Posted on December 31st, 2012 in musings and tagged memory, nature, sketch
In winter of 1506 the cold winds came down from the north with a fury, bringing with them a polar frost…
* * *
There was no rain that year. The old adage about April showers proved false…
* * *
As the spring thaw cracked the frozen ground into a million tiny fragments, the first shards of green…
* * *
Centuries passed, slow behemoths pushing into the wind. Color had drained from the world, leaving only outlines of shapes and forms. Or rather, there remained memories of colors long gone which were overlaid on gray tones filled between the lines…
Posted on July 5th, 2011 in of interest, peripherals and tagged architecture, art, mobility, nature, slowness, theory, walking
“Remember that project you did in grad school about the super slow mobile architecture that traveled around the earth?” Meredith asked me recently.
After some digging, I found the very much out-dated web documentation in my archives and thought it was interesting enough (for me, anyway) to put back online. In 2001 I was a graduate student at University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. One of the many courses I took outside the architecture school was a studio taught by Samantha Krukowski in the now defunct Convergent Media program. I ended up spending quite a bit of time in Convergent Media because 1) they were doing really interesting and cutting edge projects with digital tools, 2) the tools weren’t an end in themselves but a link in a creative process chain that stressed media translation between the analog and digital, and 3) the students and faculty there were in many ways much more sympathetic to my own artistic sensibility than the architects.
The Auto-Extraction Project gave me an opportunity to go deeper with some of the theoretical architecture research I was discovering through a speculative investigation of a hypothetical mobile architecture. As the explanatory text explains:
The Auto-Extraction Project is conceived of as a mobile architecture of restriction whereby the individual participant physically removes his/herself from mainstream culture/society by embarking on a hyper-slow journey around the earth. The structure of this mobile architecture consists of a compact, individual habitational cell equipped with austere sleeping, bathing, and cooking accommodations. Suspended from a high mono-rail-like track, the cell hovers above the ground a mere 9 – 12 inches (variably) and travels at a constant rate of approximately 10 feet per hour in perpetuity; the route which the track follows is remote and rugged, rarely passing through regions of significant human inhabitation.
There’s a good deal more documentation of the project here.
Posted on June 23rd, 2011 in project news and tagged art, ecology, environmentalism, exhibition, nature, philadelphia
I’ll be presenting a new project at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education as part of the upcoming exhibition “Facts and Fables: Stories of the Natural World,” which opens this Saturday, June 25, 4 – 7pm. The show includes some great work by a number of other artists, including my friends and colleagues, Jeanne Jaffe and Brian Collier.
The project, entitled “Nature Study, An Ambivalent Guide,” catalogs a contemplation of the ambivalence that defines humankind’s complex relationship to the natural environment. It consists of a printed guidebook that contains texts, field notes, sketches, photographs, interviews, and secondary research material. Accompanying the guidebook are several physical markers placed along the trail which establish an itinerant narrative through the range of perspectives presented in the guidebook.
See more documentation of the project here.
