Hegewisch Petcoke Research

“What we really need from the city to truly protect us is a complete ban on pet coke,” said Olga Bautista.

Chicago South East Side Coalition To Ban Petcoke

Southeast Environmental Taskforce

Hegewisch Windowsills (sketches) (charcoal on cotton) 8" x 8" each

Everyday: 10/11/15

(digital photograph) Pine Bluff Road, Morris, IL

shade balls & bungee guts zombie

Everyday: 8/3/15

two things today!

1.

(cockroach legs and solar panel shards on paper)

2.

Sieve (heat-shrink tubing, memory card, fuses, emergency whistles, penicillin tablets, Parachute Survival Bracelet, AAA batteries, brown rice, pocket knife, ethernet cable, and hardware) 48" x 1" x 1"

e.e. and futility

i was thinking of futility in context of this piece and what it needs next, to finish it, and then i opened e.e. cummings a selection of poems to this poem at random.

ice yields

images from a mummy now freed from a glacier on Pico de Orizaba because of climate change

-and-

images of "Blood Falls" on the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica

Everyday: 6/11/15

7.418ft (Key West, FL) (commissioned painting by Alberto DeAndrea, made in Key West, at 7.418ft above sea level) 2015

The previous two pieces in this series are here.

[iPhones do not do the best documentation]

Everyday: 5/26/15

On 5/24/15 I started creating a new conceptual writing piece called Biography that would be a bib of all (or most) of the self-help books focused on climate change and ecology. I started this because the piece, Rise (which is quite similar), is and will be ongoing forever. Turns out this piece may be forever ongoing also.

Senator James Inhofe needs a dictionary

weather; noun

1. the state of the air and atmosphere at a particular time and place : the temperature and other outside conditions (such as rain, cloudiness, etc.) at a particular time and place

climate; noun

1. a region with particular weather patterns or conditions

2. the usual weather conditions in a particular place or region

3. the usual or most widespread mood or conditions in a place

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), chair of the Environment and Public Works Senate Committee, Feb. 26, 2015

sea level & leather calligraphy

when Yeon Park to creates a painting he puts this informational sheet in with the work (I had him create the piece below, for an ongoing series)

10.362ft (New Orleans, LA) (commissioned painting by Yeon Park, made in the New Orleans French Market, at 10.362ft above sea level; mat and frame) 2015

Next Year

Next Year (pencil on wall) 2014

A new piece, to be executed anew each year, that consists of the hurricane names for the Atlantic Ocean. This is the 2014 version of the piece.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames.shtml

hyperobjects, hyperreal?

Google image results for "climate change"

The trouble with global warming is not just that it's real—the trouble with it is that it deals a deathblow to “common sense.” [...] Common sense tells you that things you can see and feel like snow are more real than things like global warming, which must be abstract and thus vague. But global warming turns this false immediacy inside out. Global warming is far more real, while things like weather—things that appear to be immediate in our experience—are actually the abstractions! Local weather is a kind of snapshot of larger processes, a snapshot that's pretty much out of date by the time you notice it.

-Timothy Mortin, from his blog, The Contemporary Condition

In this post Mortin is talking about "hyperobjects." In short these are things which are too large to be comprehended by people (such as nuclear bombs and climate change). The prefix is shared with hyperreal, and I wonder if he would make the argument that these two are related. He does say that hyperobjects are "real" and maybe the case could be made that they can be seen as "real" because we don't have a way of fully understanding them - we don't have a way to bring them into full semiotic view. (But, we do give it a name, so it is in our linguistic bag.) This is a big stretch, but it is interesting to think of "things that appear to be immediate in our experience" as abstractions, and these abstractions as simulation. (e.g., the polar bear stranded on an ice-berg or the parched earth.)

heat shrink tubing

things that, as of yet don't have, titles... but have a lot of potential 

[materials (so far) - dried mango, cock rings, sheathing, pig hoof, weather alert radio (cut), Starbucks dark roast coffee beans, broken shingles, compass, chicken feet, glacial float copper, light bulb, memory card, liquid tight 90 degree tube, plywood, heat-shrink tubing, and hardware]

[references - snakes, staff/stick/charm, Jim Lambie, André Cadere, time capsules]

:: cache :: lay by :: salt away ::

catalog + time capsule + rations = ???

