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This week, i'm having a chat with Lieven Standaert, the designer behind Aeromodeller2, a work as poetical as it is ambitious and thought-provoking. The project explores the possibility to build a 90-meter, zero-emission, airship that will never need to land to get its fuel, creating hydrogen from the elements it encounters and briefly anchoring when it needs to replenish its energy in a renewable way. Aeromodeller2 might not be the most efficient nor the fastest airship but it certainly leaves more space to imagination, dream and aspiration than anything Boeing or NASA can come up with. A thousand airbuses jumping back and forth over the ocean twenty-four-seven. Fly, land, replace crew and passengers and take off again. One thousand hyperactive passenger jets, and one airship that needs to rest when its energy level is low. The most surprising part of the project is that Lieven, just like its airship, works at his own pace. It might take him one year, ten or even more to complete his project. That's not really the point for him. What matters is the experimental process, the constant testings, the unhurried journey made of improvements, adjustments and exploration.
The text that describes Aeromodeller2 explains that "The project was born as a manifesto for a designer-driven innovation, as opposed to one driven by a marketing department." What are the advantages of a designer-driven over a marketing-led approach? The school where I studied industrial design was at that time very much pushing its students towards industry. If you wanted to design a good backpack, you did focus group studies and market research and asked the people what they wanted. This is a perfectly valid thing to do, and a fittingly humble approach to design. I never liked it. My background was in architecture. My heroes were, and still are, people like Le Corbusier and Buckminster. I like the arrogant, aristocratic designers who say: "I've studied this problem. This is the right solution and we should build this." There are fields, like ergonomics, where user feedback is invaluable, but if you're asking a hundred people if solar panels are better than wind power, it is an illusion to think the average answer will be better than that of one expert who studied the issue. If you base your designs on the amount of people that will buy it and their opinions, you will always follow. I value visionary designers who lead. Designers who say: "I'm not making what you want, I'm making what you need. Take it". My government, like most, is trying to promote innovation. They're doing this by financing R&D-projects, but those are all evaluated on the basis of their business plans. Explain how long it will take to make, who you will sell it to and to how many at what price, and you'll get considered for funding. This approach gives you a lot of small, sensible innovations. It leads to new Tupperware. It won't give you moon rockets. It won't give you iPods, only a lot of iPod add-ons. It won't give you high-speed reclining bikes, jet packs or stair-climbing wheelchairs. You need a different kind of inventor for that, you need the stubborn idiots tinkering away a shed somewhere. You need people that are passionate about what they do and don't give a rats what anyone else thinks.
The Wright brothers never did a market study on the economical potential of non-stop transatlantic flights. They just thought flying would be the best thing ever. And it's that passion that made them persevere when others gave up.
For me the Wright brothers were artists. They were at the cutting edge of their field and followed their hearts, put their soul into what they made. To me, asking what they did is engineering or art, is like asking if Bach's church music is art or a functional piece of music.
Also i note that you mention 'design' but could you replace the word in the sentence with art as in "art-driven innovation"? Would it impact what you try to convey with your work?
I wouldn't use the word 'art-driven', it makes me think of bringing an artist into a foreign field or industry, to apply his/her ideas and visions as an innovation consultant or an added layer to this industry, This has been tried, and I don't think it's a very useful idea.
Artists are much more comfortable with showing experiments and failure than engineers are. Art has this culture of presenting a process, a work-in-progress. "It isn't as good as I want it yet, but this is what I'm trying to do..." A painter, labouring for 20 years towards his perfect work. The idea also that your drawing takes shape as you work on it, as opposed to executing a finalized design. The idea of starting something you don't know you'll be able to finish, being ok with uncertainty. I think there is a lot of strength in those ways of working, if what you want is perseverance rather than a deadline. Surely this must influence the way you draw up the budget necessary for the development of the project? A traditional industrial R&D-process has a budget up front and a deadline looming at the end. You work behind closed doors and are supposed to present the finished result within time and budget. In this structure a lot of projects fail, not because you can't make them work, but because you can't make them work on time. Or they don't even get started as you can't find all the financing up front. If I finance a project like mine against a deadline, I'm setting myself up for failure. My most precious resource is my time, as it is very hard to predict how much time we'll need to solve unexpected problems. What I'm trying to do, by showing my experiments, by talking about a work-in-progress and explaining what I'm testing, is to put together a methodology that is less dependent on a deadline and more on slower, more sturdy growth. I believe that if you're prepared to fail in public, to show your dumb mistakes and what you've learned from them, you can grow stronger from this, and at the same time tell a more realistic, less macho, more honest story of invention.
