For example, a current project of mine, Superfund365, A Site-A-Day, is an online data-visualization application with an accompanying RSS-feed and e-mail alert system (www.superfund365.org) that visits one toxic site active in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) each day for a year. In the end, the online archive will consist of 365 visualizations of some of the worst toxic sites in the U.S., roughly a quarter of the total number on the Superfund’s National Priorities List (NPL). Along the way, I am writing an e-mail update with highlights and conducting video interviews…” From Art as Intervention: A Roundtable, NYFA Current.

40°, 73° is a project produced by The Canary Project, an organization that produces visual media, events, and artwork that build public understanding of human-induced climate change and energize commitment to solutions. In addition to producing original work, Canary collaborates directly with artists through logistical support, financial support, creative brainstorm/formation, and/or the project’s distribution. Depending on the format, the works are incorporated into our exhibitions, publications, presentations, education projects, and website. Collaborating artists include Eve Mosher, Frtiz Haeg, Josh Kit Clayton, Jon Santos, and others.

The Center is pleased to host Fritz Haeg and his project Animal Estates. While at MIT, Haeg will give a talk on his work and, with the help of MIT students and artists, build one installment of Animal Estates, a new series of dwellings thoughtfully designed to welcome an animal back into the city. These environments are made for displaced wildlife or for animals that have been domesticated. The Center will host one of eight estates—the first was built in New York as part of the Whitney Biennial while others will appear at Arthouse, Austin, TX; the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Cooley Gallery, Portland OR; Alaska Design Forum, Fairbanks, AK; and Casco Projects, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Haeg writes: “As animal habitats dwindle daily, Animal Estates proposes the reintroduction of animals back into our cities, strip malls, garages, office parks, freeways, front yards, parking lots and neighborhoods… As the human domination of the planet continues, animals are alternately viewed as exotic specimens to be treated as spectacle, cartoon characters that are anthropomorphized, friendly companions to be coddled, objectified resources to be exploited, inconveniences to be tolerated, pests to be eradicated or anonymous unseen creatures to which we are indifferent. Animal Estates intends to provide a provocative 21st century model for the human-animal relationship that is more intimate, visible and thoughtful.”

Fritz Haeg is an architect and artist based in Los Angeles whose work combines strategies from architecture, art, ecology, and education. Known for his geodesic dome and the lively Sundown Salons that attract emerging artists, musicians, and performers, Haeg’s projects challenge conventional ideas about where art should go and what art can do.

Watermans gallery will be converted into a live design / mapping studio where investigatory, locative media artist Christian Nold together with the designer Daniela Boraschi will be working with local residents to gather information for digital and physical visualizations of the ecological, cultural and economic ‘health’ of Brentford.

Instead of taking tissue samples as one would from a human being Christian Nold and participants will be using a range of cultural probes to investigate the local social body and its unique ailments. Like eastern medicine investigators will be taking a holistic view of Brentford that looks for interconnections between problems and challenges to get a sense of the whole. The project acts as both creative art project as well as hard-nosed consultation with invited stakeholder groups like politicians, historians, the local chamber of commerce as well as ecologists and the general public.

WORKSHOPS

Everyone - young, old and in-between is welcome to take part! First public workshop April 5, 2008 1 pm - 5pm FREE!* Bring your local newspaper, favorite story, images and anything you want to put on the Brentford map!

Further workshops will take place on:
Saturday, April 12 1-5pm
Wednesday, April 23, 6-9pm
Saturday, May 10 1-5pm
Wednesday May 14 6-9pm

Register online: http://www.publicbiopsy.net/join.htm

If you care about the Brentford area you are invited! Come with your own agenda and we will include it!

If you can’t attend a workshop we have arranged for you to be able to contributer online. For online contribution please log on: http://www.publicbiopsy.net/upload.htm.

Environmental Risk Assessment Rover-­AT, Version 1.0, 2008: “Sooner rather than later, one comes up against the law that so long as risks are not recognized scientifically, they do not exist–at least not legally, medically, technologically, or socially, and they are thus not prevented, treated or compensated for. No amount of collective moaning can change this, only science. Scientific judgment’s monopoly on truth therefore forces the victims themselves to make use of all the methods and means of scientific analysis in order to succeed with their claims.” -German risk theorist Ulrich Beck

ERAR­AT is a mobile, solar- and GPS-powered, networked video installation that will accumulate and aggregate the environmental threats and risks faced by the population in its immediate location. ERAR-AT performs the difficulty of perceiving, evaluating, and understanding risk scenarios and presents an assessment of its given locale by producing a unique fourteen-tiered threat level embedded live within video projections onto local natural and architectural surfaces.

