Animal Species

project::endangered species

ENDANGERED SPECIES – This temporary public art project uses transit vehicles and their environments as a medium, investigating relationships between city and region, social and environmental values. From January into April 2011, four Endangered Species buses will circulate throughout San Francisco, dispatched to different routes each day.

FROM THE PROJECT SITE: The idea came when I learned the SFMTA’s “Transit Effectiveness Project” was measuring maintenance, driving efficiencies, ridership statistics, the bread and butter of transportation engineers work. But no one was discussing aesthetics, or what wider impacts and meanings transit has. It seemed to me that an assessment of effectiveness should include these criteria too.

Like street trees, sidewalk cafes, and parks, public transit vehicles can be lively, as well as useful visual elements of everyday urban life. But the buses are so assaulted by advertising, it’s as if our transit system is not our own. But whose environment is it? How can we best look after the places we live? Public transit is about pooling and sharing resources. Bringing the bus together with local ecosystems and  vulnerable animal species was a natural fit once I started to think about it that way.

The project is also a metaphor of the relationships it addresses, like a fractal whose structure is similar at different scales. The images on the buses are at the center, but they are activated as the buses circulate through different neighborhoods and circumstances. And in parallel to the buses, there is the project website, which opens doors to information and partnerships with area non-profits whose work addresses the questions the project is raising: what is beauty in everyday life? what are our responsibilities to the resources we use? How is ownership and power divided between people – and between species?

As the project evolves I’ll be updating this webpage. For more on how I’ve been thinking about Endangered Species, please see my article “In and Out of Place” in ANTENNAE: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. And for more on the species and organizations behind the project, please browse the project website. Photographs of the buses are posted on Flickr here.

I am grateful to the many people who have helped with Endangered Species, as well to these supporting institutions: Community Initiatives, a San Francisco-based fiscal sponsor which is a 501 (c)(3) organization; the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority; SPUR; and the San Francisco Arts Commission, Potrero Nuevo Fund of Tides Foundation, Zellerbach Family Fund, San Francisco Foundation, Adobe Community Foundation, and Christensen Fund.

via project::endangered species.

Strange beasts in Shrewsbury

Theo Jansen is unveiling one of  his new wind-driven creatures at Shrewsbury’s Shift-Time: A Festival of Ideas this July. This gives us an excuse to show this piece of much-loved video of his “strandbeests”:

 

STRANDBEESTEN_TRAILER from Alexander Schlichter on Vimeo.

Shift-time is taking its inspiration from the Darwin celebrations this year. It also features a new sound/video work Follow The Voice by the great Marcus Coates:

In a playful echo of Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Marcus Coates’ new film work, Follow the Voice establishes striking parallels between a range of familiar man-made sounds and an equally evocative chorus of animal cries and calls. Chasing pockets of sound around the urban landscape of Shrewsbury, (the ‘beep’ of the supermarket checkout; the siren of a reversing delivery lorry) and by slowing down or speeding up his recordings, Coates reveals an extraordinary likenesses with the natural calls of animal species. Follow the Voice captures the heightened feeling of interconnectedness at the heart of Darwin’s view of the world, and reminds us of the spirit of curiosity and discovery that infuses his ideas.

Follow The Voice premieres on July 11 and is installed in the Unitarian Church where Darwin worshipped as a child.

More on Shift-Time here.

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