The reason i wanted to bring art on the table is that, unsurprisingly, i immediately thought Panamarenko when i saw your work and read its name. You also referred to Gaudi's old models and Frei Otto's soap bubble experiments in our previous email exchange so i guess your influences must reach much further than i expected. Can you tell us something about them and, more generally, what brought you to this ambitious project? If you stop drawing by hand, and only use a computer, you stand to lose something. A pencil is a particular interface, you think with a pencil. You don't think up a drawing up front, it gets created in an interplay between your hand and your head. I think most people would agree that there are aspects to a simple pencil in a well-trained hand that a computer can't replace. I think the same holds true in building and testing stuff, in the physical experiment. Gaudi made the highest church in the world not using reinforced concrete. And he did this by building his upside-down models, using ropes under tension so find the correct shapes for the stone arcs under compression.
Today you can do all that with computer simulations, and evaluating a structure will be faster and more flexible. But what interests me is the use of these physical simulations as a design tool. As with that pencil, I think something gets lost when engineers stop tinkering about. I would be the last to deny computers have created fantastic new possibilities, I've worked with them professionally for years. But for me, to develop a feeling for how a tensegrity structure will deform, nothing works as well as a hot-glued sticks-and-rope model, a physical model I can touch and push against. For the airship I wanted to study how you could create shapes by partially filling balloons, instead of using pressurized cigar shapes. The shape would be generated by the lift force of the gas, wanting to go up, as opposed to the pressure in a spheroid balloon, pushing the walls out. Now, it's quite hard to do this with gas in a table-top-sized model. In small volumes the forces become too tiny to be practical. So what I did was, I turned my airship model upside-down, and filled it with water. The weight of the water acts as a simulant for the buoyancy of the lift gas. This gave me shapes to play with. It allowed me to test how different balloons could interact and slide over each other. I could try out different cut-patterns for the containing bags, see how they can fold open and contract, how their shapes change as they're filled to a different degree.
I believe building physical models keep you solidly grounded in reality. It's too easy to draw stuff on a computer that simply can't be built. And in doing experiments, you can try out stuff that you don't understand. You can be surprised by a result, and afterwards discuss it and learn what was going on. A computer can't replace that. You can do a wind tunnel simulation on a desktop pc, only you need to understand all the variables you put into the computer. Otherwise what comes out will be garbage. But anyone can put his hand out of the window of a driving car and feel the wind pushing on it. That's where I want to link back to Panamarenko. What he did in a unique way, what I love in his work, is the way he showed experiments, condensed to a single idea. The essence of experimenting is curiosity, 'Let's try this and see what it does' and this is what he captured in his best works. Experiments are about failing and learning from these failures, and that is a story engineers are remarkable bad at communicating. The essence of technology is in research, is the experiment, is the process, not the final waxed car.
Has Panamarenko ever seen and reacted to your work? I sent Panamarenko an invitation to my first exhibition, where I published the work. The expo was in Antwerp, his home town, and I was showing a houseboat airship in an arts centre. I never got a reply, but I suppose he has better things to do. He had already retired then. He was the elephant in the room anyway. I felt I had to deal with that up front, and called the expo 'aeromodeller2'. As you know 'aeromodeller' was the name he gave to his airship. It was a bit a provocation, but mainly I wanted to affirm my love for his old work. I knew I didn't want to get the headline 'Antwerp architect designs airship that DOES work' I didn't create my project as a critique on his work and I didn't want it interpreted that way. If you baptise your boat the 'Kontiki 2', everyone knows you like Thor Heyerdahl. Panamarenko's hands-on prototyping was an inspiration, in a context where hundreds of crazy airship concepts never got off the paper. In science, when you create something new, you mention your sources, you mention the people whose work you're building on. Not doing so is dishonest and this is what felt right to me. After the expo, the name stuck to the project, so I kept it. And here's an interesting thing: if I talk to scientists and engineers about this, everyone agrees it makes sense and it's a good name. If artists ask me about it, almost every single one of them tells me I should never mention Panamarenko, dump the name altogether and 'stand on my own two feet'. I'm a bit a stranger here myself, I'm not an artist by training, I'm not sure where I belong, but there is definitely a cultural difference between science and art in referencing your sources. There are days I wished I had chosen a different label, and I've been called 'Panamarenko rip-off' on several occasions, but never by anyone who took more than 2 minutes to look at my work. If I hadn't had the solid confidence that my work stands on its own, I would never have dared give it this name.