What kind of local and global environmental risks do you face everyday? How far is the closest superfund site or nuclear power plant or agribusiness? How do the 148 industrial chemicals already in every American human body interact with the synthetic hormones and antibiotics in the dairy products we eat? How many chemicals are in human breast milk? How do the chemicals in your toothpaste interact with the pesticides on your food? Why has modernity, which was supposed to create a sense of security, produced more anxiety and threats than ever? Can scientific data and research help us understand the “riskiness” of contemporary life?

ECOARTTECH is Christine Nadir & Cary Peppermint ERAR Programming & Research Assistant: Colin Twomey.

ERAR-AT is part of the Neuberger Museum of Art’s Off the Grid Exhibition, March 30 - June 1, 2008. “Off the Grid” features works that subvert and circumvent conventional infrastructures. Co-presented by the Neuberger Museum of Art and free103point9 and curated by Jacqueline Shilkoff, Galen Joseph-Hunter, Tianna Kennedy, and Tom Roe.

Participating artists: Benjamin Cohen, Dylan Gauthier, and Stephan von Muehlen, EcoArtTech, eteam, Max Goldfarb, Louis Hock, Nina, Katchadourian, Kristin Lucas, Joe McKay, Trevor Paglen, Temporary Services, Seth Weiner, Bart Woodstrup

The Obama campaign shows that the power and influence of computer networks continues to grow, as a political and cultural force, while music and video downloading is transforming the arts and culture industry. Web 2.0 tools are evolving consciousness, creating new social and spiritual possibilities. Laura Dawn, the cultural director of MoveOn; Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, musician, writer, and filmmaker; and Daniel Pinchbeck, author and editorial director of Reality Sandwich, will discuss the transfigured landscape of our new networked culture, its potentials and pitfalls. Can virtual tools rescue us from the political and ecological abyss of a post Peak Oil world? Moderated by Reality Sandwich’s publisher Ken Jordan.

Followed by Akim Funk Buddha’s high energy beat-boxing and world-traipsing performance art; Zack Hagan’s “The Muramba Sessions,” Zemi17, Parashakti and more.

What does it mean to think “green”? Eyebeam’s expansive new exhibition, FEEDBACK, surveys artists, designers, architects and engineers on the topic of sustainability, and presents their responses—19 projects varying from public art projects and industrial design to DIY energy solutions and software tools—to inspire discussion and action on this pervasive (and increasingly commodified) subject.

As the culmination of Eyebeam’s Beyond Light Bulbs programming series, the show highlights the concerns, interests and work of Eyebeam’s Sustainability Research Group, with work by individuals, collectives, students, local community groups and the Eco-Vis Challenge winners. Free, artist-run workshops are integral to the exhibition’s design and are scheduled Saturdays throughout the show’s duration.

The exhibition’s title, FEEDBACK, refers to the self-correcting mechanisms by which systems—in this case, ecological—respond to the influence they exert on their environments. The works on display echo this recursive dynamic, from Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley’s DrinkPeeDrinkDrinkPee sewage processing organ, to Natalie Jeremijenko’s tadpole-dispensing prescription from the walk-in Environmental Health Clinic for the ecologically unwell. In direct response to the world’s loss of crop biodiversity—as much as 70 percent in the 20th century—Leah Gauthier’s Sow-In will engage the public, in partnership with local community gardening groups, to sow the seeds of those food plants most in danger of extinction.

Numerous projects in the exhibition address energy consumption, production and harvesting: A visitor enters the exhibition through Fluxxlab’s Revolution Door, a modified revolving door that harnesses and redistributes human energy. Mouna Andraos’ The Power Cart is a mobile unit that delivers alternative power to people on the street, and Jeff Feddersen’s installation The Off-Grid Outlet is a solar-powered AC outlet and 12V DC power port destined for the Brooklyn restaurant Cafe Habana. Building on existing urban infrastructure, Andrea Polli’s Queensbridge Wind Power Project investigates how clean, renewable wind power might be integrated into the landmark architecture of the Queensboro Bridge.

