Semi-finalists
Sound Henge
Bill Fontana working in collaboration with KUTH | RANIERI Architects
Description of Climate Clock Proposal
The team’s approach to the design of the San Jose Climate Clock creates a place of physical repose and contemplation; connecting downtown San Jose, in real time, to 12 significant ecological habitats around the world. This work will transmit live sounds from these global environments as well as display live visual data for a variety conditions: the earth’s carbon dioxide levels, ozone levels, temperature change, etc. Our proposal is as much an instrument for listening and learning as it is a civic space for refuge and contemplation. The team will work collaboratively on all aspects of the design of the Climate Clock, with Bill Fontana recording and directing the selection and implementation of the live audio component and Kuth/Ranieri Architects designing and managing the physical structure and implementation of visual data. Bill Fontana has worked for the past 30 years creating installations that use sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural settings. His sound sculptures use the human and/or natural environment as living sources of musical information. These projects have been installed in public spaces and museums around the world. KUTH | RANIERI Architects is among an emerging group of innovative designers at the forefront of green building through the strategic rescripting of conventional design & building practices. They have earned a national and international reputation for their innovative works that integrate current cultural discourse with contemporary issues of design, technology and environmental awareness.
Climate Canopy: an Evolving Memorial
Maggie Orth working with Beebe Skidmore Architecture and Joshua R. Smith
Description of Climate Clock Proposal
Our proposal is an evolving memorial which layers 3 elements: a permanent, carbon-like, memorial material, into which an algorithmically generated pattern based on the climate saving actions of the San José community over 100 years is etched; a robotic etcher whose activity records and reflects the current positive actions of the community; and an addressable, netted LED array that displays predictions of the climate future based on the current actions of the community. At the end of 100 years a permanent memorial to actions of San José during this critical time will have been created. Maggie Orth is an artist and technologist who currently directs design and research at International Fashion Machines, her Seattle based studio. At IFM, she has focused on the design and research of electronic textiles, including creating artworks, consumer products, conducting research, writing patents, and directing a highly collaborative design/engineering studio and business. Her experience in merging physical and digital art forms ranges from coordinating large collaborative interactive art projects at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to creating UL-listed electronic textile design products. For this project, Orth will be the lead artist, and will work with her studio to lead the coordination of the design of the memorial, with a focus on the LED array, permanent etching material, climate-to-data visualization software and web interface. Doug Skidmore & Heidi Beebe joined forces in 2007 to start Beebe Skidmore, a practice in architecture. By focusing on proportion, scale, and quality, their work takes a practical and economical approach, emphasizing thoughtful planning and real solutions. Through their experience with museums and other arts organizations, they have developed the expertise required to align the technical, functional and aesthetic criteria essential to successful civic art space. As Project Manager and Project Architect for the new $85 million Seattle Art Museum, from the design concept through construction, they led client committees, managed large teams, and coordinated technical disciplines in the execution of a complex new art facility. Beebe Skidmore is in process of becoming LEED AP certified. Joshua R. Smith is a highly qualified and versatile scientist and inventor with strengths spanning mathematical modeling, software, sensing, and actuation hardware. Many of his projects involve couplings between data and the physical world. He is currently a Principal Engineer at the Intel Research laboratory in Seattle, Washington, where he conducts research in sensor physics, signal processing, robotic grasping, robotic walking and control, and wireless power. He has collaborated on art projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and continues to enjoy working with creative people. For this project Smith will take an active technology and science advisor role, providing technical support and supervision in software development, data visualization and analysis, robotics, electrical engineering and hardware.
