“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)

Dawn School is a participatory art work that takes the form of itinerant classroom performances planned for a 10-year duration (2010-2020). It engages with contemporary and historical ideas of nature, time, labor, ecology, media, and the depletion of resources through the extractive processes of capitalism.

The basic instructions for the piece are always the same: “Wake before dawn. Take a walk. Watch the day emerge. Discuss.”

Prior Dawn Schools have investigated social and labor relationships in the industrial infrastructure around Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY; the effects of closing a Ford plant in St. Paul, Minnesota; and signs of de-gentrification in the East Village.  In the Summer 2011, Dawn School was held at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoCA) at North Adams, MA, at the invitation of Bureau for Open Culture. This work included a visit to Specialty Minerals, a quarry and mineral processing facility in neighboring Adams, MA. 

The most recent iteration—held as part of the exhibition Con•Tin•U•Ums curated by Patrick Jaojoco at the former Pfizer pharmaceutical factory in Brooklyn—touched on the issues of fatigue, exhaustion, overproduction and over-medication in contemporary life.  The assembled group of 10 or so participants met at the former Pfizer plant at 4:45 am, and proceeded to take a silent, meditative “sound walk” around the building.  We tuned in to the sounds of the building itself—a humming machine—and the city as it stirred awake in the early morning light. 

We then proceeded into the building to tour spaces once devoted to the production of drugs, including Viagra, and discuss texts by Lewis Mumford on the emergence of commodifiable “factory time” during the Industrial Revolution, and Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. 

Participants talked about their sleep and work patterns, and their own exhaustion as artists, activists, and media producers coping with the expectations of an “always on” and “always plugged in” world.  The specter of the global toxico-temporal biopower regime of Pfizer, “one of the world’s premier biopharmaceutical companies,” hung heavy in our imaginations as we toured FDA clean rooms and laboratories reminiscent of recent science fiction movies like Alien.  Interestingly, these spaces are currently being converted into “incubator spaces” for food startups and catering kitchens in what is envisioned as the world’s largest hub for food startups. Thus we were experiencing not just a disused factory, but a transition in the making.

Dawn School asks participants to think about how our patterns of behavior are largely constrained and shaped by infrastructure and architecture, and how we might reuse or remake given or inherited structures and environments to be more equitable, just, and sustainable. 

Dawn School VIII was presented as part of the exhibition con•tin•u•ums (time beyond lifetimes) curated by Patrick Jaojoco. The former Pfizer factory at 630 Flushing Ave. and the gallery in which con•tin•u•ums (time beyond lifetimes) is presented are ADA accessible.

Excerpted from the publication:

“When we first started working with Bea at the Sunview, the front window was filled with a tangle of plants, mostly overgrown spider plants and ivies, that over the course of the first winter had frozen, thawed, and froze again. Eventually they were hauled outside by an impatient film crew and never brought back (their pots still reside in the garden, sans plants). It always felt like a loss, though we get more light now, and Bea has brought in fake flowers and a couple of plastic potted plants which aren’t so bad. When Dylan started talking with Matej about a project to create an aquaponic growing structure as a sculpture in the Sunview’s window (and back yard), it was these first plants they had in mind. They had also wanted to build a garden in the Sunview’s back yard, but with the oil spill and all (you know just the largest oil spill in US history) and the toxic plumes, they had no desire to actually plant anything in the ground, fearin’ what it might bring up. They decided instead to build an indoor/outdoor mobile aquaponic sonic phonic hydroponic garden. Aquaponics is a viable system of growing plants alongside fish in a symbiotic circle of life/waste in which the fish poop is used to fertilize the plants and the plants give the fish a reason to live, which then cheers the Sunview up over the cold winter while providing fresh herbs and small vegetables to members and the public.”

SeaChange culminated in a 150-mile voyage down the Hudson River (from Troy to New York City) in a fleet of hand-crafted paper boats.  This on-the-water, durational performance lasted three weeks and served as an experiment in visualizing the impossible. The project invited collaborations with boat clubs, colleges, small presses, community centers, individual activists, artists, and art spaces – and a rotating crew of over fifty volunteer paddlers from diverse backgrounds – galvanizing communities along the river through events focused on regional climate and water concerns.