A need to track, understand and communicate environmental change is at the heart of Preemptive Media’s Area’s Immediate Reading project, a portable, air quality monitoring device for urban individuals and groups to self-identify pollution sources, and a platform to discuss energy politics. The Living’s Living City is a design for an ecology of facades in which individual buildings collect data, share it with others in their social network via wireless transmission, and respond to the collective body of knowledge. Michael Mandiberg’s The Real Costs, a Firefox plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel related e-commerce websites, presents yet another means of using environmental data—on the level of individual consumption.

Recognizing that poorly communicated messages often fall on deaf ears, FEEDBACK artists Eve Mosher and Brooke Singer translate existing information into immediate and digestible forms. Mosher’s HighWaterLine is a public artwork on NYC’s waterfront that demonstrates the impact of climate on NYC residents. Over a period of six months, Mosher drew a blue chalk line marking the 10- feet above sea level line, demarcating the areas most at risk for flooding. Brooke Singer’s Superfund365, A Site-A-Day, is an online data visualization application with an accompanying RSS- feed and email alert system. Each day for a year, beginning September 1, 2007, Superfund365 profiles one toxic site currently active within the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Eyebeam’s 2007 Eco-Vis Challenge competition asked artists and designers to persuasively package eco-data, within two categories: icons and visualizations. Six winning and finalist projects are showcased in FEEDBACK. The winning entry in the Eco-Visualization category was The Studio for Urban Projects’ Strange Weather, a project that considers the semiotics of global environmental change. Relying on Internet news sources, Strange Weather graphs the usage patterns of the buzzwords that characterize the dialog around climate change, on the premise that language is critical to how we perceive and address our role within the environment.

The Green Map® System’s Green Map® Icons is a suite of icons designed collaboratively, and spread to more than 50 countries around the globe, for assessing environmental resources currently available to local communities. Version 3 of this iconography received an Honorable Mention in the data visualization category.

Timm Kekeritz’s VirtualWater and WaterFootprint posters, which received an Honorable Mention within the Eco-Vis category, function as illustrated summaries of the virtual water issue, mapping freshwater use against consumption patterns, and across nations. Annina Rüst’s Eco-Vis submission, which also received an Honorable Mention, addresses consumption and excess quite literally. Her eRiceCooker tracks Internet news about genetically modified rice; at each report published online, the cooker dispenses a quarter cup of rice into the pot; at four quarters full, water is added, the rice is cooked, and participants are notified their meal is ready via email.

The art group Forays received an Honorable Mention for their Edible Excess icon-stickers designating edible waste, and Oz Etzioni’s Unrecyclable was named the winner within the Eco-Icon category, for his icon designating unrecylable material. Both demonstrate the power of effective imagery in raising environmental awareness.

A series of short video-documentaries by Brooklyn artists’ collective Not An Alternative, commissioned especially for FEEDBACK, documents the making of each of the displayed projects, providing insight into the creative process. These videos will be screened in the main gallery, and will be available for download from Eyebeam’s website (for portable .mpeg playing devices), or for viewing on personal PlayStations available for loan during the exhibition.

The exhibition design is by Fluxxlab, and the series of paneled displays enclosing an expanse of vibrant green artificial turf in FEEDBACK references an aesthetic of trade shows and science fairs. The suggestive use of donated, recycled and blatantly artificial grass designates a central commons, posing questions without easy answers: Is artificial turf truly eco-unfriendly?

All 19 projects on display in FEEDBACK are designed to enlighten and entertain, challenge and inspire, and ultimately compel viewers to move beyond passive spectatorship. Toward this end, Fred Beneson’s Committeecaller.com, a website application that enables one person to target an entire congressional committee over the phone, will be featured in the exhibition. Three telephones for use with CommitteeCaller will be available to exhibition visitors and three local community groups, including SolarOne and Sustainable South Bronx, will offer agendas and talking points for their use.

Artist-led workshops will offer a unique opportunity to brainstorm with FEEDBACK artists and experiment with the methods, tools and strategies on display. The following public programs will take place in conjunction with FEEDBACK; all are free and open to the public.

