discussing environmental affairs; 10 Commandments for the 21st Century, by Tea Mäkipää; Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's You don't need a weatherman; Christoph Keller's The Whole Earth, a projection on a weather balloon. White clouds over a blue sky form the perfect picture of the peaceful blue planet we live on, there's even piano music for perfect bliss. Every two minutes, a roaring aircraft brings us back to reality. Its passage takes one or two seconds but that's enough to spoil the idyllic vision (image); Yonic, a NGO working in Brazil to diminish pollution in the rain forest and find new solutions to old problems, showed the fanzine they publish on a yearly basis using handmade recycled paper.
Now that was a fantastic and energizing exhibition. If only we can get more people to see it, not just the already converted. Set of images. Related entries: Natalie Jeremijenko's talk at Stifo@Sandberg conference, They make art not bioterrorism. |
GenTerra is essentially a participatory "theater" comprising a lab, computer stations displaying the company's informational CD-Rom, and a 
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The current exhibition, Ecomedia - Ecological Strategies in Today's Art, was curated by Sabine Himmelsbach, Karin Ohlenschläger and Yvonne Volkart. It presents projects founded on progressive ecological models and conceive utopian horizons in the process. It peruses fundamental considerations concerning ecosystems, sustainability, renewable energy sources, as well as visions of the future. In addition, it examines the role of art and new media over and above science, technology, and ecoactivism. I liked the theme, the way the curators explored it but most of all i found that the works on show were of particularly good quality, individually and as a whole.
The work that moved me the most is Christina Hemauer's and Roman Keller's video and installation work, A Moral Equivalent of War: A Curiosity, a Museum Piece and an Example of a Road not Taken (2006-7). Reading news headlines yesterday, i realized how meaningful the work is. The title of the work, inspired by a television speech to the Nation delivered by Jimmy Carter in 1977, documents the artists' quest for the solar panels that President Carter had mounted on the roof of the West Wing of the White House in 1979 during a moment of awareness of the dangers of the US' dependence on foreign oil.
In 1977 Carter convinced the Democratic Congress to create the US Department of Energy. Promoting the department's recommendation to conserve energy, Carter wore sweaters, had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House, had a wood stove in his living quarters, and requested that Christmas decorations remain dark in 1979 and 1980.
Carter called for 20 percent of American energy to come from solar power by the year 2000, he even had very generous tax reductions implemented for people who installed solar panels at home. But the Reagan administration in the 1980s put a stop to that, the panels and all their symbolic power were torn down and the energy budget was curtailed by 90%. 25 years later people are slowly starting to understand how foolish Reagan's gesture was.
In 1991, «America's Environmental College», Unity College in Maine, tracked the panels, found them in a warehouse just outside DC, bought them for peanuts and installed them on the roof of their dining room. Hemauer and Keller strapped one of the panels to the roof of their car and drove from Maine to the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta, filming a documentary along the way, interviewing people who had been involved in the solar panel experiment, and reopening a dialogue about present energy policy.
We keep reading that eating local food might not always be such a good idea. Sometimes the food is sent on huge globetrotting journeys whether the reason for the trip is that english prawns are cheaper when shelled in Asia or that lamb is four times more energy-efficient when imported from the other side of the world than when it is bought from a producer in your backyard. Eating local can have damaging effects on African organic farmers. You can't make feta in Yorkshire and we should all start thinking about adopting a vegetable. Free Soil uses oranges as a vehicle to explore the complex relationships that make up the worlds Food Systems. The oranges --that Free Soil found at the Oldenburg local distributor-- in Winter come from South Africa. This means that they have been underway at least one month by boat. This is also why it is practically impossible to have organic oranges at this time of year as most of them would rot if they were not treated chemically. MILK, a project by Esther Polak, Ieva Auzina and Rixc, follows the milk from the cow to the table of the consumer. All the participants, from Latvian farmers to Dutch cheese makers and market salesmen, were given a GPS device for one of the days that saw them involved in the movements of the dairy product.
Insa Winkler's work intends to make us reflect on the globally implemented industrial farming. In a mass production factory located Wülknitz, a municipality in Saxony (Germany), pigs destined to become Tyrolean bacon are fattened. Wülknitz is situated in a highly exploited mono-cultivated land and suffers greatly from an exodus of the population. How is it that the famous Tyrolean bacon can make its name by means of anonymous pigs from Saxony? If these pigs can be made into Tyrolean bacon, then it should also be possible to produce a speciality of equal quality - the "Saxon acorn ham? - in a setting which is worth living in for both man and animal in compliance with the premises of the Agenda 21.
