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WATERPOD: Autonomy and Ecology January 9 - February 6, 2010
in Exit Underground. Opening: Saturday, January 9, 7-10pm

Waterpod: Autonomy and Ecology, the sixth exhibition of the SEA (Social Envrionmental Aesthetics) program, is a survey of Waterpod™'s five-month voyage around the boroughs of New York. It includes videos, photographs, relics, art works, journal entries, and ephemera that tell the story of this unusual public art project.

Waterpod™ was a floating, sculptural structure designed as a futuristic habitat and an experimental platform for assessing the design and efficacy of living systems fashioned to create an autonomous, fully functional marine shelter.

A New York-based multinational team, led by founder and artistic director Mary Mattingly, drew upon the talents of artists, designers, builders, civic activists, scientists, environmentalists, and marine engineers to bring this cross-disciplinary collaboration to fruition in the waterways of New York City. During a global recession and within strict government guidelines, Waterpod™ managed to achieve new ways of community outreach, resource sharing, and art creation.

To fortify against the possibility of widespread climate change, desertification, overpopulation, and rising sea levels, the Waterpod offered a pathway to sustainable survival, mobility, and community building through a free, participatory project and event space that visited the five boroughs and Governors Island, for a voyage lasting from June to October 2009. The Waterpod’s mission has been to prepare, inform, and offer alternatives to current and future living spaces.
 
As a self-sufficient, navigable living space, the Waterpod showcased the critical importance of water within the natural world. Collectively embracing the richly-patterned folkways of the five boroughs of metropolitan New York, the Waterpod reified positive interactions between communities: private and public; artistic and societal; scientific and agricultural; aquatic and terrestrial >>

With a specialization in interactive architecture and an interest in nomad culture, human conditioning and sustainable living, a group of artists including Mary Mattingly, Mira Hunter, Alison Ward, Derek Hunter, Eve K. Tremblay, Carissa Carmen and Ian Daniel, worked with a team of volunteers to create Waterpod™, a floating, self-sustaining eco-habitat inhabited by artists for six months that roamed the NYC waterways as an experiment in potential future living spaces and lifestyles 50-100 years from now. Both an expression of art and life, Waterpod™ changes as is inhabitants adapt and its systems renew. Filmmakers spend the day with its crew to see what it is really like to live on a living sculpture >> Radar Seventeen: Waterpod

OCTOBER: SAYING GOODBYE TO THE WATERPOD™ CHICKENS
Marble, Rizzo, Bonsai and Gilly, the Waterpod™ chicken foursome have arrived safely in Pennsylvania, their new permanent home >>






"Do it Yourself Utopias:" Artists and community groups consider sustainable Brooklyn Living, including presentations by artists Nathaniel G. Kassel and Bryony Romer, featuring special guests Mary Mattingly and Ian Daniel of Waterpod™ Project and Stacey Murphy of BK Farmyards.

Thursday, October 8, 6 - 8 PM
At the Old Stone House, 5th Avenue between 3rd & 4th St. Brooklyn, NY 11215

What would it take for Brooklyn to grow its own food? Build with recycled materials? Strengthen local communities? "Brooklyn Utopias?" Artists will present their ideas for a more sustainable, “green” Brooklyn. They will receive feedback from guest presenters Mary Mattingly and Ian Daniel of Waterpod™ Project and BK Farmyards, who will also discuss their work building sustainable local communities. This will include hands-on demonstrations of projects you can do at home!

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