Now i think i'd need more details about the technology behind Aeromodeller2. The vehicle 'regenerates its fuel, creating hydrogen from wind power and the rain on its skin." Why isn't it powered by the sun like so many flying prototype i read about then? In order to answer that I have to tell you about hydrogen gas first. We've stopped using it in airships over 70 years ago. It is lighter than air, but also flammable. Today though, a number of people are reconsidering this, as we're using the same gas as a clean fuel in cars. It's harder to use than batteries, and less efficient, but the cars exist and we can use them safely.
The reason people keep trying to make it work, is because the principle behind it is very beautiful. You start off with water, you put an electric current through it and you will split the H20 into H2 and 02. O2 is oxygen, you let that part go, H2 is hydrogen. Hydrogen is a flammable gas with the unique property that when you burn it, it turns back into water. If you use it as a fuel, what comes out of the exhaust is clean water. Now I'm arguing the problem with those hydrogen cars is that you're misusing this principle. The cars only consume the hydrogen. This means they need hydrogen refueling stations, which don't exist. It also means that they miss the essence of this idea, namely that it is a reversible, cyclic system. If you put hydrogen in a car, you're saying to the world that hydrogen is a clean fuel, it is a replacement for gasoline. And it is not. You have to make it first. If the electricity for creating the hydrogen is generated by a coal-firing plant, it is not clean energy at all! Hydrogen is not a fuel; it's a fantastic, light-weight battery. It is not an energy source, it is an energy carrier.
What I'm proposing is a vehicle that can generate its own hydrogen, store it and later use it as fuel for propulsion. That would result in an airship that is both a lot more autonomous, wouldn't need refueling stations, and could fully demonstrate the beauty of this water-to-hydrogen-to-water reaction. You would have a true zero-emission zeppelin, with the autonomy of a sailing ship.
The basic principle is that I equip my airship with 2 large propellers. It can fly with those, using hydrogen as fuel. When it runs low on hydrogen, it does not land to refuel. Instead it anchors at a cable, like a kite. The propellers now start working as wind generators. They create electricity. You get water from captured rain or a lake. Electricity and water gives you hydrogen. You have the ship recharging for one or two days, and then you lift anchor and fly on. Now, you could implement the same idea using light-weight, high-efficiency solar panels and have a continuous system. You wouldn't need to stop. This kind of design does exist as concept drawings from several companies, but they're extremely expensive to build and won't get realized, not with the present state-of-the-art. They only exist as computer renderings, not as prototypes. The largest solar-powered airship is a French student project that's just big enough to carry one man. I wasn't interested in making pretty design drawings. I wanted to take this elegant idea of a hydrogen-based energy cycle, and implement it in a design at a scale and cost level that it could actually be built. I wanted to take this blue-sky, radical concept and develop it in the most down-to-earth, practical way possible. Because of this, the shape of my airship is designed to be built from smaller parts on ground level, like a tent structure, and the wind rotors originally were put on there because, unlike solar panels, they're perfectly affordable and much more low-tech. But in placing those wind generators on the concept, it grew into something else. I now had a machine that had to rest in order to regenerate. I had designed a zero-emission machine that, in order to renew its consumed energy, had to go to sleep. It grew into this biomimicry model, of a machine dealing with energy in the same way as a living being, a machine that at the end of the day has to pay the price for the energy it used up. I think that's a very powerful idea, telling a story about energy as a finite resource instead of an unlimited supply, and I think this version is better than the solar-powered one.