Insa Winkler interviewed farmers of conventional pig farming, studied the mechanisms of industrial meat production, the destruction of landscape with monoculture and fields for liquid manure, etc. She searched a piece of land around Wülknitz, got authorization to keep pigs outside, bought a special breed of pigs and learned how to raise and feed them on acorns. The ham from these pigs will be produced in a local factory, and then sold in local restaurants, throughout Germany and also internationally. Raising piglets in acorn forests - like some parts of Spain still do today - is not just a romantic ideal, it can also be an important contribution for the biodiversity of landscape. Insa Winkler created a logo and a public relation vehicle for her project: The Acorn Pig Cinema which transports the film from the Project since 2004. Parallel to a public discussion, the practicality of The Acorn Pig as an agricultural project is explored, making it both an agricultural and a cultural experiment. But what if we should keep on breeding, feeding and killing pigs industrially? Is there a way to keep the animal welfare element in the equation? Rotterdam architecture office MVRDV thinks so. The Pig City project, for which they collaborated with the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Fisheries, is a computer simulation of skyscrapers for industrial pig breeding.
Pigs would inhabit stacked 'apartments', balconies would allow them to rummage around under trees outside. Pigs for slaughter would be moved in lifts and brought to a central abattoir housed in the plinth. On top, a fish farm would supply some of the food needed. Each tower contains a central slurry-processing plant and a biogas tank, which caters for the tower's energy needs. To reduce transport costs, towers are located either in the port or close to major cities. When first presented the project met with heavy discussions: criticism centred on the dangers of centralisation. Should one element be put out of operation, then the consequences for the whole system couldn't be foreseen. There were also unfavourable comments about the belief that society can reduce nature into models that are then turned into reality. What is more, the pig flats would 'harm' the image of the pig-farming sector. Architecture critics in the media were much more receptive and viewed it as a courageous proposal. Ecological Strategies in Today's Art runs until January 13 at the ERH in Oldenburg, Germany. The show is a touring exhibition. It just opened at plug.in in Basel last week. You can order the catalogue of Ecomedia for EUR 24,80 plus shipping costs from: Set of images. Ecological Strategies in Today's Art (part 2) Previous exhibition at the Edith Russ Haus: Soundbytes (part 1 and 2). Related stories: Edible City, Part 1 and 2. Eyebeam's Ecoviz Design Challenge panel (part 1), Eyebeam's Ecoviz Design Challenge panel (part 2). |
One of my favourite exhibition spaces for new media art is the 
Just like A Moral Equivalent of War, 
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Forays is a low profile (that's their words) artist group strung somewhere between New York and Montreal whose work focuses on the research and creation of open-source minor architectures and low-tech modifications of everyday life.
Forays is Adam Bobette and Geraldine Juárez. Geraldine Juarez is a self-taught designer and an artist from Mexico City based in Brooklyn, New York where she is a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam and play around the city with Forays. She is a drop out of Communication and Graphic Design of a university in Mexico City and worked in advertising for several years doing visual effects in Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles. Her current interests are low-tech crafts and artifacts. Most of the time she obtains her supplies in trash bags, by freecycling or by hacking public sites. Adam Bobbette is a writer, researcher and artist based in Montréal. What started as an innocent conversation between Geraldine and i about the Postal Gown she was modeling around Williamsburg during the Conflux festival escalated into a fully-fledged interview about her, and mostly the works she's currently working on together with Adam. Here we go:
Hey Geraldine, you write that you find your supplies in trash bags, freecycling or by hacking public sites. Sounds interesting but we'd like to get more details. How does one hack a public site? can you give us examples too? And what is freecycling? G:. I read once that hacking is the creative adaptation to immediate circumstances. I switched not so long ago from purely digital work to more analog and tangible object production and I had to learn electronics from scratch, a bit of code and a whole lot about materials. I started hacking the city accidentally. I was working a lot with paper and electronics and I needed something that I couldn't afford. Looking online for alternatives I found it freely available in the public infrastructure of the city: the postal office. Not paying for my source material was a complete delight and I pushed it forward. Picking stuff from the street in New York is nothing new, everybody does it. There is a royal amount of quality waste all around the city. However there is an easier and more social way to get specific things that you need. Freecyle is a simple yahoo list that let's you ask and offer things for reuse. Most of the time the craft materials are just surplus so you get perfectly good stuff for free. Often I found just what I needed and it was an opening to start wandering around the city to get what I need and most important, interacting with the moneyless layer of New York City. Together with Adam Bobbette, you work on the Forays projects. How did you get to meet and work together? Does each of you have his or her own skills and knowledge that complete the other? AB. Like yin and yang? Like milk and tea? Like diamonds and roughness?