RESIDENCY FINALIST: Huey-Dewey-Louie Climate Clock (an homage to the film ‘Silent Running’)
Usman Haque in equal partnership with Robert Davis
Description of Climate Clock Proposal
Huey-Dewey-Louie Climate Clock (A homage to the film Silent Running) The Clock consists of three characters that construct themselves over the course of days, months & years forming a highly legible landscape record of climatic change & possible causes of this change. Biological materials are extracted directly from the environment to facilitate ongoing and future analyis. 1. Accretion Mounds: Huey Autonomously accreted daily from light & dark materials extracted chemically from the atmosphere, the thickness of each carbonised/calcareous layer is proportional to the degree of fluctuation of local environmental parameters, visible, like tree-rings, via color gradations of the deposited material. The geometric trend of the stratigraphic iconic structure is dependent upon measurements of climatic change so that, viewed from below, the sky is visible until its completion, at which point the date will indicate the relative ‘health’ of the global weather system – the later it closes each year the better the global ecosphere’s ‘health’. 2. 3m3 Samples: Dewey Round the site will be 100 plinths onto which will be placed annually a sample of air hermetically preserved in a transparent box measuring 3m x 1m x 1m. At Year 0, 10,000 daffodil seeds will be cloned from a single genetic sample. Each year, 100 will be planted on site; at year-end, a single flower and 99 compacted into a block will be placed at the base of the sealed sample columns. The way this preserved plant material, genetically identical through 100 years, responded to its year’s changing climatic situation, and the air samples, will provide useful material for future analysis. 3. Cubic Data Packer: Louie An autonomous machine, powered by solar panels & heat engine, grazes round the site moving 1 cm/day, guided by local temperature & wind conditions. It extracts local soil via helical blades & fuses this daily into small cubes, each face of which is stamped with a date & environmental or economic measurements chosen by daily popular public vote, including e.g. global CO2 level, atmospheric methane, rainfall, price of corn, or index of light crude oil and whatever contemporary humans determine to be important. The cubes through their encoded positions record both local & global daily environmental conditions. Robert Davis is a systems developer in the Psychology Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London, who is particularly interested in systems that are contingent upon the environment and the entities that inhabit it, as well as the adaption within such systems. His particular interests include analog neural networks and chemical systems. Usman Haque is an architect who has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass-participation performances. His skills include the design of both physical spaces, and the software and systems that bring them to life. Together they have worked on a number of previous projects including Haunt and Evolving Sonic Environment. The Haunt project was an attempt to simulate a haunted space, using infrasound and electromagnetic field patterns derived from previously recorded ‘haunted’ spaces. Evolving Sonic Environment was an architectural experiment to construct an interactive environment that builds up an internal representation of its occupants through a network of autonomous but communicative sensors.
Breathing Tower
Yuji Oshima with key members Tobias Baldauf, Florian Otto, Marie-theres Okresek, Jorg Stotzer
Description of Climate Clock Proposal
Our proposition presents a mysteriously flying garden mounted on top of a tower. The garden will be equipped with a sensor which can measure the air quality of San Jose and its surrounding. Those sensors will show immediate action in case of less air quality and produce water mist (200 microns) by several jet nozzles. The volume of water mist is preciously controlled by a computer. In case of high CO2 level, this effect will be seen as a cumulus cloud when the tower is literally misted over with fog. However, with good air quality the garden itself can be seen from far distance. A Ginkgo tree, as one of the oldest witnesses of our earth’s history (some of them are over 1000 years old), will be planted to register the seasons with its leaves and the climate in its trunk. With technology to observe climate change, the Ginkgo tree will record carefully year by year the climate development as annual rings in its body. The height of the tower will be defined by the Sea Level Rise. In the IPCC Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001 scientists expect a 68,2m sea level rise in case of total ice melting of Greenland and Antarctica. The height of the tower according to these results will thus also operate as an admonishment, imagining , San José being 42.2 meters under water. We would like to apply the same method in case this tower will be built in another country. The tree-like trunk holding the garden will consist of an elevator or staircase through which the visitors are brought up to the top to overlook the Silicon Valley. Our proposal is not only to collect and show the climate change data but also to cultivate new results by comparing different vegetation due to dry and humid air condition. We consider Breathing Tower living public art. Yuji Oshima is a Vienna -based artist and is working in sound installations and new media projects. His work has been presented in various exhibitions as Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Espace Paul Ricard, Pairs; Flux Factory, New York; Le Fresnoy, Tourcoing; Intercommunication Center, Tokyo; Dena Foundation, Milano; Nuit Blanche, Paris; Musee des Beaux-Arts, Calais; Beurschouwburg, Brussels; Forum des Images, Paris; Credac, Ivry-Sur-Seine; Gmeb, Bourges; TinaB, Praha; and Kibla Multimedia Center, Maribor, Slovenia. His site specific multimedia elevator installation is part of the collection of the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs rue Saint-Honora in Paris. Bauchplan (Tobias Baldou, Florian Otto and Marie-theres Okresek) is a Munich-based landscape architecture and urbanism networks established in 2001, with offices in Vienna and Zurich. Our interst is the everyday, the process-like and search for the hidden potentials of free space. We aim to explore phenomenons and translate them into specific spaces of possibility. The built result is directly linked to it’s generic process. Designing and using are viewed as creative phase-delayed observational acts. Reality becomes a way of reading the environment. In this reading three aspects are of superordinate importance to us: the concept as a request for action deducted from the approach to the site and it’s phenomenology; the space as space of possibility with specific inherent qualities; and atmosphere as accentuated and amplified ambiental character. We conceive dealing with social phenomenons overlaid with the temporal aspects in landscape designs as a contribution to urban culture.