How long have you been working on the model and how much work is left before you think that you've achieved what you were dreaming of? I never finished those studies in industrial design, as I left to start a company with two friends. So I never did a thesis project as a designer. In the years that followed this airship idea slowly took shape. It got under my skin and I kept going back to it. It established itself as something I saw as my master thesis, as something I could use to take a position on what I kind of designer I wanted to be, and I worked on the concept verification in my free time. It's hard to point at a specific origin, as it isn't as much one concept, but a puzzle of ideas that over time fit together into something that was more than the sum of its parts. In 2007 I did a series of combustion tests on 10m³ hydrogen balloons to see if you could develop a balloon system to use hydrogen safely. I realized nobody had actually done those kind of experiments in a serious way, as the idea was completely marginalized by the old Hindenburg disaster. In 2009 I got to the point where I believed I could convincingly argue this concept was feasible, so I published it in a solo exhibition in order to do so. This led to the opportunity to show the work in other exhibitions, and to build the remote-controlled 9-meter-model at the Verbeke Foundation, and the project has been my main focus since.
People keep asking me how long it will take me to build the full-scale airship. I have a couple of timelines written out, including one where I have all the funding I could wish for. So I used to give an answer, with a definite timing and budget, then tried to explain that it's more complicated than that. That the whole point was deciding what you do when you don't have all the money you wish for and you need to manage your resources. Be small. Cut the big project in little pieces and realize one piece at a time, but get it off the paper somehow. That when you want to build something radically new, any deadline is a guesstimate and your time is your most precious resource and you should protect it by developing methodologies that focus on endurance instead of on a deadline. Show your work-in-progress, instead of building behind closed doors. Show an R&D-process instead of an end result and grow slowly... I recently realized I can give a simple, one-sentence answer. And it is: "As long as it takes..." Like a painting, it will be finished when it's darn well good enough. I'm chasing an idea I'm passionate about and think is worthwhile working on. If it takes 10 years to get it done, then it takes 10 years. That's how it is.
Finally, i was interested in the scenario behind Aeromodeller2. Would people live on it, use it as a refuge in case of natural or man-caused disasters or would it be rather a vehicle for travels? Or would it simply be a passing blimp? Now you're asking me the industrial-engineering question; where is it good for? What's the application? Who will you sell it to? But what if I'm not building the fastest, the most efficient or even the cheapest solution? What if I'm building the most elegant, most beautiful solution to a problem? What if I'm building a working airship, not for any particular use, but to tell a story? A machine that needs to sleep, that deals with energy like a living being. A story about a more responsible, more organic way of using energy. A story about an old, clean technology that's too slow to actually be used in transport, just like sailing ships are ancient and outdated. If I want to do that, where does it belong? Where do I belong?
I don't want to define an application for it, because then I'm trapped again in this industrial-engineering logic of developing a product against a business plan deadline.
Let's build it, not for a specific market, but because it's beautiful.
Let's build it because it has the right story to tell. I'm not interested in wild utopian visions where hundreds of these nomad ships are wandering over the globe, I'm interested in a pragmatic approach to get the first one built. An experimental ship will be limited in where it is allowed to fly. It won't be super big, but large enough to carry a thousand kilos of supplies, a warm coat and a bed (yes, in the end I'm still an architect, this would be the ultimate tree house). Like an experimental airplane, it won't be allowed to fly over any densely populated areas. And if you want to come on board for dinner, I'll have to make you sign a waiver. But even if I'm only allowed to travel over international waters, there are a whole lot of interesting places we could visit... Thanks Lieven!
This Summer the 9-meter-model of Aeromodeller2 is participating to the exhibition Machines improbables, on view at the Musée Ianchelevici. The show is part of the ARTour Biennale in La Louvière, Belgium and runs through August 28, 2011. Videos of the Aeromodeller 2 project. |
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Tomas Saraceno's Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider's Web was the ultimate photo-magnet at this year's Venice Biennale. No doubt the work he's exhibiting at ReThink: Contemporary Art and Climate Change in Copenhagen is meeting with the same fascination from the audience. I've seen his artworks in numerous group exhibition. They are always striking of course but i never really took the time to sit down and watch his work with enough attention.
MUDAM gave me a great opportunity to do just that. The Luxembourg museum is currently dedicating one of its exhibitions to the Argentinian artist with videos, sketches, photo documentation of his experiments, prototypes of inflatable structures anchored to the floor of the galleries, etc.
