The Reverse Ark was a project developed by Futurefarmers as artists in Residence at Pasadena City College. Futurefarmers spent 4 days in residence in the gallery working with students to create the Reverse Ark.
An inventory of limited resources inhabit the gallery– in preparation for the flood. These recycled materials were used during a four day residency to build “the Reverse Ark”. The gallery became a living laboratory for learning, inquiry and improvisation including mini-workshops, lectures, video screenings and frameworks for reflection. Invited guests included an environmental scientist, Los Angeles Mayors Office, Department of Water, a priest, and a computer scientist.
Inventory: Ratio(n)s
• Recycled Plastic waterbottles ..Amount: Enough to hold the ..collective body water of ..Amy, Michael and Stijn.
• 25 wooden-shipping pallates ..Amount: Enough to float the ..collective weight of ..Amy, Michael and Stijn.
• Recycled Cardboard ..Amount: Combined height of ..Amy, Michael and Stijn.
• Newspapers 40 days and 40 ..nights of San Francisco ..Chronicle/Los Angeles . Times/New York Times
• Projection Screen ..(10’ x 12’ made from.. ..lamenated newspapers and .. white guache) • Blackboard • Buckminster Fuller Quote ..(Pencil on Wall)
Water (40 gallons = the combined amount of water in the bodies of the three Futurefarmers collaborators. This is based on the
average percentage of the human body that is composed of water.
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Related Quote: “Should we also flood the sistine chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” -Excerpt from a full-page newspaper advertisement paid for by the Sierra Club in 1966 to provoke the public to fight the US Bureau of Reclamation’s proposal of building a series of small dams in the basin of the Grand Canyon.
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_”…If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem…” -R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
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