:: kit :: list :: stock :: survival :: permanence :: share :: store :: measure :: dole ::

diviner (too to the point, but a nice title)

Confidence & An Inconvenient Truth

"Awareness of our highly destructive pollution levels has been key to our becoming more environmentally responsible. When Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary on climate change (appropriately named An Inconvenient Truth) was released, it alerted millions of people to a potential man-made catastrophe - global warming. The message was quite apocalyptic, yet it helped create a positive change in people's attitudes toward the environment, increasing recycling and decreasing pollution.

So the truth is often painful, but less painful than ignoring it. It may seem preferable in the short term to be overconfident (whether that relates to phenomena such as health and global warming or to our own abilities), but ultimately, being aware of our own limitations - and, in particular, our defects - can help us reverse and combat their effects."
- from Confidence, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Window Proposal

Witch's Brew (Milk Lake Glacier) [proposal mock-up]

Witch’s Brew (Milk Lake Glacier)

for Window, Asheville, NC

“When President Taft created Glacier National Park in 1910, it was home to an estimated 150 glaciers. Since then the number has decreased to fewer than 30, and most of those remaining have shrunk in area by two-thirds.”[1]

In an effort to neutralize fears caused by global warming threats, society creates fictions designed to exorcise, to relieve, or to ignore the anxiety caused by these fears. The novel The Road, the movie Interstellar, and the television series The Walking Dead are recent examples of such narratives, where the arc of the apocalyptic story is designed to lead the audience to solace. Threat is avoided in each instance because it is created and resolved within a short time frame. This gives the readers/viewers only a glancing and safely disengaged non-encounter with fear and, in the end, leaves them with the feeling of reprieve.

Witch’s Brew (Milk Lake Glacier) presents a threat in the form of a specter, which resembles both the No Fear logo and a jack-o-lantern. However, this apparition does not bring reprieve; it becomes a harbinger for the real future of our planet.

The build-up of greenhouse gasses since the industrial revolution (circa 1760) has heavily contributed to the retreat and extinction of glaciers worldwide.[2] The Milk Lake Glacier, of Washington’s Cascade Mountain range, disappeared some time between 1988 and 1995. The appropriated photograph in Witch’s Brew (Milk Lake Glacier) was taken during Milk Lake Glacier’s retreat. The combination of the red tint, timeworn print, and layered graphic presents this glacier as a harrowing example, a specter, of climate change.

The final piece for Window Contemporary will utilize a re-photographed image of the Milk Lake Glacier. In enlargement, artifacts from printing process will be present in the image. As “photography is the inventory of mortality,”[3] this places the glacier further in the (dead) past.

---

[1] Glick, Daniel. "Global Climate Change, Melting Glaciers." National Geographic. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Nov. 2014. ‹http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/›.

[2] National Snow and Ice Data Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. ‹http://nsidc.org/›.

[3] Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador USA, 2001. N. pag. 70

research for "Rise"

research for Rise :: a conceptual poem/text composed of only the word "Rise", a large amount of in-text citations, and (currently) a 3 page MLA formatted bibliography

(such a nice design)

book found at Red Emma's

(obligatory)

Japanese Honeysuckle (tests)

 sprayed with bleach

bleached by the sun

notes from the past few weeks

1/16/14
US national fear index, 1950 - 2000
 belief in climate change, 1950 - 2000

1/28/14
Northwest passage
Northeast passage
- ice free arctic summers
- Canadian gov. firing weapons into the sea
"windfall"

1/29/14
"maybe comfortable w/ his diss-comfort" - Fishel

1/30/14
low impact
no impact

2/3/14
list of the dead

2/3/14
driving home, naming the darkness

Scott Ross - Ghost (woodfired stoneware) 2009

Low - Breaker (from "Drums and Guns") 2007

hot hots (in sketches)

two sketches I made in Morocco

 

 

 

 

digital mock-ups displaying possible types of handles (to be installed directly onto the wall)

We go to bed, but we don't sleep too hard.

We are crying out. We are black cats. We are lucky pennies. We are rotten food. We are cut zombie legs. We are building a raft. We are the ocean.