News – Page 9 – Meredith Drum

My collaborators and I presented a prototype of Oyster City in October in NYC. To see documents of the prototype visit our Flickr set. We also presented a workshop at the New School as part of the MobilityShifts: International Future of Learning Summit. We were pleased to be part of this summit, a week of events exploring digital fluencies in a mobile world and nontraditional learning opportunities outside of schools and universities. Oyster City is a game and walking tour enabled by an augmented reality browser developed for the iPhone/iPad. The piece makes visible social, political, ecological and gastronomic histories of oysters in lower Manhattan and New York Harbor. Our project provides an active experience for the user/player/reader/actor and a meaningful place-based tool for learning. During the workshop we discussed investigative research of local spaces and then together sketched design-narratives and ergodic structures to make hidden histories visible. The Oyster City team is Meredith Drum, Rachel Stevens and Phoenix Toews. Read more about our MobilityShifts workshop here.

OYSTER CITY at Mobility Shifts, New School in October 2011

My collaborators, Rachel Stevens and Phoenix Toews, and I will be presenting our new project Oyster City at the Mobility Shifts: International Future of Learning conference at the New School in NYC on October 12th. The workshop description is here. The project we are presenting, Oyster City, is an augmented reality walking tour of lower Manhattan focused on the history of humans and oysters in NY Harbor, including information about recent initiatives to restore water qualities by reintroducing oyster reefs to the harbor.

Dead Horse Bay on Big Screen 6th Ave NYC in Aug / Sept

My short video, Dead Horse Bay will screen in late August and September on/at the Big Screen Plaza, 851 Ave of the Americas (tween 29th and 30th) NYC as part of Artport’s Cool Stories II. Thank you to Corinne Erni and Anne-Marie Melster for organizing the Artport screenings. The schedule for August: Sunday, 8/14, 10-11 am; Monday 8/15, 6-7 pm; Saturday 8/21, 12-1 pm; Sunday 8/22, 7-8 pm. For September schedule please see http://bigscreenplaza.com/schedule/

Fishing: A Playable Possible Future

As part of my University of California Institute of the Arts Grant, I have been working on a project called Fishing: A Playable Possible Future. The piece, now in the R&D phase, will be formed as a playable nonfiction concerned with declining global fish population, a food shortage issue with potential dire consequences for humans and the ecosystem. The work is currently in a research and development phase led by artist Meredith Drum. For more information about the project, please see my research and development blog: fishingplayablepossiblefuture.com

Louisiana Re-storied

I recently completed a documentation video of my interactive installation Louisiana Re-storied. Here it is:

LOUISIANA RE-STORIED is an interactive, documentary installation concerning environmental justice and pollution governance in Southern Louisiana. The work examines a particular geography, the stretch of Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where small, predominantly working class, African American communities are sandwiched uncomfortably between large petrochemical plants and oil refineries. In recent years, community groups, in collaboration with scientist activists, have won seminal legal victories and out-of-court settlements, initiatives to protect their health from toxic emissions. The piece places these current narratives in dialogue with Robert Flaherty’s 1948 Louisiana Story regarding the relationship between the petroleum industry and human and ecosystem wellbeing and considers how a documentary project can contribute to citizen activism demanding stronger pollution regulation. As a hypertext, the participants navigate through 24 narrative threads. The deeper participants venture into the work, the more nuanced their understanding of the region’s controversies. The installation includes a large projection and a touch screen, with an interface made up of images of common products produced by petrochemical feedstocks, referencing the visitor’s potential daily consumption. User interaction is governed by a MAX patch.

AIR History Video

In 2008 I created a short (16-minute) documentary about AIR Gallery, the first artist-run, all-women gallery in the U.S. Founded in 1972, the gallery is still going strong and is home to many interesting artists and runs several important public programs. Esteemed artists Nancy Spero, Dotty Attie, Mary Beth Edelson, Agnes Denes, Ana Mendieta and others began their careers at AIR> The AIR documentary was produced as part of the AIR History show, on exhibit at Fales Library and the Tracey / Barry Gallery at New York University from May through October 2008. The video was produced by Kat Griefen and AIR Gallery. Major funding was provided by Fales Library. Camera, editing and directing by Meredith Drum.