The artist's suspended gardens and nomadic architecture follow the steps of the structures conceived by Peter Cook, Yona Friedman, Buckminster Fuller and the members of Ant Farm. Saraceno's vehicles are "lighter than air", they are powered by solar energy and made with materials such as aerogel, an extremely low-density solid derived from a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas.
His Air-Port-City is an ongoing experiment that interconnects various living areas floating in the air through a system of modules. Saraceno's architecture is ethereal and delicate, it is poetical and utopian but because they are ruled by regulations similar to airport ones, his cities also challenge existing political, social, cultural and military boundaries. They are truly international. Inhabitants will survive eating the produces of the "Flying Gardens" made of plants that can survive the constant changes in spatial and temporal conditions. There will be 'airplants' for example. These plants, from the genus Tillandsia, feed on rain, dust, insect matter, dew and whatever nutrients the air brings to them.
The work of Tomas Saraceno is on view at MUDAM in Luxembourg until January, 3, 2010. Previously at MUDAM: Mudam, the Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg (part 1) and Mudam (part 2): RRRIPP!! Paper Fashion. Related: Open Sailing, drifting lifestyle to cope with looming disasters. |
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I just spent a couple of eventful days in Eindhoven, NL. Endless thankyouverymuch to my lucky star (in this case the MU art space) who brought me there as the Van Abbemuseum had just opened a fascinating and very timely exhibition dedicated to contemporary art and culture of the central and southern states of America. I'll come back with more details on Heartland but here's the appetizer: Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the WTC twin towers, authored another set of buildings that would end in gravel and dust in front of TV cameras, this time in St Louis, Missouri. Designed in 1951, when the city was still segregated, the Pruitt-Igoe was a complex of 2,870 apartments. Originally, the city planned two partitions for the housing project: Pruitt for black residents, and Igoe for whites. But as segregation was ruled unconstitutional in the 1954, the project was opened as racially integrated that same year. Within two years, most white residents had found the means to relocate elsewhere.
Yamasaki's initial designed incorporated Le Corbusier's '3 essential joys of urbanism; sun, space and greenery'. Severe cuts in the budget forced the architect to compromise its original plan, leading eventually to the deterioration of the gym, playground and landscaping. The complex was vandalized and quickly fell into disrepair and disuse. After several unsuccessful attempts to rehabilitate the area the St. Louis Housing Authority began demolition of the complex on March 16, 1972. It was regarded as a failure of architecture as a tool to solve complex social problems. Ironically, the rubble was carted off to serve as landfill for luxury homes being built in the suburbs of Ladue, Missouri, the wealthiest and most expensive neighbourhood in the U.S. at the time.
Reports of the time say that the public attending the demolition let out a dull roar as the buildings fell. Artist Michael Rakowitz, famous for the paraSITE plastic shelters, recreated the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in the form of a big inflatable building. He called it 'Dull Roar'. The inflatable structure is right at the center of a circular wooden ramp, and the public can walk up, gather around and watch the building deflating and then resurrecting, again and again. The spectacle evokes those images we all saw on TV a few years ago: on the screens the Twin Towers stood erected than fell, you'd switch channel and here they were again, up then down.
Small drawings hanging around the inflatable evoke the local baseball team's loss the night of the implosion, the sad death of architect Louis Kahn in a Penn Station bathroom and, once again, the collapse of Yamasaki's World Trade Center. The installation, featured in the the Heartland exhibition, is on view at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven until January 25, 2009. |
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Another season, another exhibition worth taking the train to Florence for at Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina. Marnix de Nijs' latest installation, Exploded Views - Remapping Firenze, spectacularly recreates a visual and dynamic body experience of the city. Minus the added visual layer of the hordes of tourists who walk through its cobbled streets every day. See for yourself: Two industrial treadmills in front of a huge screen display renderings of a deserted Florence. The 3D images are put into motion by the physical effort made by the viewer(s)/runner(s)/performer(s). The speed of his or her movements directly guides the intensity of the aesthetic experience. Sensors placed in the handle bar detect movements, and allow the viewer to determine which direction should be followed and what will be the intensity of the images traversed.