CLI-Mate
Mel Chin working with Joe Dahmen, Travis Franck, Amber Frid-Jimenez, Amul Goswamy and David McConville
Description of Climate Clock Proposal
Our idea is to develop and implement a globally accessible widget, available to all languages through free-ware methods, that personalizes any individual’s connection to global climate change. The widget is called the CLI-mate and the program that is developed through the use of it is what is currently missing in the computations on global climate changes. The San José CLI-mate server will be ensconced within a structure supporting a canopy of photo bioreactor tanks, absorbing greenhouse gases and powering hundreds of suspended small displays, working 24-7 to process information of the compounded effects of human actions on global climatic activity. Climate information from scientific models will react to and reflect real-time human input gathered through the CLI-mate delivered to the San José climate computing station, and reprocessed to make it accessible there and to every cell phone, and computer that would have it.The San José Server Structure with the algae reactors will fuel floating mini-displays of a multitude of constantly refreshing comparables that individual users may be requesting or that may be randomly generated. Small scale allows personal review of individual requests. Mel Chin is known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork and works that conjoin cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas. In 1993, for Eco-Tec International, he organized a multi-disciplinary team to assess an abandoned asbestos mine and former factory in Corsica, France. He continues to develop long-term works such as Revival Field (1989-ongoing), a project that has been a pioneer in the field of “green remediation.” A 10th anniversary implementation in Stuttgart, Germany featured dramatic advancements in the use of plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil. In 1998, Chin completed two large-scale public commissions, the Seven Wonders project, for the Sesquicentennial Park in Houston, Texas and Signal for the Broadway/Lafayette Subway Station in New York City. Chin is one of 16 artists included in the first year of the PBS Series, Art of the 21st Century, 2001. He is the lead artist for the first joint university/public library in the United States in San Jose, California, completed in 2007. Joe Dahmen is an architect dedicated to designing and developing sustainable construction methods. He has international experience designing and executing a variety of building technologies guided by appropriate technologies and fabrication methods. Dahmen is one of the three founders of a startup venture Bodega Algae LLC, a developer of a scalable continuous flow photobioreactor that grows large volumes of microalgae for use in the production of biofuel. He is the chief operating officer for Bodega where he works on business development strategy, prototype design and fabrication. Joe brings his knowledge of mechanical system design to Bodega. He received a Master of Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006, where he initiated original research on rammed earth, a sustainable alternative to concrete. Dahmen is also currently a consultant to Rammed Earth Works, of Boston, Massachuestts, where, building on research performed at MIT, devises custom strategies and equipment enabling clients to conserve resources while utilizing materials encountered on site. Travis Franck is a Massachusetts Insititute of Technology climate change researcher and a trained software engineer. Currently, Franck is a research assistant and Ph.D Candidate with Massachusetts Institute of Technoloy’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. This research group brings together the physical Earth sciences along with the social sciences to generate an integrated picture of climate change and society. Franck studies how accelerated sea-level rise affects coastal cities and natural ecosystems. Franck has worked at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an inter-governmental organization with climate change research responsibility. During his work there, he worked with researchers on long-term climate change mitigation that concluded in a published work. Amber Frid-Jimenez is an award-winning designer, artist, engineer and educator, whose uses her experience and knowledge of emerging technologies to design products, visualizations, experiences, installations and sites that confronts issues ranging from politics and surveillance to representations of women in media. Her recent work includes interactive video installations, performance-based participation from large-scale online audiences, visualization and interactive design, and traditional painting. Frid-Jimenez is currently teaching art, design and critical theory as a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Visual Arts Program and an adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Frid-Jimenez is a graduate of the MIT Media Laboratory where she studied with John Maeda in Physical Language Workshop. Prior to beginning her degree, she researched the aesthetic, social and economic implications of collecting, mining, and visualizing large databases of text and video in the Cognitive Machines Group at MIT. Amul Goswamy is a digital media artist and former lead software developer at Apple Inc. Goswamy is currently studying Engineering Education at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts to educate the public about climate change and clean technology. He feels Climate Clock is an example of how art and software can make a positive difference for the environment. Goswamy served as an Arts Commissioner for the City of San José presiding over many environmental art and digital media projects. During his terms as a commissioner, he has gained an understanding of the complexities of large public art projects and the traits of successful public art installations. Deeply rooted in the environmental art field movement, Goswamy was an artist and partner with C5 Corporation creating digital media artworks about landscapes and mapping. Goswamy is also a compost educator for Santa Clara County, Goswamy discovered the complexities of people’s conception and treatment of the environment. David McConville is a media artist and researcher specializing in the development of dome-based display technologies. He is co-founder of The Elumenati, a full service design and engineering firm specializing in the development and deployment of immersive visualization environments and experiences. The Elumenati provides systems integration, realtime software design, immersive content research, custom fabrication, and optical engineering for clientele ranging from art festivals to space agencies. McConville is currently based in Asheville, North Carolina, conducting independent research as a PhD candidate in the Planetary Collegium through the University of Plymouth in Plymouth, England. His research focuses on the history and contemporary development of dome-based environments in the construction and shaping of worldviews.
