Waterpod Project catches and releases New Yorkers' imaginations

Waterpod™, 2009. Photograph by Eve K. Tremblay.

Ericka Osborne sends a recommendation to check out the New York Times coverage of the Waterpod Project. The project is currently floating its way around NYC, and is unfolding day to day as an experiment in alternative, future-based land use and infrastructure interpretation, innovation, and celebration.

In her artist statement, Mary Mattingly describes the project this way:

The Waterpod demonstrates future pathways for nomadic, mobile shelters and water-based communities, docked and roaming.

It embodies self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, learning and curiosity, human expression and creative exploration. It intends to prepare, inform, and provide an alternative to current and future living spaces.

In preparation for our coming world with an increase in population, a decrease in usable land, and a greater flux in environmental conditions, people will need to rely closely on immediate communities and look for alternative living models; the Waterpod is about cooperation, collaboration, augmentation, and metamorphosis.

As a malleable and autonomous space, the Waterpod is built on a model comprised of multiple collaborations. The Waterpod functions as a singular unit with the possibility to expand into ever-evolving water communities; an archipelagos that has the ability to mutate with the tides.

The Waterpod is mobile and nomadic, and as an application for the future it can historicize the notion of the permanent structure, simultaneously serving as composition, transportation, island, and residence. Based on movement, the Waterpod structure is adaptable, flexible, self-sufficient, and relocatable, responsive to its immediate and shifting environment.

As with art, architecture is largely about stories: stories of its inhabitants, its community, its makers and their reflections on the past or expectations of the future. The Waterpod is an extension of body, of home, and of community, its only permanence being change, flow, and multiplicity. It connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies.

With this project, we hope to encourage innovation as we visualize the future fifty to one hundred years from now.

World Science Festival: New York

Science and the Arts at CUNY Graduate Center just sent out an update about the World Science Festival underway in New York. The full schedule can be found here.

Katie Holten's Tree Museum

TREE MUSEUM at the Grand Concourse

"Katie Holten created the TREE MUSEUM to celebrate the communities and ecosystems along the Grand Concourse, a 100 year-old boulevard in The Bronx. Visitors will be able to listen in on local stories and the intimate lives of trees offered by current and former residents: from beekeepers to rappers, historians to gardeners, school kids to politicians." -from Katie Holten's site

Read the review in the Times

Matters of Perspective: Freeman Dyson in the Times

Eugene Richards for The New York Times

On March 25th, the New York Times Magazine ran an extended story about physicist Freeman Dyson. The media outlet has taken note of the scientist's stance on a contemporary topic that looms large in relation to the emerging field of art + environment - global warming. Dr. Dyson has a unique take on the subject, and is no stranger to being controversially and influentially intertwined with issues affecting landscape and land use. Most people are familiar with two commonly reproduced, and rather mesmerizing, quotations of his that were spoken and written (several decades ago) in response to another force that greatly influences the contemporary landscapes of the United States - nuclear weapon development and testing. These quotes can be found in John McPhee's Basin and Range, Rebecca Solnit's Savage Dreams, and Trevor Paglen's recent Blank Spots on the Map.

From John Else's Day After Trinity:
"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

From his own, Disturbing the Universe, in response to visiting Jackass Flat in 1959.
"It is a soul-shattering silence. You hold your breath and hear absolutely nothing. No rustling of leaves in the wind, no rumbling of distant traffic, no chatter of birds or insects or children. You are alone with God in that silence. There in that white, flat silence I began to feel a slight sense of shame for what we were proposing to do. Did we really intend to invade this silence with our trucks and bulldozers and after a few years leave it a radioactive junkyard?"

Comments posted in response to the Times article appear here.