Working with organizations like Riverkeeper, Stop the Algonquin Pipeline Expansion, and with indigenous representatives from Algonquin, Wampanoag, and visiting Lakota tribes, SeaChange revealed how fossil fuel extraction and transport threatens the river ecosystem and affects low-income communities around the country. Along the way, we collected narratives of community response to climate change and shared them, both in an online journal and in public talks aboard the historic ship Lilac moored in Battery Park City. Our arrival in New York City was marked by two culminating participatory events: the symbolic de-colonizing of an island in the East River and its dedication to global climate change refugees, and a traditional Lakota water ceremony led by tribal leaders. SeaChange posited that artists play an important role in shaping culture, in increasing civic engagement and community responsibility, and even in suggesting unconventional solutions to staggeringly complex policy and ecological issues. As we learned with SeaChange, water is an equalizer – we all live downstream, and we all require clean water – as well as a metaphor for our interdependence and interconnectivity to each other.

Credits:

This project was produced in close collaboration with Sunita Prasad, Jean Barberis, Kevin Buckland, and Amaranta Herrero and the rest of the Mare Liberum crew – Kendra, Stephan, Ben.

See Also: SeaChange Tumblr.

“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.

“My idea was to immerse myself in this maelstrom of images to establish its Geography.” ~ Chris Marker, Immemory

In 1639 a brook was built to divert water from the Charles to power mills on what was then called the East Brook.

The brook is a quiet, forgotten backwater (in some cases, even hidden – it runs in a culvert under the parking lot for the Pizzeria Uno in Dedham).

Echoes of the mills remain (Saw Mill Lane and Stone Mill Drive, which cross the brook). Centennial Dam now sits beside an apartment complex built out of a former mill on Stone Mill Drive.

The trees all clump together into some sort of treeness. The water… is it shallow? Is it water? Is it dried out? Give me a second and I’ll look up the weather. When are these images from? This is a memory of theriver. Made for passing by. Odd that the whole of it was made in a single take. When was that moment, when all was memorized? Is this the now-river or something else — older-river? It is hard to navigate from here. You can’t navigate a moment anyway. I’m trying to find my way through the cloud into the wilderness. Where is the dark matter we know exists? Are there any missing masses if you stop stopping to explain? Where is the way through the quote-unquote known to the still quote-unquote unknowable?

Can we click off the known layer and find ourselves only in the real thing?  Even a simulation of the real thing would be better than this.  We are training our eyes not to see beyond that which we know, that which has been written.  As if there was nothing else but that which had been written.

Prior Dawn Schools have investigated: the social and labor relationships in the industrial infrastructure around Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY, the closing of a Ford plant in St. Paul, Minnesota, and signs of de-gentrification in the East Village.  In the Summer 2011, Dawn School was held at MASSMoCA at North Adams, MA, at the invitation of Bureau for Open Culture, which included a visit to Specialty Minerals, a quarry and mineral processing facility in neighboring Adams, MA. In 2017 Dawn School will be held as part of the exhibition con•tin•u•ums (time beyond lifetimes) curated by Patrick Jaojoco.

Wake before dawn. Take a walk. Watch the day emerge. Discuss.

Alarm:

Dawn Alarm

—

Dawn School 8: Dawn School to the former Pfizer Building, NY (2017)

Dawn School 7: Dawn School to Newtown Creek, NY (2015)

Dawn School 6: Dawn School to San Pedro, CA (2014)

Dawn School 5: Dawn School to Specialty Minerals, Adams, MA, with MassMoCA/Bureau for Open Culture (2011)

Dawn School 4: Dawn School to the East Village for Psygeoconflux festival (2010)

Dawn School 3: Dawn School to Minneapolis Airport (2010)

Dawn School 2: Dawn School to Prince Edward Island (2010)

Dawn School 1: Dawn School to School of the Future, Brooklyn, NY (2010)

Preamble:

“The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.”

~ The Waves, Virginia Woolf

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.