Projects + Links

• Andrea Polli, The Queensbridge Wind Power Project: http://www.andreapolli.com/queensbridge
• Annina Rüst, eRiceCooker: http://web.media.mit.edu/~rusti/eRiceCooker
• Brooke Singer, Superfund365, http://www.superfund365.org
• Eve Mosher, HighWaterLine, http://www.highwaterline.org
• Fluxxlab (Jennifer Broutin and Carmen Trudell), Revolution Door, http://www.fluxxlab.com
• Forays (Geraldine Juárez and Adam Bobbette), Edible Excess, http://www.forays.org
• Green Map® System, Green Map® Icons, http://www.greenmap.org
• Leah Gauthier, Sow-In, http://www.leahgauthier.com
• Michael Mandiberg, The Real Costs, http://therealcosts.com
• Mouna Andraos, The Power Cart, http://missmoun.com
• Preemptive Media, Area’s Immediate Reading (AIR), http://www.pm-air.net
• Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley, DrinkPeeDrinkPeeDrinkPee, http://www.submersibledesign.com/drinkpee/
• Roger Marvel Architects, http://www.rogersmarvel.com/GovsIsland.html
• The Living (David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang), Living City, http://www.thelivingnewyork.com/
• The Studio for Urban Projects, Strange Weather, http://www.strangeweatherproject.net
• Timm Kekeritz, VirtualWater and WaterFootprint, http://www.traumkrieger.de/virtualwater/
• Fred Beneson, CommitteeCaller, http://www.committeecaller.com/
• Natalie Jeremijenko, The Environmental Health Clinic, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/index_projects.html
• Sustainable South Bronx, http://www.ssbx.org/
• SolarOne, http://solar1.org/
• Not an Alternative, http://thechangeyouwanttosee.org

Credits: Curators: Amanda McDonald Crowley (Executive Director), Liz Slagus (Director of Education and Public Programs), Paul Amitai (Exhibitions and Programming Coordinator), in collaboration with Eyebeam’s Sustainabilty Research Group. Exhibition designers: 2007 Eyebeam Residents and active participants in the Eyebeam Sustainability Research Group, Jenny Broutin and Carmen Trudell of Fluxxlab. Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative. Artificial Turf donated by Forever Green.

E.P.A. is the first project of S.E.A, a large-scale program dealing with current environmental concerns and the way artists respond to them. E.P.A is a group exhibition surveying recent performance work from around the world that addresses current environmental crises. The exhibition will consist of videos, photographs, texts, related ephemera and a film program documenting recent performances. For this opening project Amy Lipton and founder/co-curator Patricia Watts of ecoartspace — a leading international environmental arts organization — are collaborating with Exit Art on the organization and presentation of this material.

E.P.A. will include performance documentation from more than 30 international artists. These works, created in the public sphere, draw attention to and engage the public in a dialogue about issues such as climate change, watersheds, urbanization and, ultimately, human survival. E.P.A. will set the precedence for future exhibitions of S.E.A. dealing with environmental issues including The End of Oil, about the global oil crisis and alternative energy, and Consume, about food production, agricultural and sustainable living practices. An exhibition of historical social-environmental art works is also planned to place this work in context.

ARTISTS: Brandon Ballengée, Vaughn Bell / Sarah Kavage / Nicole Kistler, Mark Brest van Kempen, Carissa Carman / Joanna Lake, Susanne Cockrell /Ted Purves, Xavier Cortada, Carrie Dashow / Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg, Erica Fielder, Ozzie Forbes, Futurefarmers, The Center for Tactical Magic, Fritz Haeg, Amy Howden-Chapman, Basia Irland, Scot Kaplan, Carolyn Lambert, Robin Lasser, Kathryn Miller, Miss Rockaway Armada, Matthew Moore, Eve Mosher, EcoArtTech: Cary Peppermint / Christine Nadir, Andrea Polli and Joe Gimore with Dr. Patrick Market, Rapid Response (Cobb / Fend / Fischer / Meyer), James Reed and Social Sculpture Research Unit / Earth Agenda Projects, Austin Shull, Brooke Singer / Brian Rigney Hubbard, Anne-Katrin Spiess, Chris Sollars.

