“I sailed up a river with a pleasant wind,
New lands, new people, and new thoughts to find;
Many fair reaches and headlands appeared,
And many dangers were there to be feared;
But when I remember where I have been,
And the fair landscapes that I have seen,
Thou seemest the only permanent shore,
The cape never rounded, nor wandered o’er.

Fluminaque obliquis cinxit declivia ripis;
Quae, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa;
In mare perveniunt partim, campoque recepta
Liberioris aquae, pro ripis litora pulsant.
OVID, Met. I. 39”

~Henry David Thoreau, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” (1849)

highwatermarks is an immersive video and audio installation that was envisioned, filmed, and edited during the artist’s year-long residency at the Brandywine River Museum of Art which focused on key aspects of the Brandywine Conservancy’s activities. The video and sound environment depicts the river and its people through four seasons, blending views from the Brandywine landscape with on-water shots filmed from a small boat constructed by the artist  at the museum.

The video is a micro-level investigation of environmental issues that affect rivers and streams throughout the world, a portrait of place – the Brandywine River – and an ethnographic portrait of the community who live in the region, use the river, and find themselves in it.

In our current moment of global ecological uncertainty and increasing evidence of the human hand in shaping nature and climate, I was interested in focusing on the Brandywine as a site that has been made and remade continually over successive epochs of human ingenuity and discovery, and through engineering, agriculture, manufacturing, and now tourism.  While a river like the Brandywine may appear to be a natural system, human beings are inextricably linked to that natural system – we might attribute this human hand to a history of environmental degradation.  Thoreau realized this in traveling on and writing about the rivers in Northern Massachusetts, and Hudson River School painters were depicting these very changes in their work.  At the same time, the current work of the Conservancy shows that through stewardship and organization, policy and community-building, we might also have a positive impact in preserving and conserving such fragile natural sites.

Sean Hanley (Cinematography),  Yoni Brook (Cinematography), Meryl O’Connor (Editing), Brian Hutchings (Color)

Observationhouse was built in a floodplain, and is capable of flotation.

The shape of the structure is borrowed from a shed built in the early 20th century by Alexander Graham Bell for his research station in Nova Scotia, Canada. Bell made use of his “tetrahedral structure” as a base for environmental sensing experiments and observation in the field. Here, observationhouse is: a field studio, workshop and visual anchor for my year-long residency; a site for artistic work that dovetails with the Brandywine Conservancy’s environmental stewardship activities (particularly source water protection); and a platform for experimentation with a range of environmental sensing technologies, including a water monitoring device built and installed in the River beside the house through a collaboration with Shannon Hicks, engineer at Stroud Water Research Center. Stroud continues to monitor river data, viewable here: http://tinyurl.com/gpwaxtb

To build the observationhouse, I collaborated with Tri-Lox, to reclaim white cedar and fir from a New York City water tower.

Field recordings are played on the half hour and the hour within the structure, mixed with live sound from the river.

“Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.” ~ Lebbeus Woods

Let us consider the term “utopian architecture” for a moment.  Does it sound like an oxymoron?  Must it?  Le Corbusier said that all architecture is utopian. How might we change the rules of architecture without throwing away its generative aspects?   Like goldfish, we grow to fit our containers.  Can we imagine an architecture that increases liberty, propagates communalism, stokes mutual aid, and embraces interdependence?

What would such an architecture – a desiring architecture – look like, and what might it want from us?

Is it modular?

Is it anarchic?

Nomadic?

Ecohousing?

Collective?

Squat?

Freespace?

Inflatable?

Self-sufficient?

Feminist?

Queer?

Anti-capitalist?

Black?

Commune, or Common?

Picking up on the work of visionary architect Lebbeus Woods, architectures of desire will explore expanded conditions of a built environment beyond those intended by an ideologically-driven definition of urbanism pegged to for-profit development, imposed alienation, isolation, and other tropes of the capitalist regime.  To imagine such an architecture is to expose the ideology inherent in the way we currently build the buildings in which we live our lives.

In doing so, we will construct a reader and reflect on writings by Rosalyn Deutsche, Lebbeus Woods, Jennifer Bloomer, Gordon Matta-Clark, Paolo Soleri, Daniel Campo, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Marc Augé, Isabelle Auricoste, Jean Baudrillard, Henri Lefebvre, Deleuze and Guattari, Richard Serra, among others.

About Utopia School:

Utopia School is an open-sourced pedagogical project hosted at Flux Factory and elsewhere with the purpose of studying Utopian thought throughout time.  The school works on a horizontal, non-hierarchical, and open-sourced model. Utopia school asks: What questions are useful for re-imaging the future?

The first iteration of Utopia School was held at Flux Factory, New York City, in 2015, and was co-organized by Dylan Gauthier, Lena Hawkins, Jamie Idea, Scott Rigby, and many others.

See also the Architectures of Desire class page on the US website.

See: http://www.thesunview.org

We built The Floating Academy, as it came to be called, from discarded art crates “borrowed” from the Walker’s workshops.  The Academy was comprised of rafts of varying sizes.  We floated them out onto Lake-of-the-Isles, circled up, and held a seminar, the last of the series of Red76’s Pop Up Book Academy talks to be held in Minneapolis that summer.

Read more on the project at the Walker’s blog.