Interactive Documentary – Meredith Drum

Rachel and I were recently interviewed by Hester Street Collaborative for the Making of Paths to Pier 42 website. We discussed the process of creating our collaborative Fish Stories Community Cookbook as the culmination of our artist residency with Paths to Pier 42 in lower Manhattan. Interview link.

Fish Stories Community Cookbook commissioned by Paths to Pier 42 NYC 2015

Fish Stories Community Cookbook is a seafood cookbook, in progress, created by artists Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens in collaboration with residents of the Lower East Side: neighbors, non-profit organizers, commercial business people and others. The project is supported by a grant and studio space on Wall Street from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and will be a part of LMCC’s Paths to Pier 42 summer programming 2015. Visual information and documentation forthcoming.

Inspired by spiral bound cookbooks produced by local Grange chapters, the Provincetown Cookbook, and the Slingshot Organizer (collectively designed Anarchist calendar), Fish Stories will include not only recipes for cooking seafood solicited from residents, but also stories, historical recipes, drawings, maps and health and ecology information. The name Fish Stories is designed to encourage imaginative and playful contributions. It is also an homage to Allan Sekula, an artist and theorist whose work interrogates the the politics of labor and the flow of global capital in the maritime industry. We envision the cookbook as a catalyst for community engagement and an opportunity to capture the lives and cultures of people who live in the LES. The Fish Stories Community Cookbook seeks to tie everyday lives to the ecology of the rivers, harbor and estuaries of New York City.

Exhibit in the Al Fahidi Historic Neighborhood, Dubai, November 2014

My Louisiana Re-storied cinematic installation was installed in a pop-up gallery in house 40 in the Al Fahidi Historic District (formerly called Bastakiya), a wind-tower district near the creek in Dubai. I really enjoyed seeing my piece in this setting. I had a lovely time in Dubai, both at ISEA events and simply wandering around this complex and surprising city.

Installation in Dubai as part of ISEA2014

I am excited to travel to the UAE in late October to install a new version of my interactive doc Louisiana Re-storied in a gallery space in the old part of Dubai (Al Fahidi Historical District). The occasion is ISEA2014. I will also be giving an academic paper on November 5, part of the conference section of the symposium.

Enjoying a Residency at Wassaic Summer 2014

Mitch and I are pleased to be a part of the summer residency at the Wassaic Project, June-July 2014. It is a beautiful place with great people. Very happy to be here.

My animation included in the Last Brucennial, March-April

My new short animation, Countach Belfort (2m), is included in the Last Brucennial (2014), 837 Washington Street. The piece is a sketch – my attempt to think through my distress about the ease with which white collar criminals, like Jordan Belfort, free themselves from sentencing and restitution. In the Brucennial, my animation hangs right below a work by Carla Gannis. Hi Carla.

AR as Critical Practice Article to be published in AR[t]

My article, “Place-based, Somatic Augmented Reality as Critical Practice” will be published in the upcoming issue of AR[t] magazine, a publication run by researchers at the AR Lab (Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague), Delft University of Technology, and Leiden University. My article considers place-based work by Teri Rueb (a document of Rueb’s No Places With Names above) and by Manifest AR (particularly Border Memorial by John Craig Freeman and Mark Skwarek, also above). The article also seeks precedents for contemporary somatic AR in works by Jeffrey Shaw (Golden Calf, 1994) and Rebecca Allen (Coexistence, 2001). Another iteration of my research project was published as a short article in Media-N Journal, summer 2013.

PHATT-B @ Pratt – I’m hosting a panel discussion

I will be hosting a panel discussion as part of Pratt Institute’s PHATT-B, a one-day festival of electronic art. My panel starts at 11:30am and is called: Augmented Reality as Critical Practice. My panelists are Teri Rueb, Sarah Drury, Mark Skwarek, and John Craig Freeman. I am excited. Should be a good day that also features some fantastic people including a keynote by Eva and Franco Mattes (a document of their work above). If interested, please visit the event webpage. Here is the description of my panel. As the capacity of handheld devices has increased, and new augmented reality software has made production more accessible, there has been a corresponding surge of AR projects produced by artists concerned with place and situation. In what ways can these projects refocus attention in virtual and actual public spaces, and provide platforms for expanded public discourse? How do these artists produce within the boundaries of mobile AR, navigating common limitations (small screens, jumpy GPS, device dependency narrowing audience), to create meaningful experiences? This panel starts with the premise that artist-produced AR has the potential to significantly alter our relationship to cultural, political and social phenomena and to other bodies—humans, animals, plants, built structures, landforms and visible and invisible machines. Four artists producing critical place-based AR—Teri Rueb, Sarah Drury, John Craig Freeman and Mark Skwarek—will discuss their concepts, processes and choices with the audience and moderator Meredith Drum.

Images Open Studio LMCC Gov Island July 13 + 14

A few shots taken using our Oyster City app; this is just prior to our July Swing Space Open Studio on Governors Island, NYC. Rachel and I are happy that we were granted this space, March – July 2013, by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. These shots show the Aquaculture site of Oyster City being played/experienced. Oyster City is an iOS app as walking tour and game being produced by Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens in collaboration with Phoenix Toews.

Oyster City test shots out on Governor’s Island, July 2013

Rachel Stevens and I are testing different augmented reality elements for our Oyster City AR app here on Governor’s Island (NYC) during our Lower Manhattan Cultural Council swing space residency. These are screen shots of our tests. Oyster City is an environmentally focused walking tour and game as augmented reality iOS app. It will be released this summer as a free download on the Mac app store. We hope to move to other platforms soon, droid and windows. We want to expand our audience beyond those with Mac products. Our programming resources are limited, though, and programming for multi-platform takes a good bit of time so this is still on the wish list. If any programmer would like to donate time to the project, we would be thrilled.

Our Open Studio LMCC Gov’s Island

Rachel Stevens and I pose in our Oyster City studio during the LMCC open studios on Governor’s Island, May 25 and 26. We will have our second and final open studio out there on July 13 and 14, 2013. Come visit.