iLAB Archive

iLAND  is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2011 iLAB collaborative residency:

PARK 2011 residency At Fresh Kills, New York

choreographer Kathy Westwater, poet Jennifer Scappettone, architect Seung Jae Lee, and trail-builder Leigh Draper

iLAB, now in its sixth year, is a residency program supporting collaborations between movement-based artists and scientists, environmentalists, urban designers/landscape architects, architects and others that integrate creative practice within different fields/disciplines. The goals of iLAB are 1) to invigorate and re-imagine relationships between the public and the urban environment through kinetic experience, 2) to engage artists and practitioners across the disciplines of dance, art, and the ecology of physical interrelationships such that we create and investigate innovative approaches to science, infrastructure, urbanisms, and architecture within a performative context, and 3) to support the development of process in engagement over product such that process is itself a product for artistic and public action.

Each year iLAB provides collaborator teams with support including a $5,000 stipend, resources to document the residency, mechanisms for disseminating their research in the science and art communities, and mentoring throughout the process.  This year, in addition to participating in the residency activities, the iLAB recipients will be engaged in the development of the iLAND Process a dynamic structure of best practices that will foster in-depth and effective collaborative processes for the iLAB Residency program. Defining the iLAND Process will create a replicable model for interdisciplinary collaboration with a strong emphasis on the role that dance and somatic practices play in environmental and aesthetic understanding.

PARK 2011 Residency At Fresh Kills, New York

PARK is about what we destroy in order to create. Existing as both process and performance, it expresses forms of making and unmaking that engage wilderness, post-industrial spaces, and everyday landscapes. PARK locates the convergence of nature, industry, and individual experience of the wild and mundane daily life at large at Fresh Kills, New York.

Geographically situated away from the view of many of the city’s inhabitants, Fresh Kills, once the largest landfill in the world, is currently undergoing a 30-year conversion into a park.

Collaborators include choreographer Kathy Westwater, poet Jennifer Scappettone, architect Seung Jae Lee, and trail-builder Leigh Draper. Their research includes exploring the translation of wilderness practices to the urban landfill-to-park site.

PARK seeks to activate the landscape, articulating the site’s mutating topography, infrastructure, mass, and scale while evoking notions of proximity and distance between the public and the largely invisible contents of the landfill, collapsing our individual and collective remoteness from its obscured function in the life of the city.

As New York continues to create a new use-value for the Fresh Kills Landfill, the PARK residency project – which culminates in a public event in Fall 2011 –represents an unprecedented engagement for project collaborators and the public with a unique site that has been largely inaccessible until now, though it is crucial to both the history and future of the city. PARK invites individual participants to enter into awareness of their own connections to this place, a monument to cycles of consumption in which we are all complicit; it invites the public to enter a zone of visceral intimacy created within this expansive and alien, yet familiar landscape.

Culminating Public Event in Fall 2011

In honor of the upcoming River to Creek bicycle tour on September 11, I’d like to share some thoughts that came up during a tour with our accompanying expert, Ryan.

On July 11, 2010 I took a bike tour of the Newtown Creek with Ryan Kuonen of Neighbors Allied for Good Growth (NAG), a volunteer-based community planning and environmental justice organization that has worked in North Brooklyn waterfront communities for many years.  The tour was offered as a course at the School of the Future.

Ryan is stuffed full of knowledge about the history and ecological state of the creek, and led us to unusual access points along the creek.  Some interesting tid-bits  from the smorgasboard of information she offered:
–    There is an oil spill under the creek that is bigger than the spill from the Exxon Valdez.
–    The Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant has a visitor’s center which was designed by Vito Acconci and New York City DCA Percent for Art brought us the George Trakas sculptural habitat on the grounds of the treatment plant.  This habitat, a large public area that contains gardens and a unique spatial design, is hidden away at the end of Paidge Avenue and surprisingly uninhabited, given its unusual and gorgeous nature.  It has been a stop on some the River to Creek research tours.
–    In the past 400 years, the area around Newtown Creek has gone from productive wetland to farmland to heavy waterfront industry to light functioning industry with less waterfront activity and is currently transforming, albeit slowly, into residential areas with waterfront access.

Here are some photos of some flora and fauna along the creek, and some waterfront views from the bike ride:

The ride and the talk started me thinking about the intersection between art, activism and science.

Ryan, a passionate advocate for environmental justice, had a plethora of scientific knowledge at her fingertips.  This type of knowledge is essential for a certain type of activism.  Activism aimed at our ecological survival (aka survival of life on Earth) requires science.

