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.

Click here for the accompanying publication, KiteScores, released through the Socrates site.

1903, May 6, Wednesday At Conn Ave.
AREA OF TRIANGLES.
Area of 100 cm. triangle = 4330.000
Area of 50 cm. triangles = 1082.500
Area of 25 cm. triangles = 270.625

WEIGHTS OF WINGED TETRAHEDRAL CELLS.
Grammes per Square metre. 25 cm. Cell. 50 cm. 50 cm. Cell. 100 cm. Cell. 100 5.4125
21.65 86.60 200 10.8250 43.30 173.20 300 16.2375 64.95 259.80 400 21.6500 86.60
346.40 500 27.0625 108.25 433.00 600 32.4750 129.90 519.60 700 37.8875 151.55
606.20 800 43.3000 173.20 692.80 900 48.7125 194.85 779.40 1000 54.1250 216.50
866.00

~ From Alexander Graham Bell’s notebooks. Library of Congress.

Kite Scores was a monthly publication series to accompany Accidental Flight, a multi-modal public sculpture, performance, and publication series that explores the aesthetic, conceptual, corporeal/somatic and transcendent aspects of flight, invention, technology and collaboration. Commissioned for the Emerging Artist Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park, the piece pairs a monumental public sculpture based on the triangular-trussed kites built by Alexander Graham Bell with a monthly publication of kite patterns (“scores”) for visitors to Socrates Park to take away or download from the park’s website, assemble in public workshops, and fly.

Kite Scores functioned as research footnotes, containing both historic texts and commissioned pieces by a number of contributors on topics ranging from solar power, climate change, collaboration, the kite as an internationalist/utopian “flag to no nation,” and flight as an escape path.

Click here to download PDFs of KiteScores, released through the Socrates site.

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.”

During the fair, the shed served as cover for the collective’s bookmaking equipment / bindery as well as a pop-up shop for Red76 books, some extra special goods, and other contributions (publications, ephemera) by friends engaged in the fight for housing, shared control of public space – right to the city fights, occupations and re-imaginings of our experience(s) of the urban fabric.

After the fair the bookshed was moved to the lot of Frank Traynor, who was working as an art handler at the fair and expressed interest in it.  It was eventually incorporated into The Perfect Nothing Catalog, Traynor’s backyard art shanty/gallery located behind Signal Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn.