This week I took the list of suggested artists and spent some time finding more about what they do, and how their projects relate to and inform mine. without further ado:
Fritz Haeg
Since we had trouble watching the video last week:
Fritz Haeg runs all manner of online projects, but the one that interested me the most was Edible Estates, which focuses on the issue of lawns. Lawn care accounts for 20-40% of residential water use, and in terms of surface area can be considered the fifth largest crop in the United States, and yet it produces no useful product, and contributes to the runoff of pesticides and fertilizer into the water supply.
In Edible Estates, regular homeowners across the United States are invited to have their front yards replanted in a more sustainable way, either by incorporating vegetables and herbs that can be harvested, or by creating a more natural habitat for wildlife in the area.
In the video above, Haeg says, "I love the idea of this super modest gesture of one person, on their own private land, in their own front lawn - [that] is a very public gesture." Aside from the shared focus of environmental issues, I think that this quote speaks to me in the same way that my own project does because its about bridging the community impact with the private effort. The word "modest" is a really awesome one - one person's small change can have a voice!
Where its different, I think, is that Edible Estates exists almost entirely in the physical world. There's a web site that has pictures, and some news, but its not a place you come back to, or use in any daily context. I want my project to sit more evenly between the online and the physical, where you actually use the website as a tool on a regular basis.
Brook Singer
SuperFund365 was a side project that came out of a documentary. Brook Singer was putting together a film about how the EPA was reponding to the events of 9/11. The project struggled, and Singer started 365 as a way to get all the information she was gathering out there before the movie. The word Superfund comes from the EPA program of the same name that is tasked with cleaning up toxic waste sites. 365 refers to the sites's overall premise of focusing on one of these Superfund sites a day and presenting all the information about it. There were other components - video interviews, responses from people living in the sites, etc - but the bulk of the site stayed true to its basic structure.
The educational nature of this project appeals to me, and is a lesson I'd like to take with me as a create my own projects. The simple idea of making a promise (in this case in the form of a site name) — to share information at a regularly scheduled interval, for a finite length of time — is a really great one. Avoiding getting overwhelmed is a big challenge for me, and this is a great example of one solution to that.
The visualization of The Superfund365 information is also really lovely! Great inspiration here:
