Video Documentation
DATA CENTER FOR A DEMOCRATIC FLOATING FARM
In the summer of 2016, Swale launched at Concrete Plant Park in the South Bronx, one of the largest food deserts in the United States. Food deserts are a reality in many communities in New York City; as many as three million New Yorkers live in communities with limited access to places where they can get fresh produce. Swale began as an idea to advocate for food to be grown on some of the 30,000 acres of public land in New York City, through urban stewardship initiatives led by community partners in the South Bronx.
Mary Mattingly's Swale is a floating food forest built atop a barge that travels to piers in New York City, offering educational programming and welcoming visitors to harvest herbs, fruits and vegetables for free. In the summer of 2016, Delta_Ark and Biome Arts organized a large scale research-to-production experiment on board the ship, consisting of the construction a pavilion, an agricultural sensor system, a light-installation and an incubator for other artistic work.
Video Documentation
A pre-apocalyptic aquatic TEST SITE
Mary Mattingly’s Wet Land was a habitable sculpture and training test site for response to global sea level rise. To quote directly from the project description:
WetLand’s overall ecosystem includes rainwater collection and purification, greywater filtration, dry compost systems, outdoor vegetable gardens, indoor hydroponic gardens, and floating gardens circling the perimeter. Attention to the social and environmental impacts involved in material production, distribution, use, and disposal are important to the formation of WetLand, which was built entirely from the urban waste stream.
WetLand augments local community movements by drawing a broad range of people with different backgrounds to the space, and by organizing collaborations. WetLand stresses how important it is for more people to be involved in caring for our common home and to re-address water as a commons by engaging with students who steward the space, collect data relating to energy use and production, and test and maintain the project’s water systems. The WetLand sculpture is an argument for a thriving local urban environment.
A POST-APOCALYPTIC FLOODED WORLD
SCIENTISTS, BANKERS AND ANIMALS
DIAMONDS, ROPES AND NEUTRONS
ARMIES, MONSTERS AND LEAGUES
OF REAL AND FICTITIOUS NATIONS
A TELEPHONE POLE,
NYMPHS AND UTOPIAS
TRIREMES, WALLS, AND MEN
As one of the temporary stewards of the space, Delta_Ark built a graphic installation of text that listed the objects (both real and fantastical) that WetLand would encounter on its journey through the flooded world. The text discusses the breakdown in the social order caused by rising seas, and creates a sequence of images that brings these scenes to life. The text also references other fantastical sea voyages, and puts the journey through the flooded future in this context (a world returning to the unknown, to magic). The full text is available
here.
Video Documentation
In the summer of 2014, Delta_Ark and Biome Arts co-organized a large scale collaborative project: a two-week symposium on ecology, technology and autonomy that culminated in the construction of a networked, semi-autonomous structure in the woods of Delhi, New York. The aim of the symposium was to identify organizations, people and places that were building the kind of future we would like to live in: an ecological, open source equitable one. Multiple other artists participated, dropping by to study and live with us throughout the period, ultimately contributing their own artistic projects, based on our collective research.