That might sound a bit like de Nijs' famous installation Run, Motherfucker Run. There are some similarities of course. There's the irresistible element of risk. Don't be fooled by the cushion which gently inflates behind you as you run.... Runners don't have much more control on the probability of their fall as they have on its location (i did witness some "lateral falls" but they were totally benign.) I actually wonder what would happen with this installation in "risk-management" crazy Britain. But that's another story. Just like in RMR, the runners meets with the emptiness of the city, with an almost total absence of any human imprint on the spaces. In Remapping Firenze however, the human presence is crawling back into the city through a store of sounds registered in the city by audio designer Boris Debackere.
The runner can only hear the field recordings when navigating slowly through the geometry of the streets and buildings. When they accelerate, contact with human voices and noises is lost. Which touches upon one of the most impressive characteristics of Remapping Firenze: running and slowing down/stopping on the treadmill provides the public with a totally different perspective.While you adopt a gentle walking pace, the city looks real and recognizable in all its touristic cliches and beauty but once you run, you enter a new dimension, the one of modernization and globalization which Florence, just like any other city, has to live up to, no matter how fascinating the history lurking behind its thick walls can be. RMR shows a modern city. It was in fact Rotterdam but unless you intimately know Rotterdam there was no hint of the actual location. It could have been anywhere. As its name attests, Remapping Firenze is deeply grounded in its location.
The images on the screen are part film, part computer graphics re-creation. They were created using a brand new scanning software, developed both at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and at the University of Washington. The system generates a kind of extremely detailed 3D. Its functioning is very different from the usual procedure to generate 3D images. This one works with image recognition. When a peculiar spots in the picture is recognized in different pictures, it become the reference point of the 3d meshes.
Exploded Views - Remapping Florence was made especially for the CCCS. It's the first of a series of works by leading international artists who have been invited to Florence to create site-specific works that reflect the diverse realities of this city'. Catch it while you can. The exhibitionis open until June 30 at Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina in Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. |
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The Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Sevilla is currently running an exhibition dedicated to Ant Farm, a group of experimental architects and critical artists active mostly in the '70s. The exhibition includes videos, models, original drawings, inflatables and all the quiet you can expect in a cultural center located inside a stunning monastry on the bank of the Guadalquivir River, the Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa María de Las Cuevas.
Founded in San Francisco in 1969 Ant Farm could be regarded today as a very effective mix between Archigram, the Rolling Stones and The Yes Men. Ant Farm embraced the latest technologies at the same time as they hit American culture on the head with their social and political comments and their highly critical (up to being in some cases destructive) approach to mass media. Their projects do not stop at the work of art itself, they also encompass the mass media rendering of that work of art. All i knew about them was their rusty Cadillac Ranch installation which i do not like very much but the rest of their practice impressed me beyond words. I can't think of any artistic group playing a similarly brilliant, innovative and multidisciplinary work today. Here's a shortcut to their works:
Ant Farm deployed their conceptual world through videos, manifestos, spectacular performances and installations until 1978, when they disbanded following a studio fire. Most of the slide and video documentation was saved, but very little else survived.
Ant Farm started their career as evangelists of inflatable structures. Cheap and easy to assemble, they challenged the American consumerism culture and fitted perfectly a nomadic, communal lifestyle, in total contrast with the Brutalist architecture prevalent in the United States during the 1960s.
In 1971, they took the road abroad their Media Van, a customised Chevrolet van turned into a mobile studio to share information and images with the public while they toured the country to give talks and organize public happenings. The van not only transported the material necessary to build their ICE 9 inflatables but its motor was also used to generate the energy indispensable to blow up the structure.
In 1972 the group built in Texas the House of the Century, a ferro-cement weekend residence with organic shapes that remind the inflatable structure that Ant Farm had realized a few years earlier, in particular their ICE 9 prototype.
Video showing what the House was like before its decay: The Dolphin Embassy was a never realized sea station in Australia which engaged with interspecies communication using the new video technologies. The structure would sail with the help of a solar mechanism.
In 1974, Ant Farm created their most famous pieces in Amarillo, Texas, Cadillac Ranch. They half-buried a row of used and junk Cadillac automobiles dating from 1949 to 1963, nose-first in the ground, at an angle corresponding to that of the Great Pyramid of Giza. To add to the outrage done to the iconic vehicle, the public is very welcome to graffiti the cars.
