We use direct democracy and cooperation to clothe, feed, heal, nurture, celebrate, educate, and challenge each other. We do all of this not to profit individually, but to meet the human needs of our community. Our internal economies are the antithesis of the greed and oppression we have been taught to expect from each other and acknowledges and addresses the myriad injustices that people bear everyday. Together we are moving beyond “jobs,” something someone gives you or takes from you, towards shared livelihoods that increase our collective economic security.

Read the full article by ISEA2012 keynoter Caroline Woolard in the Brooklyn Rail.

floating DNA we extracted

My cool lab partners Maurizio and Erich Berger

The DIY incubator we built (hey, it works!)

More images and links to come…

https://www.facebook.com/bdacosta

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting Bill Dolson’s studio/airplane hangar (yes, he shares his studio with his plane) and learning more about his work. What was especially inspiring to me were several very large scale, almost impossible projects: Reentry, Fire Line and Grid Switch. Bill and I were both residents of the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in NYC (although at different times) and I related to his large scale projects because of my own experiences with the NY2050 collaboration and my Queensbridge Wind Power Project proposal.

Bill Dolson Studies for Synthetic Meteors – San Diego
Still from HD Video Animation

Reentry involves creating an artificial meteor shower by adding a special payload to a vehicle that provides supplies to the space station regularly and burns up upon reentry to the atmosphere. I find this project interesting in the way it brings attention to the extensive amount of human activity currently occurring in space.

Bill says:

Since the beginning of space exploration the atmospheric reentry of man-made artifacts has created what could be considered synthetic meteors. The Reentry Series involves the deliberate creation of vast, ephemeral drawings using these reentry events. Historically, the pattern and timing of synthetic meteors has been inadvertent or has been determined as a side effect of other technical or scientific objectives or as the result of accidents. The tragic breakup of the space shuttle Columbia was certainly the most widely viewed of these events.

Bill Dolson Video frame from computer animation study
“Five Points in an East-West Line, displaced Northwest”

Fire line is a beautiful proposal for choreographed controlled burns. While seemingly destructive, these burns are executed deliberately as a means to simulate a natural ecological process. In order to prepare for this project, Bill said he had to obtain firefighter certification.

Las Vegas, Nevada
view from the International Space Station
Image Courtesy of the Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center

Although the intention is to create all these projects in reality, Bill concedes that Grid Switch would likely be the most difficult. The idea is to create a visual pattern to be seen from a great height by switching on and off the electrical grid.

He says:

These are proposals for pieces whose realization is admittedly problematic. If executed in a currently inhabited city, they require the acquiescence if not explicit permission of virtually the entire population. With the exception of the area around Chernobyl, there are no known urban sites which possess an intact power grid but are uninhabited. Perhaps these works can only be executed in the future, at a time when the manipulation of the power grid is no longer an inconvenience to the residents of the city due to abandonment or is a necessity for implementing power conservation through rolling blackouts.

Amy Francescini and the Future Farmers with a work called Ethnobotanical:

a mobile module that draws upon the diverse lineage of knowledge to study the complex relations between plants and humans. It brings in the question our faith in modern quantitative science as compared to the long tradition of qualitative indigenous knowledge through an inventory of distinctive tools, exemplary specimen and mappings that explore new ways to relate to the plant life around us. A combination of mythology and science fiction combined with qualitative science is used to create an experimental framework that regenerates traditional knowledge. Hands-on workshops and visual display are the vehicle for exploration and sharing new configurations of knowledge. Just like the intricate mechanisms for seed dispersal, E.B. moves freely to collect and disperse knowledge freely.

World’s Fair 2.0 by Stephanie Rothenberg and Marisa Jahn that:

reclaims the current home of the New York Hall of Science, re-envisioning the concepts that transformed Fitzgerald’s famous “valley of ashes” into Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. The fairs, through exhibits such as Futurama, The Road of Tomorrow, and Hall of Electrical Living, introduced visitors to products and ideas ranging from domestic robots and dishwashers to superhighways and space colonies, and as such, were seminal moments in the national psyche and global consciousness.

Looking to this rich cultural and technological history, Jahn and Rothenberg worked with 14 teens, and together they used innovations in mobile and augmented reality technology to ask: what are the continuities between utopian visions from the past and today’s vision for the future? Using a smartphone, visitors can experience World’s Fair 2.0 at locations in and around NYSCI. At the Rocket Park, for example, visitors will encounter visions for future living, from the “liberatory” promise of the electric dishwasher to single family space pods. Available both as a self-guided tour and teen-produced mobile game–where zombies thwart players in their time-traveling quest to explore the history of the future–World’s Fair 2.0 stages interventions into the past and future, regenerating conceptual tools to interact with the present.

2049 by Scott Kildall

and

A Geography of Being by Ricardo Miranda Zuniga. Ricardo initially sent me the information about this show and also a link to this video:

Of course such a great combination of artists and projects could only have come from the genius of curator Steve Dietz!

As one of the last events at the Albuquerque Museum related to ISEA2012, featured exhibiting artist Ruben Ortiz-Torres gave a talk about his work.

He talked about the history of the ‘Alien Toy’ transforming border patrol vehicle and his long-standing collaboration with Salvador Munoz. Salvador was at the museum for the opening party of the ISEA2012 exhibition. I didn’t realize what an important role he has played in the development of Torres’s work. Salvador was showing his work at low-rider competitions in the 1990′s where Torres was filming. A new category of competition was developed specifically for Munoz’s work, ‘Radical Bed Dancing’ which involved the entire bed of a pickup truck rising up and ‘dancing’ on hydrolic pumps. Torres collaborated with Munor to create the ‘Alien Toy’ project which was on Jay Leno and featured in a Fat Boy Slim video (along with being shown at the Venice Biennial – for you high art fans).

It was great to learn about this history and hear about Torres’s recent projects having to do with a pneumatic robot for sculpting organic forms and painting that respond to heat and sound.

This exhibition includes documentation of the original Ant Farm Media Van from 1974

Including drawings and photographs

and a life-size mock-up of the original interior

In addition they have an Ant Farm inflatable

That you can go inside

Along with original drawings

In addition they have a large installation by a young artist named Hector Zamora

and a satellite exhibition called Steering the Spaceship Earth for which high school students learned about and responded to the Whole Earth Catalog

The project presents a mythological van that had been buried/hidden since 1974

including a video of its discovery

Inside the van is a ‘media hookah’ with various connecting ‘pipes’ to which you attach your smartphone.

ASU Museum curator and Desert Initiative Director Greg Esser hooks up to the hookah. He then takes a ‘toke’ during which the hookah emits a puff of virtual smoke and bubbly sound and grabs an image from his phone.

The hookah then gives you a receipt for your image that will then become a part of the image archive for the project.

Another great exhibition as part of the DI was Portuguese artist Miguel Palma’s Trajectory

centered around another media vehicle, the Desert Initiative Remote Shuttle that projects images taken from the desert in urban settings

The project included multiple galleries of drawings, collages, objects and artifacts from his desert explorations

The November issue of Art Ltd. has an article about Palma’s project.

The lovely Raven demonstrates the use the sniff-o-lometer at Elsewhere

Fellow artist-in-residence Bridget Quinn reads the Adventure directions, and yes, of course it is free.

How to properly operate the sniff-o-lometer

Particularly adventuresome smells in the collection have been identified with tags throughout the museum

Raven uncovers one of the scents in the department store

The process by which smells are transformed into memories that are then recorded in the Olfacttological Field Notebook

View from afar