I joked about becoming a stowaway when the Waterpod, an eco-art-science barge touring New York City this summer, came to Queens. Turns out the crew was serious about hospitality, and it included a taste of the future.
This week, on the Waterpod's final day open to the public, I went to find out how the project had gone. My plan was to meet Waterpod mastermind Mary Mattingly, look around, take notes, and peace out. Then she kindly invited me to stay for dinner with the remaining crew. It's hard to say no to ripe vegetables from vines at your fingertips.
Gathered in the well-used kitchen, co-curator Ian Daniel and graywater specialist Andrew Carter contemplated post-barge living. Mattingly prepared a giant yellow squash to go on the rocket stove and reflected on how she'd adjusted the experimental ecosystem.
"I think there's a confidence about [the] ability to be self-sustaining that I have now, and a lot of people who come on board do," she said before we all dug into brown rice, seasoned cooked squash, and spicy marinated eggplant, tomato, and green pepper salad. If rising ocean levels force us to figure out how to float, it might not be an entirely bad thing. Especially if the food tastes like this.
For more, check out the audio slideshow:
Photo: Mary Mattingly rocks the rocket stove. Credit: Alyssa Danigelis.
Looking like a lost set piece from the Kevin Costner movie Waterworld, the sustainable art and tech showcase Waterpod Project has finally made its way from conceptual design to aquatic New York reality.
In previous summers, a Science Barge docked in New York promoted the possibilities of urban farming and sustainability. This summer belongs to the Waterpod--a different kind of barge with much broader goals. The brainchild of a sculptor and photographer from Queens, Mary Mattingly, the pod is a useful and self-sufficient green project--a mobile art studio, aquatic living space, classroom, and science lab.
Mattingly, along with several other artists, will live aboard the converted commercial barge as it travels around the five boroughs through October. Beyond creating cool conceptual art, the pod is welcoming the public to come aboard and check out sustainable tech in action. Teams of students from an engineering class at Humboldt State University came up with tech experiments, including bike-electrical power, small-scale hydropower, a human-powered water pump, and a rocket stove. A rocket stove? Yes, really. The pod heads to my borough in September. I wonder how they'd feel about a stowaway.
Photo: The Waterpod in New York City. Credit: Mary Mattingly.
Milwaukee School of Art and Design senior Rob Podell designed a sleek eco-friendly drying rack for the millions of Americans who don't have access to clothes dryers in their homes or apartment buildings. And for the women in his life who were driving him nuts.
They hung undergarments everywhere in the apartment--over shower rods, door knobs, on furniture. "You had trouble using the shower or closing doors without damaging some expensive bra," Podell wrote in an email. "I started looking at drying racks, and I hated all of them. Most were
plastic, some where chrome-plated mild steel. All were relatively
obnoxious-looking and hard to store."
So he came up with a wall-mounted unit made from bamboo--which is renewable and naturally moisture-resistant--and recycled aluminum parts. It could be shipped flat, Ikea-style, keeping the cost down. The sculptural drying rack design came in third place in the Greener Gadgets Design Competition recently. Fortunately Podell had come to New York for the conference and spoke up from the audience when judge Saul Griffith scoffed, saying that one could achieve the same effect with a piece of string. As someone who owns "dry flat" delicates, the rack would beat string any day.
In recent months I've strayed from covering tech art, but a recent artistic project in New York deserves recognition for trying to engage normally-jaded New Yorkers like myself in environmental protection. As a Discovery Channel video reported recently, an artist named Adrian recently set about putting curbside trash in giant colorful and biodegradable bags.
Usually I find myself recoiling in horror from the trash piles lining the streets on a regular basis -- stinky mountains of who knows what that make perfect homes for rat families and freakishly large bugs. Not only are the trash bags colorful and labeled with the project's website, but they are naturally scented and contain natural bug-repellent as well. The idea being if we suddenly notice all these trash piles and stop recoiling, we can do something about them.
Recently I boarded the free Staten Island Ferry before sunset and whizzed to the outer borough. Natives and tourists alike clamored for classic snapshots of the Statue of Liberty and the skyline at dusk, but there are some new special guests in the lineup.
The ferry moves fast, but I caught a glimpse of Olafur Eliasson's summer-long installation. When I last interacted with the artist's dynamic technical work, it was at the Museum of Modern Art for his Take Your Time exhibition. Now, the artist has erected four towering New York City Waterfalls placed strategically around the East River and appearing to rise out of thin air. They're all about the height of Lady Liberty herself and if you're wondering about fish taking a nasty trip through them, have no fear: they pull water through secured mesh filters that have holes less than a millimeter in diameter. Electric pumps (which are not so green), push the water up and over. An intake pool at the base recirculates it.
Eliasson's goal with the waterfalls, which will be up through October 13, was to get jaded New Yorkers to think about spaces they usually overlook, although he phrased it differently. While few outright ignore the Brooklyn Bridge--the site of one waterfall--he does have a point. New Yorkers tend to forget this is an island surrounded by water unless we are actually out on it. That said, a note to self: don't kayak too close to the waterfalls.
The Science Gallery in Dublin, a serendipitous find from a friend, combines technology, science, and design for visitors in a way that invites feedback and participation. If I could just jet over to Ireland for a little while, several current and upcoming events at the gallery look worth the Euros.
A flagship exhibit called TechnoThreads explores the fashion--and fabric--of the future and runs through July 25. The exhibit includes a workshop given by designer Rebecca Earley July 4 on eco design concepts. In the late 1990s, Earley developed a process called "exhaust printing" that minimizes chemical use and eliminates water pollution in textile printing.