The installation was originally located in a wheat field, but was later moved 3 kilometers to the west, to a cow pasture in order to place it further from the limits of the growing city.
A year later Ant Farm staged the performance Media Burn. Dressed as astronauts, they drove at full speed a 1959 Cadillac into a wall of burning television sets. Media Burn critiqued American ideals of heroics and technological superiority, and offered an affront to the television media who were the only one invited to attend the event. Their video of the performance is styled after news coverage of a space launch, including melodramatic pre-stunt interviews with the artists and a speech by "JFK" (impersonated by Doug Hall).
Short video and a 26 minute one. Media Burn was not their first attack of the media, in 1972 they collaborated with the video collective Raindance to launch the guerrilla Top Value Television (TVTV) to provide alternative coverage of the political conventions of that year.
Let's close the post with The Eternal Frame, a 1975 reenactment of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Part of it plays on America's obsession with the media, but the video demonstrates also that the sacred images of the assassination cannot be mocked. The work can be read as a commentary on the pervasive media culture in America, as it explores how the Kennedy assassination itself became a new type of media event. Video: More images. The exhibition of Ant Farm's work is on view at the CAAC in Sevilla, Spain, until June 8, 2008. Actar has just released Ant Farm - Living Archive 7. Felicity D. Scott has collected archival material to illustrate the early trajectory of the collective, including its architecture, inflatables, performance, multimedia, and video work. |
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Jessica Findley lives in Brooklyn where she works as a "freelance designer, illustrator and animator." That brief description hardly encompasses all Jessica's many activities and talents: she makes animated movies, crafts reversable dolls, she draws, she is also a web designer but what brought my attention to her work are the performances and interactive installations she developed and shows around the world., crafts reversable dolls, she draws, she is also a web designer but what brought my attention to her work are the performances and interactive installations she developed and shows around the world. Oh! And just for the info, Jessica received her BA at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA with her studies focusing on Film, Video and Animation. She then completed her MA in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. On your website there is a section called "Work" and another is "art". what's your art for if it is not work? is it just a question of what pays the rent? Are you happy with that equilibrium or would you rather focus only on the art? This is always a difficult challenge. In a dream world it would be great to focus on the art all the time, but a girl needs to eat. It is also nice not to have to think of the monetary value of my art when I make it. I would love to have less work and do more art. Or at least more interesting work and do more art. I have been very happy doing illustrations and work for museums and educational programs. It would be great to take a break to just focus on the art for a while, then go work, then do art. For now both art and work seem to need to be constantly in process. Can you explain us the project "millefiore effect"? And in particular the Front inflatable garments? How do they work?
The Millefiore Effect was the name that Margot Jacobs, Ralph Borland and myself gave our team when we made "Front". Millefiori means 1000 flowers in italian, it is also a technique used in crafting many colors of glass or clay together to create patterns. We liked this symbolism for the collective efforts of our group. Margot came from an industrial design education, Ralph from sculpture, and I from film video and animation and had experience sewing my own clothes. The project "Front" consists of 2 symbiotic, voice-activated, inflatable conflict suits. Front is a sort of an endless game of vocal battle between two people who wear suits equipped with fans which inflate when they yell. Each suit has two types of inflation sacks - aggressive and defensive - which inflate depending on who is making sound. The suits are to be worn by the public.
How do people behave when they wear it? Does it trigger any particular/unexpected behaviour? It's interesting, some people are quite shy and then others get really into it and get really silly or serious about it. It can have a explosive emotional release or instill stage fright. We have had people sing opera, burst into contagious laughter, bark like dogs, talk like knights in armor, and make up comedy routines. Some places we go people are too shy to even put them on, and usually Margot and I will just get in and go for it, after that we end up with at least a couple people who sign up to get ridiculous.