G:. it’s actually not like that at all, we don’t really like each other. We met in Eyebeam. I knew he wanted to work with steam and I thought that was wicked but he was too cocky so I didn’t want to talk to him. One day I stole a little kaleidoscope from his desk. I confessed to it and then we found out that we both were into folding stuff, trash and useless things. He is a luddite and I’m more geeky. He speaks French and I speak Spanish, so it helps to create confusion. AB. We always have experiences to share about crossing the American border, which is a strong bond. G. Also, we really work hard to keep it low and that's really encouraging. Adam has trouble with authority while i have it with sustainability and environmentalism. He likes space and i like materials. We both find waste inspiring. We like the idea of creating pieces that make you realize your space and environment in a more beautiful and accidental way. Since we come from different worlds we are constantly questioning what it really means to step into these arenas like activism, art, architecture. We are also really afraid of how art goes, and we don't know how to slip in and come out clean. And yeah we don’t like each other. AB. Which makes for this great productive confusion. Collaborative work is mostly frustrating. G. And there are others we work with too, wonderful, distant others. AB. And some of them like you, Jerry. G. Sure. AB. We do a lot of our own stuff and sometimes just fall into each other’s projects mid-way, towards the end or drop out from the beginning. But it’s definitely important that we are surprised by what we work on individually. Or, it’s great to be surprised by how differences end up overlapping.
One of your pieces Field Notes addresses the ways in which the delineation of interior and exterior or private and public space can be used towards political ends. Using cocoons, you and Adam propose open source architecture and hacked materials as forms of grassroots activism. Can you give us more details on that? Which materials you use? And how the cocoon can be turned into OS architecture? A— G: The basic nature of the cocoon is to turn the structures and infrastructures of the city into a vehicle for experimentation. It might need space, it might need a certain material, it might need a certain action to hang it. When a cocoon needed certain materials, it made us go and find it around, explore sites and slip into and through cracks to get it. This gives us the chance to hack infrastructures. When the cocoon needs to be used you have to look for space: a scaffold, a tree, a fire escape, which enables reclaiming some lost space. Also, the cocoon is meant to be a tool for tactical occupation, like in the case of More Gardens —
AB. A kick ass New York City community garden advocacy group that saves community gardens from being destroyed by the city G. — Either for tree sitting or for creating a temporary squat, when you slip into a cocoon you slip into a tool riddled with the potential of continually evolving. AB. With the cocoons we weren’t really so interested in focusing on the objects but on the whole network, the whole approach that building and thieving, freecycling, skill sharing and trespassing gets you into. I mean, we personally really cared about the objects but that was not what we wanted to show to the public. That stuff is personal. What we do care about is pointing in a direction; towards techniques of trespass, of building, of acquiring materials. It was important to provide entry points into the very material circumstances and consequences of art making. The kind of materials we were using were things like construction netting hacked from construction sites. To get them you climb up inside scaffolding and cut out some chunks. We also used modified Tyvek postal envelopes grabbed for free from post offices around New York. And, 1 dollar beach mats. These are the main materials, but there is tones of other stuff, mostly culled from construction sites, hardware shops, outdoors shops and the street. Open source architecture refers to the way that we hoped to distribute a process of building, not instructions on how to build a particular thing. We had to break codes and hack systems to build the cocoons and what we are interested in distributing are the techniques we used. We don’t think any body would be really all that interested in reproducing the objects we produced, but the techniques could help people build their own stuff or at least take an adventurous approach to buildings. We are just hoping to pass on a very basic program for experimental architecture.
What does one of these cocoons look like exactly? Can you sleep in it? A— AB. People have said they look like many things. Some people think they look like body bags, which I kind of like. Some people think they look like jewels, some say they are just hammocks, some don’t really know what to make of them. Yes, you can sleep in them. We have and will continue to. There is this whole experiential side, as you can imagine, to sleeping in trees and hanging up against scaffolding, strapped to some edifice under construction like you were, well, a little larvae grafted to structures. Which you are already, with or without some cocoon. G. They are really a simple hammock. However the material and the way in which they are built, make them what you want them or need them to be.
And how about the Craigslist chapter of the project? How did it go and did it encounter the kind of response you were hoping to get? A— G. Well, Adam got all those emails. Actually the Craiglist chapter are the origin of the cocoon. He was trying to advertise free space for people to occupy as well as describing this kind of poetics of squatting. Squatting not only as a political strategy but also a creative architectural endeavour. AB. Craigslist is a funny place. It was really a way for us to talk to an audience that would otherwise have little relation to this kind of work (though maybe we’re making bogus assumptions). And, yeah we had great responses ranging from sincere interest to total confusion to pick-up lines.
I like the “swing actions� a lot. How did the public react to the swings? Do you know if the idea has spread around?
G. I was just the trooper. I had to wait in line to use the freaking swing. The pictures I took are beautiful though. Did you ever get into trouble for installing swings and portable squats? A—G. Not a real problem. Some building porters that double as mini-cops... AB: So many people in New York city are mini cops... G. Some have come to us to ask what the hell we are doing, but often people give us a break to finish or even let us keep going. You would be surprised by how many public servants are tamed by the word "art". It's really the best antidote or word you can use to dissolve confusion and tension. We just published recently ‘How to Unload bags and Practice Failure’, a description of getting busted and the function of the “artist�. Why don't you read it. It's my favorite project.