On July 5, Tara Carrigy gives a workshop on e-textiles, showing her prototype yoga wear (photo), which helps the wearer monitor breathing, and give participants a chance to make their own wearable electronic clothing.
A Conceptual Couture section demonstrates spray-on fabrics as well as interactive designs like a jacket that expands when you scream. And appropriately, the exhibit includes a dress "grown from Guinness." If you go, be sure to wear a pint for me.
We know that the ice up north is
melting and that collectively, a little energy conservation can make a
big difference. Yeah, yeah. But they're still super-abstract. This is
where visual artists can jump in and bridge the gap. The upcoming 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge
in San Jose looks like a treat for the brain, with a visual bridge to boot. The second
annual festival, with an emphasis on digital arts, only runs from June 4 through June 8, but some of the
exhibitions will be on display at the museum longer. Worth checking out
if you're in the area.
From the online preview, these works of art grabbed my attention, with props for helping subtract abstraction:
Sarah Lowe's Ice Age, 2008 (above).
Although I often wish I could go to the North Pole during the summer,
this has to be the next best thing: a 25-foot-tall iceberg made with
plastic sheeting and blowers. Not just a reminder of what we're losing
up there, but a cool installation. I'll keep this one in mind for the
holiday season. Take that Frosty!
HeHe's Nuage Vert, 2008. Literally "green cloud"
in French,
this project used lasers to outline a cloud above a power plant in Helsinki throughout February. HeHe, short for artists Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen, encouraged residents to cut back on electrical power. The more power saved, the larger the green cloud grew.
Jane Marsching's Rising North, 2008. Marsching shows us what's going on at the North Pole by combining predicted temperature readings through the year 2107 with colors representing a range from hot to cold. It gives Orange Alert a new meaning.
Most museum exhibits cause the brain to work harder than normal. I'll be the first to admit to well-earned "museum headaches," usually followed by long coffee breaks. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is no exception. Yesterday I wrote about environmental innovations on display in "Design and the Elastic Mind" (virtual online tour here). Today I'm unleashing the adaptive and reactive technology that was at work in the museum.
More than half the world's population is on track to live in cities, so we're less likely to interact with nature in our daily lives. Simon Heijdens, a Dutch visual artist, came up with Lightweeds wall installation (above left), a software-based "living digital organism" that responds to the human traffic passing by. The plants didn't just bend with the flow of museum-goers, they are also attached to sensors outside that evaluate the weather conditions; over time they ultimately become a living memory of how the space has been used. Digital projections as collective experience.
Taking the sensory theme in a different direction, designers Rachel Wingfield and Mathias Gmachl came up with Sonumbra (right), a giant tree-like umbrella made from cameras, speakers, software, and electroluminescent lace. During the day it provides shade from the sun and at night provides light collected while the sun was out. It has also been programmed to respond to the people who gather around it, translating movement into sounds and light.
There were a bunch of other intriguing concepts scattered throughout the collection, including Chuck Hoberman's Emergent Surface, retracting and extending metal pieces that respond to the environment. I liked Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters, an interactive piece that invited children and adults alike to move around in front of a projector, causing monster and animal sounds to emerge along with shadowy projected shapes, depending on what they were doing.
It was impossible to see Eliasson's installations without becoming part
of them. A fan on a string swung around overhead, causing inadvertent
ducking. "I only see things when they move" (left) brought out the
childlike desire to examine multilayered shadows on the wall.
Being at MoMA reminded me of being in fourth grade, staying overnight
at the Boston Museum of Science with my elementary school class. Everywhere we turned,
there was something to touch, something that reacted, something
surprising. Not to be cliche about the exhibits, but my mind has been officially stretched.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York is wrapping up its 6th-floor exhibit "Design and the Elastic Mind," which pulled together a wide range of innovative design concepts. In the mix were some clever sustainable and environmental ideas. While ducking around the crowds that had come to experience this exhibit, a few concepts caught my eye:
Bel-Air organic air-filtering system (left). French designer Mathieu Lehanneur created an air filter that uses plants to absorb toxic compounds that make their way into our homes. He based his system on NASA's scientific discoveries. In the 1980s, space shuttles were filled with synthetics and plastics that released toxic gases. NASA found that specific plants cleaned the air better than others. While the filter is neat, a similarly effective way to keep air clean at home is to get some of those plants: Gerbera, Philodendron, Chlorophytum, and Spathiphyllum, which is better known as a peace lily.
Solar Bottle (right). Designers Alberto Meda and Francisco Gomez Paz came up with a bottle prototype that uses sunlight to disinfect water. The water goes into a transparent bottle and is exposed to sunlight for at least six hours. During that time, the sun hits the reflective surface inside the bottle to heat the water. The handle allows the bottle to be angled for maximum UV-A radiation and then easily transported. To see more images, visit Meda's site. In the wake of natural disasters such as the cyclone that hit Myanmar recently, tools like this could speed recovery.
Although this prototype food packaging concept looked rather antiseptic under the museum's bright lights, it's actually a new green twist on supply-chain dynamics:
Mushroom Growth Packaging (left). Designer Agata Jaworska pictured a way for us to harvest food ourselves right before we eat it instead of buying food that is perishing en route. Her European Made in Transit concept packages mushrooms in such a way so that they continue to grow while making their way to a grocery store. While not entirely a technical idea, it seems like a remarkably obvious plan. Why aren't we all getting our fruits and veggies this way? Continued growth allows the shipment more time to arrive (fewer airplane flights needed), a larger potential customer base, and fresher food. There's a lot of potential here for biodegradable packaging (compost the box along with the seeds, roots, and unused parts!) and ways to make organic produce more readily available to communities that need it.
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