The tall willows, rocky banks, and thick meadows that stretch along the rolling Brandywine provided a sonic backdrop for a sound piece on the region’s cultural and natural history, composed by the artist and broadcast on provided radios along the trip. Naturalists from the Brandywine Conservancy provided commentary on the flora, fauna, and history of the region along the way.

The artist’s 12’ punt, a small boat constructed with the public over the course of his residency at the Brandywine Museum, accompanied the trip.

Book designed in collaboration with Partner & Partners, map designed in collaboration with Brandywine Conservancy’s Michele Gandy.

The neon light references the river’s former industrial uses as a source of power. During the Industrial Revolution, the reign was a seat of power and hundreds mills were activated by the Brandywine (including the one you’re standing in now). The neon was fabricated with the specific constraint to use the amount power that the River could generate using an inexpensive consumer grade hydroelectric generator.

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Regional waterways once dictated where and how cities came to be built, and acted as a connective fabric between distant regions and peoples. They powered industry and provided residents with food and drinking water while serving the public’s needs for both transportation and recreation. My work invites the public to interact directly with their local rivers and streams, and to question the role of these waterways in contemporary American life as a means to thinking about larger ecological topics. The Brandywine flows into the Delaware and rejoins the Atlantic in the Chesapeake Bay, and in a sense, all waters are connected.  The sort of work that the Brandywine Conservancy is doing on the Brandywine River contributes not only to clean drinking water for neighboring cities, but to cleaner Oceans.

If rivers are no longer harnessed to generate power, my work also asks: how might these rivers, along with other energy generating technologies, one day be harnessed again?

The installation consists of a number of hexagonal tanks, built from reclaimed water tower wood (white cedar), each housing a school of fish from one of three families of Cichlids commonly known as Tilapia: Red Nile Tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), Gold Tilapia (Oreochromis Mossambicus), and Blue Tilapia (Oreochromis aureus), along with Copepods (small crustaceans) and algae. Above the fish tanks, water is circulated through angled hexagonal platforms containing gravel and sand along with several species of marshland plants, including edible sea purslane (Halimione portulacoides and Sesuvium portulacastrum) and sea oats (Uniola paniculata). Excess water is circulated downward into the fish tanks, providing nutrients for the fish. Water from the fishtanks is cycled back up to flood the plants, bringing fertilizer. Full spectrum LED lights and pumps provide an artificial daytime and flood the plants on a tidal cycle, synchronized to that of a proximal body of water, in this case, Dutch Kills on nearby Newtown Creek. A series of mirrors, cameras and screens multiplies the visual environment outward and inward. HI/LOW MARSH TIME is a stand in for a missing ecosystem, a self-governing system of agriculture, and a work of sculptural ecology and architecture.

Aquaponics research images:

“We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as THEY take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as THEY see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the “great mass” as THEY shrink back; we find “shocking” what THEY find shocking.” ~ M.H.

“The shape is the object: at any rate, what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape.” ~ M.F.

Filmed in the Adirondacks, while in residence at Blue Mountain Center.

“According to City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., the city does not have a complete record of where cellular antennas are in the city. In fact, they have no idea how many antennas there are in the city.” ~ Gothamist, 2010.

Fabric/Fragment of An Urban Wilderness is a sound work and an investigation of the built environment, produced by giving voice to the city’s thickly layered range of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) projected by cell phone base stations.

In 2012, I started the project, “Toward a North Brooklyn Wilderness Corridor,” to document endangered urban wilderness in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I have lived off and on since 2002.  “Fabric/Fragment of An Urban Wilderness,” is made up of four tracks, each corresponding to a specific site within the 1.5 square-mile neighborhood, and runs for approximately 40 minutes.

Electromagnetic fields form an invisible backdrop to our daily lives, and offer an inaudible soundtrack to our technologized selves.  Emanating from all electronic devices – from the common fluorescent fixture, to traffic signal controls, plasma screens, or the towers beaming raw data to the cell phones in our pockets – the signals are invisible, the devices are easily overlooked, but the fields themselves are everywhere.  By giving voice to their presence in public space, we might define the limits of a type infrastructure, or of the city itself.

Excerpt:

Our work bridges dialogues in art, activism, and science, by remapping landscapes, reclaiming local ecologies, and observing and recording the overlaps of nature, industry, and the polis.  ML’s projects connect divergent constituencies with shared environmental concerns, create waterfront narratives ranging from the industrial to the personal, and catalyze the creation of engaged publics.  Employing the methodologies of civic hacking, participation, open source, social sculpture, and temporary occupations, our work expands on Lefebvre’s “right to the city” to include its neglected waterways. Mare Liberum is premised on the speculation that water is a commons and the boat as a heterotopia – social platforms that catalyze societal change.

We have presented work at Bureau for Open Culture at MASS MoCA, Neuberger Museum, Maker Faire, the PsyGeoConflux Festival, The New School, Boston Center for the Arts, EFA Project Space, Smack Mellon, Alexandraplatz, and the Antique Boat Museum, and have been written about in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Bad at Sports, The Village Voice, and Vice Magazine, among others.

The collective was founded by Dylan Gauthier, Ben Cohen, Stephan von Muehlen in 2007.

The collective is currently:
Dylan Gauthier, Sunita Prasad, Jean Barberis, Ben Cohen, Kendra Sullivan, and Stephan von Muehlen.

For more information, visit – http://www.thefreeseas.org.