Ecoartspace is one of the leading international ecoart organizations established as a non-profit in 1999. Providing a platform for artists addressing environmental issues, Ecoartspace promotes a diverse range of artworks that are participatory, collaborative, interdisciplinary and educational. Their philosophy embodies a broader concept of art in its relationship to the world and seeks to connect human beings aesthetically with the awareness of larger ecological systems.

The Bat House Project is a collaborative initiative to imagine and design a home for bats in London. The Project highlights the potential for architects, builders, home-owners and conservationists to work together to produce wildlife-friendly building design. It connects the worlds of art and ecology to encourage public engagement with ecology issues. The Project builds on the Mayor of London’s policies to raise awareness of urban biodiversity and to support the survival of London’s ten bat species.

The Bat House will be built at the WWT London Wetlands Centre in Barnes, in South West London. It will be accompanied by a publication, an exhibition and a limited edition artwork by Jeremy Deller. The Bat House will be a building of aesthetic and environmental excellence, built with sustainable materials, offering a home to bats and an educational visitor attraction for people. Visitors to this website can take part in monthly Design Challenges, and also contribute or browse through ideas, images and information about bats and buildings. These Resources will remain as an online information bank.

Jorgen Tandberg and Yo Murata won the overall competition. You can see a list of additional winners here.

[Image: Still from Jeremy Deller's Memory Bucket 2003. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow] About Jeremy Deller: An internationally acclaimed artist, Jeremy Deller won the Turner Prize in 2004 with ‘Memory Bucket’, a film about Texas which included 8 minutes of footage of 3 million bats leaving Frio Cave in Texas. After winning the Turner Prize, Deller announced his intention to build “a large bat house somewhere in the UK. This would be a piece of architecture, a sculpture and a living, working object.” According to the Tate: “Collaboration and participation are central to Deller’s work. He acts as curator, producer or director of a broad range of projects, including orchestrated events, films and publications, which draw attention to forms of culture on the fringes of the mainstream or reveal hidden histories.” More >> [via]

Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn surveys recent ecological initiatives completed by the artist and architect known for his socially-responsive and community-oriented practice. Working at the intersection of art and social activism, Haeg engages audiences in collaborative encounters that often take place outside of the institutional confines of a museum or gallery. This exhibition brings together photographic and video documentation from Haeg’s ongoing Edible Estates project along with ephemeral items and site-specific elements created for Arthouse’s space that relate to gardening and sustainable food production in Austin. For the exhibition, Arthouse has been transformed into a community resource center, schoolhouse, working greenhouse, and finally, laboratory for artistic experimentation. This umbrella exhibition provides context for two related projects — the Sundown Schoolhouse and Edible Estates — that Haeg has developed for Austin.

The Sundown Schoolhouse is a non-traditional educational environment for design, literary, performing and visual arts. It was founded on the premise that artists, designers, performers and writers should be powerful and active agents in society, engaging in a dialogue extending to the outside world and which values public interaction, physical connectedness, and responsiveness to place. A large geodesic tent within Arthouse serves as the base site for How to Eat Austin, a weekly series of free workshops related to the cycle of food production, from composting and garden design to cooking and marketing the garden harvest.

Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #5 is an ongoing project to replace domestic front lawns with highly productive edible landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people. According to Haeg, Edible Estates is a “practical food producing initiative, place-responsive landscape design proposal, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening!” This project was initiated by Haeg on Independence Day, 2005, with the planting of the first regional prototype garden in Salina, Kansas (the geographic center of the United States). Regional Prototype Gardens have since been planted in California, New Jersey and London, England. Commissioned by Arthouse and with the help of community volunteers, Regional Prototype Garden #5 will be planted from March 14-16, 2008 and located at Sierra Ridge, a non-profit run low income housing community in Austin. Ultimately, regional prototype gardens will be established in nine cities.

Fritz Haeg works between his architecture and design practice Fritz Haeg Studio, the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Schoolhouse, the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates), and his role as an educator. He received his B.Arch from Carnegie Mellon University and has taught in architecture, design, and fine arts programs at CalArts, Art Center College of Design, Parsons, and the University of Southern California. He has produced projects and exhibited work at the Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, among other institutions. His new series of projects called Animal Estates will debut at the Whitney Biennial in March 2008. His first book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, is published by Metropolis Books and distributed by D.A.P.