I want to know more about 100% Local Irradiated Food. And that TV set that you turned into an Edible Excess Machine. What was the impetus for that project? How does the EXM work? A— G. Oh! The EXM doesn’t work.
Basically, parasitic activity requires the very consumer society it deplores in order for it to survive. Freegans would be impossible without the excess generated by consumer society. Their activism, their scavenging, which is a totally justified protest against this consumption at the same time depends on it. So, in their own ideal world they would not exist. In a way they are fighting for their own disappearance as a group. That’s interesting. What the machine is supposed to do is allow you to turn absolutely anything (garbage, bricks, old tires) into edible waste by irradiating it and swallowing a laxative. A perfect circle. A perfect impossibility. If it were true, at a certain point, you would end up turning your own self into edible waste. We built it as a workshop at Eyebeam. Jerry and some excellent workshop folks built a commercial around the EXM. We hope to eventually get a feature in Martha Stewart’s magazine. G. I have a crush on garbage bags so I really wanted to do something directly with them. The idea came up actually because someone told us that you can actually create x-rays out of a tv. So the project is meant to raise attention to the enormous amount of waste we produce everyday, right? G. We are trying to make clear the fact that while everybody goes green, local and organic our waste will remain there. It’s about excessive consumption. If everyone is really really interested in being sustainable, how about eating your own waste? THE EXM is as retarded as green capitalism.
There’s a strange little device on your website. It’s called Bucky and seems to implode. Can you tell us something about it? A— AB. This is Jerry’s killer project and she thinks more clearly about it than I but we do share this distrust of Mr. Bucky Fuller. He is still someone that we have to contend with, maybe one of the most important idols that we have yet to destroy. He is really this figure head of all of this naïve technological optimism that threatens to murder anything that was once dangerous and/or interesting about sustainability. G. The Bucky is an exploding microcosm contained in a dome. It simulates the illusion of cheap and easy sustainability and environmentalism based on the commodity. Saving the world has became a commodity that you can buy in Whole Foods and every other shop on the block and it's really pathetic. Why is being green even an interesting future? Honestly, it looks all the same to me.
AB: Isn’t it just the same as the present except that people will feel guiltless about their consumption, about their excesses? You know, I feel like sustainability even has enough room in it’s future for things like solar powered tanning salons and ways to power your television set by the energy emitted by burning your own calories. And all sorts of other “neat� stuff. JG. For me, a sustainable future based on consuming "with the earth in mind" is the ultimate social disaster. I prefer to stop preparing for the upcoming natural disasters and start acting on the social disaster around me, like consumer capitalism.
The Bucky’s are based on Fuller's Geoscope: This globe that allows you to see the big picture and help humanity somehow to "anticipate and cope with inexorable events". Bucky I is a forest made of money that explodes. Pure illusion. My Bucky is meant to mimic the actual fragility of 'Space Ship Earth'. Green or not. I really want to destroy this illusion of "saving" the world going "green". I don't think we are going to "save" it. But i do believe we have to go more dark in order to learn how to live on it from now on.
During the last edition of Conflux, I saw you walking around with your friends wearing some pretty Postal Gowns. How can I make one? Can you give us a little step-by-step? A—AB. Regine, haven’t you heard how damn stubborn Jerry is with instructions these days? She avoids them like she had a nut allergy or something. JG. Uff. Don't even get my started. What's with this obsession for systematization? Yeah i don't like instructions, but actually some people really dig instruction sets and they even think they allow you to show how instructions for anything always rely on some impossibility and the unthinkability of chance.
Once you got your material: (You need a pattern and a sewing machine) 1. Cut your pattern 2. Sew both parts together, Thanks Geraldine and Adam! All images courtesy of the artists. |
A— AB. It’s pretty hard not to love swings even when they are set in places they shouldn’t be; they are pretty benign objects. Everybody loved them, from construction workers who would tell us we ‘gotta patent that shit’, to passersby, and of course, kids. But this is why they can be a decent introduction or gateway to more intense experiences of disruption, or of bending and twisting space.
AB. It is a symbolic machine. We have been inspired by 
Well my allergy to instructions is that i don't think there is a possible way to break down into steps things that are not technical, and maybe i really want to move over the technical. I like to share information yes, but i think we have to subvert the way we share it some how too. Instructablism is getting a little boring to me. To make a Postal Gown first you need to get some material for free by any means. And this can be as broad as you want. Hacking, thieving, freecycling. You have to make an effort to avoid money exchange. You have to learn how to step into strangers homes (it's really weird sometimes as well as interesting), receive something and take responsability of it.
