Open Waters
[Northwest Passage | Open Polar Sea | Arctic + Great Lakes Plastic]
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Multimedia installation: interactive video/audio and large format book, laser cut glass map, generative video projection, digital photographs
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Collaborators:
Judith Goldman, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo; visual artist
Bridget Baird, Professor Emerita in Computer Science at Connecticut College
Brett Terry, composer/sound artist
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BURCHFIELD PENNEY ART CENTER, BUFFALO, NY
(DEC 2019 - MAR 2020)
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BROWN UNIVERSITY, GRANOFF CENTER GALLERY, PROVIDENCE, RI
(APR 2018)
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INTERSECTIONS BIENNIAL SYMPOSIUM, AMMERMAN CENTER, CONNECTICUT COLLEGE (FEB 2018)
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CC CONNECTICUT COLLEGE MAGAZINE "POLAR ART" 2020
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Inspired by the 500-year history of Anglo expedition to find the Northwest Passage and an “open” Polar Sea, Open Waters is an interactive art installation that examines 21C realities of environmental and geopolitical change, in connection with the melting of the ice cap at the North Pole. Once a myth stubbornly adhered to in the face of cryogeographic impassibility, sailable waters have become an Arctic reality, reconfiguring the globe as we know it. Open Waters also processes the global circulation of microplastics: the sixth plastic gyre forming in the southern Arctic, due to ice transport and melt, and debris-gathering global currents, as well as plastic transport and deposition within the Great Lakes system, and its potential output, through the St. Lawrence Seaway, to the North Atlantic gyre.
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Gallery view
Interactive, generative digital video and text projection, variable size
Interactive, generative digital video and text projection (detail)
Interactive, generative digital video and text projection (video detail)
"Open Waters" large-format, hand bound artist book, 36 pages embedded with RFID tags, 25x25"
"Open Waters" large-format, hand bound artist book, 36 pages embedded with RFID tags, 25x25"
"Open Waters: Generative Community Poetry Projection" video projection, variable size
"Buffalo in North Polar Context/Plastic Glut" 17 laser etched glass plates, post consumer plastic waste, 105x68"
"Plastics at Black Rock Lock, Buffalo, NY" 6 archival digital prints, 18x18"