What was the impetus for your project Aeolian Ride? I wanted to do something that would transform the everyday public landscape and make people giddy or baffled. One day I was riding my bike in Brooklyn with white nylon jacket on that was unzipped. I felt it fluttering behind me and thought that it would be great to make costumes for a big bike ride. I forgot about it until one day my friend Ryan O'connor was trying to think of ideas for an art project at burning man. I told him my idea and he thought it was great but he ended up making a giant octopus instead. A year later he called me. He said he had been thinking about my project and I needed to do it. This was not too long after 9/11 and my life seemed to lack any luster. A switch flipped in my brain and I suddenly was up to my elbows in rip-stop nylon designing inflatable costumes. You brought the project to different cities, was the experience extremely different from one place to the other? Any plan of organizing another Aeolian Ride any time soon? I'd love it if you could bring that to Europe. I find that riding a bike in a city is such a wonderful way to get to know its landscape. The people are what make the place for me. Its interesting who comes to the ride. It often depends on the connection who brought me to the city. It's usually a combination of different cycling cultures, every day cyclists, commuters, advocates, artists, messengers... anyone with a bike is welcome! I am always looking for people willing to organize and find funding to bring the ride to their city. I call these people champions. Each ride has had great champions who made it happen. The responses vary from city to city. New York was the first ride, it was rainy so I wasn't sure if it was going to happen and I didn't have a permit so I was nervous when the cops showed up. Funny my dad was there and he is such a charmer he gave the cops a couple of Aeolian buttons and told them about how excited he was for his daughters art project and they left. San Francisco happened in conjunction with the Bicycle Film Festival and was sponsored by a grant from the Black Rock Arts Organization. The people there had seen it all and loved it. They shouted out Angels! Sperm! Capetown was gorgeous. My good friend Ralph Borland was the Champion of this ride. The Discovery Chanel was doing a program on local artists and tried to show a collaboration between myself and artist Matthew Hindley. They purchased a couple suits for Matthew to work with. Unfortunately the Discovery Channel dropped the ball and gave me no images or video for that event.
I worked with Bike Summer's Dave Benoff to bring the Aeolian Ride to LA. The riders out there were used to lots of fun. Before the ride I joined the Midnight Ridaz for a fun ride in Heavy Metal Costume to a bowling alley where they had Metal Karaoke and giant paper mache musical instruments. LA was our first night ride with lights in the suits and we had a magical moment where mostly just the riders got to see the effect of the lights. During our ride through the bright city most of us didn't notice or remember we were wearing lights inside the suits. When we arrived at the dark park all the riders softly gasped and oohed at the forgotten surprise that they were glowing. My connection in Melbourne, Chris Star, is very deep into the politics of cycling and its community. We had a bit of competition in that the naked ride was happening at a similar time. The city and its people are super charming and laid back. Halifax was wonderful, my connection, a great photographer Francesca Tallone is embedded into the arts there. It was great fun and there was tons of enthusiasm for the ride. The Aeolian Poster was on the cover of their local weekly happenings paper all around town! The waterfront there is magical. The next Aeolian Ride will be Saturday September 8th 2007 from Brooklyn New York to the Dietch Art Parade in SOHO. Sign up already available!
I would love to bring the ride to Europe. Who wants to be the champion? Grow is a serenade for plants. Are you sure that the plants appreciate all that musical effort? How did you compose the music? Does it depend on the plant? Haha. I am not sure if the plants really react to the sounds or not. It seems at least one vintner believes it.I did read that it is a common grade school experiment to play music for plants. I found it difficult to write love songs for the plants. Half of them are for the plants and half are actually love songs for my friends. I wrote and recorded each song myself in an abandoned studio in a building I used to live in.
Design, animation, illustration, interactive installation, etc. You seem to jump effortlessly and with talent from one medium to the other, is there anything you are bad at? My strength is definitely my weakness. I love learning new skills and working in different mediums, but sometimes this can be fragmenting. I really envy people who know exactly what they want and have a path to get there. I chose this path, to explore, and it can be really challenging not to lose sight of what I really want. I try to follow my heart, eat my dessert first.
And more seriously, what do you find rewarding about each of these mediums? I am most interested in the idea first, then the materials and medium second but they definitely inform each other. Every medium provides me with a way to explore my ideas in different ways. Are there any designer and/or artist whom you think should get more attention from the public? Two of my favorite artists are Gelatin and Theo Jensen. I love the possible positive and the ingenious imaginative. Any upcoming project you could share with us? I am working on a graphic novel about the adventures of a girl who gets transported to the twin planet of earth. Thanks Jessica! More on her websites: Work + Art, Illustrations and Inspirational Blogging. |
August is ending and everyone is coming back from the beach. Including the interviews!