RESIDENCY FINALIST: Organograph
Chico MacMurtrie working with Geo Homsy, Bill Washabaugh and Gideon Shapiro
Description of Climate Clock Proposal Organograph is an ever-changing, participatory sculpture that invites the public to observe and respond to the processes of climate change. Visually and physically inviting, it functions as a captivating civic beacon as well as a flexible instrument of scientific measurement, public education, and individual experience. The total mechanism of the sculpture responds to and provides a window into worldwide climate data. A spectacular clock-like system of interconnecting exhibit orbs, liquid flows, and mechanical movement illustrates the dynamic equilibrium of energy and mass flow in the biosphere. The entire sculpture moves two meters per year along a spiral trench, leaving in its wake a living garden and a trail paved with archival culture bricks made of glassified garbage. The width of the trail forms a graph, representing the historical levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The future is represented by a curving reflecting pool. Visitors enter the sculpture via a single stairway, representing the rise of industrialization as well as the progression of the greenhouse effect. At the top, in the humid “Vapor Orb”, visitors may choose to descend by way of one of two stairs: the oil dependency future, or the sustainable future. This journey of discovery is guided by the interactive Learning Atom. These user-specific tokens, using RFID technology, connect to a live database that is continually updated in collaboration with scientific research institutions, and present each visitor a unique interactive audiovisual experience. In the Terrarium Sphere, plants are continually seeded, nourished by compost carried up by visitors, and rotated out toward the perimeter. Each day at noon, a plant travels down a chute from this Spiral Incubator and is replanted in the Time Trail Garden. The atmosphere inside the incubator — and hence the health of the exterior Garden — fluctuates in response to global atmospheric conditions. The sun is the sole energy source for the project. Photovoltaic arrays and solar thermal collectors are clustered along the three great unfolding sculptural petals that dramatically open each morning and close each night. Chico MacMurtrie is the lead artists for this proposal and works using sculpture to animate space and stimulate public dialogue. Together with his collaborative studio of artists, technicians, and programmers’ known as Amorphic Robot Works he has exhibited work in 15 different countries since 1992. Many of these projects have poetically raised questions about birth, death, renewal, mechanical vs. organic life, and the resilience of nature within the urban habitat. Recent projects include two sculptural metal trees that explore different aspects of humans’ relationship with nature: Growing, Raining Tree, a $100,000 commission from the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, responds to the presence of viewers by moving and dripping water from the tips of its branches. Floating Tree for Anable Basin, installed upon a sculptural island planted with native estuary grasses, encapsulates the historical interplay between industrial and ecological activity on the New York City waterfront. It is designed to focus attention on the balance of nature in the city. MacMurtrie’s imaginative use of robotic technology is exemplified in the Totemobile (2006), a sculpture of a Citroen DS that expands twice each day into a 60-foot-tall elongated sculpture, creating a serenely monumental spectacle. Geo Homsy brings 25 years of professional, academic, and artistic experience in electrical engineering and computer science to the Organograph design team. A collaborator with Amorphic Robot Works since 1991, Homsy has served as software choreographer and chief technical consultant on numerous projects involving pneumatics, hydraulics, electronics, and real-time control and performance software. His innovative, technically intricate work was exemplified in the sculpture Growing, Raining Tree. His art-related experience also includes creating and directing the Large Hot Pipe Organ, a pyro-acoustic musical instrument that has performed in six countries. Homsy has served as artistic director of SlackerTronics Systems in the Netherlands, and contributed to several projects with San Francisco-based Survival Research Laboratories. Homsy’s professional engineering career includes pioneering work in Europe and the US for the laboratories of Quicklogic, Woodward Design Associates, Electude, Addison Wesley Longman, and University of California. He is a founding partner of the information architecture firm Permabit, and a partner in the multi-disciplinary design firm Squid Labs. Homsy will be the lead digital design engineer for this proposal. Trained as an aerospace engineer and mechanic, Bill Washabaugh has applied his technical expertise and creative vision to numerous fields of design. He joined Amorphic Robot Works in 2006 as Lead Engineer for the studio’s landmark Totemobile project, a robotic sculpture that transforms from a 1965 Citroen DS automobile into a 60-foot-tall moving sculpture. Directing a multi-disciplinary team of engineers, artists, and fabricators, he managed the design/build timeline, CAD modeling, machine design and analysis. Washabaugh has worked as Senior Mechanical Engineer for New York-based