Where does art fit?  In a                                                               space.

Ideally, art brings the message home, under the skin and into the tear ducts, through the soles of the feet and into the blood stream.

Perhaps art is the intersection of information, education and understanding.

Art acts in this space not just by presenting information in an attractive manner.  It is the intermediary between the raw experience of the world/event that is eventually translated into “information” and the information it becomes.  It is privileging our sensory and other perception, our nuanced intuition, and it allows us to become utterly engaged in a situation.

I propose:
Environmental activism needs science to be effective as information and it needs art to be effective in creating true understanding. Also, environmental science needs environmental activism so that it can remain vital and connected to everyday life, and environmental science needs art so that there is a connection between analysis (taking the world apart into its constituent pieces) and synthesis (putting the pieces back together in unusual ways).  And—environmental science stimulates art to create a connection between ideas and physical reality, while environmental activism has given rise to some of the many of the most interesting expressions of artistic creativity in the past decade or so, giving the creative process a boost into a socially engaged yet esthetically rigorous realm.

Comments welcome.  And we look forward to seeing you on Sept. 11 for a vigorous ride through the wilds of the industrial Creek, crazy environmental facts and discussion, and birdwatching.

Clarinda for River to Creek

An article in Nature about the power of networked humans:

“Networks of human minds are taking citizen science to a new level”

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100804/full/466685a.html

Join us as we dance through the urban forest this summer. Jackie and Phil will be leading groups of street tree stewards on Saturday afternoons this summer. All friends of trees are welcome to explore the relationship between movement and the urban environment!

Prospect Heights Location:
Prospect Heights Community Farm
Saint Marks Avenue between Vanderbilt Avenue & Underhill Avenue

Park Slope Location:
367 5th Street between 5th Avenue and 6th Avenue

July 2010
17 July 2010 :: 1 pm to 3 pm :: Park Slope
24 July 2010 :: 1 pm to 3 pm :: Prospect Heights

September 2010
25 September 2010 :: 11 am to 1 pm :: Prospect Heights

RSVP appreciated: jcaradodd@gmail.com

Howdy folks. This is the most succinct description we have to date. What do you think?

Not many people know that street-trees need to be cared for. But think about it- in the forest of urban street-trees, there is hardly any open ground to soak up water and nutrients, and roots have to compete with concrete and pipes! Street-trees need our help to grow tall and healthy; we can break up compacted soil, mulch around trees with woodchips, water, and even become citizen tree-pruners to trim dead branches before they become diseased.

However, the trees aren’t the only ones in need. New Yorkers need help from street-trees, too. We need to slow down, appreciate the air, sunlight, and rain in our city, reclaim our tall, strong posture from our workdays at the computer, and talk to our neighbors…

When you join us for a Stewardance day, we’ll do all the normal stewardship activities, but that’s only half of it. We will also be stewards of ourselves. Come learn how to tune in to the dance of your own body as it calls for physical activity, exertion, stretching, relaxation, air, water, and sunlight. Respecting the naturalness of ourselves, we can better realize the naturalness all around us; we can find the forest of New York City.

Jump right in. Join us as we figure it all out…how do we get from here to there in North Brooklyn?  What will we find along the way?

On Saturday 6.19.10 Carolyn (Hall) and Clarinda (Mac Low) went on a trip by foot and bike from Greenpoint to Bushwick.  Along the way:

–  We visited India St. pier, gathered samples of plants there.  The concrete slab has shifted since we were last there, decaying further into the river. We found tiny little barnacles on every kind of surface. There were four cormorants diving and then drying themselves on the pier pilings, a gaggle of geese, and several birds we have not yet identified that we called “sea sparrows.” (Click on the picture for more photos of India St. and the events of the day) [Read more…] about River to Creek gets started

Some text to get us started . . .

I’m a dancer. I like to understand things through personal experience. Dance has been my way of consciously seeking and discovering information and cultivating an understanding of the world and of myself. The knowledge I gain is palpable, felt, immediate.

I’ve been making site-specific dances, informed by history, cultural studies and architecture, for the past couple of years. I wanted to work with a geoscientist who could give me another perspective on place. I found Christopher Small through his website.

Chris works with remote sensing, among other tools. He creates images, based on the amount of sunlight reflected off of the Earth’s surface, and can consequently measure the amount of urban vegetation in a place like New York City. He can then compare images from different times and look at the amount of vegetation growth or depletion that’s happened over a span of up to thirty years. [Read more…] about Intro to the Remote, the Immediate