Arnell Group, and as a Senior Design Engineer for Genie Industries and Chef’n Corporation in Seattle, where his ZipFlips product was awarded the RedDot Design Award in 2007. His design and engineering experience also includes consumer product design, furniture design, interactive electro-mechanical systems, and kinetic architecture. Washbaugh will be the lead mechanical engieneer for this proposal. Interested in the role of public art and architecture in shaping or reflecting society, Gideon Shapiro has collaborated with Amorphic Robot Works since 2005. He recruited the interdisciplinary team of artists and ecologists who created ARW’s winning proposal for the Long Island City Grounded competition, culminating in the installation of Floating Tree for Anable Basin. This project explored the possibility of a revived natural urban habitat for both birds and humans, the industrial history of the New York City waterfront, and the transformative effects of rapid high-rise residential development. Shapiro managed the project’s implementation and coordinated an extensive public outreach effort in collaboration with community partners such as Place in History, the New York Audubon Society, Plant Specialists, and the Long Island City Community Boathouse, highlighting the sculpture as a catalyst for discussion about nature in the urban context. He has also worked with ARW on several other sculpture commissions and competitions, including the Inflatable Birds and the Flight 587 Memorial Competition. An architectural writer, researcher, and designer, Shapiro works for the Manhattan-based architectural firm of Gabellini Sheppard Associates. He will be the researcher/designer for this proposal.
RESIDENCY FINALIST: Wired Wilderness
Greenmeme: Freya Bardell working with Brent Bucknum
Description of Climate Clock Proposal
A significant inspiration to our team is digital ecologist, Mike Hamilton, the reserve manager at Blue Oaks Ranch Reserve, a 3000-acre UC field station, only minutes outside of San José, that will become the first model of a completely “wired wilderness”. According to Hamilton, “if we had to reduce the regional ecosystem health down to one indicator that will change dramatically over the next 100 years, it will be the oak woodlands.” Oaks are host to one of the more documented bio-indicators, lace lichen. Scientific studies from around the globe have shown lichen diversity, directly correlates with air quality and human health. Beautiful and slow growing, lichen serves a moniker of wisdom of time, an evolving barometer of climatic change, a biological indicator, relevant to San José, but also a model that can be applied universally. As artists, we don’t try to substitute the “senses” and sensors of human experience, but rather frame them, and reduce them to an understandable scale. We can simply set the clock by creating a forum for the true artistic potential of the clock to be made by the timekeepers of natural process, the community and the city. To do this, we propose growing an Oak and Lichen grove in the center of San José and comparing this directly to a similar grove at Blue Oak Reserve. In juxtaposition, the reserves will serve as a “natural sensor” for San José. As they evolve over time, visitors will observe how the groves adapt differently with environmental change. The human experience and memory of this natural process will be the climate clock. While these bio-indicators are the central timepiece for our “climate clock”; we envision the space to be continually evolving, embracing daily environmental and technological changes, through programming and public participation. The monument will be a multi-sensory experience, to be viewed as an art piece, meeting place, a gallery, a site for education, communication and observation. Freya Bardell is an ecological designer and artist based in Los Angeles, California. She works with Greenmeme and is a design consultant for Rana Creek, which are innovative, environmentally oriented companies based in California. Her work is part of a growing movement known as Sustainable design that seeks to integrate new technologies and ecological systems to design, architecture and landscaping environments. Bardell has also worked as designer for Osborn Architects, Glendale, CA; a 3-D artist for Mind Browser Productions, Los Angeles; an artist and interactive consultant for Urbana, Los Angeles; and as a superintendent for Hulette Construction. Ecological Designer, Brent Bucknum, founded the Hyphae Design Laboratory in February 2008, a consulting and design firm dedicated to bridging the gap between innovative architecture and hard biological sciences. From 2005-2008, Bucknum served as the design director at Rana Creek, an ecological restoration and design firm based in Carmel Valley, California. Bucknum’s work included the design of large-scale living roofs, ecological landscapes, rainwater catchment systems, living walls, greywater systems and constructed wetlands. He has worked as an ecological designer for Blaha Design and Greenfield International gaining experience in browfield remediation and natural building. His national and international project’s have enabled him to research indigenous cultures and incorporate appropriate building techniques into designs. Bucknum is also a member/collaborator of Greenmeme, an design firm based in Los Angeles and The Chlorophyll Collective, an environmental education group based in Oakland, California.