The Urbano Project and Artists in Context lend a hand to Mel Chin’s collaborative art piece, Fundred, this weekend, as the project celebrates its Boston kick-off. Fundred is an advocacy strategy to garner $300m in federal funding for lead decontamination efforts in New Orleans. Participants draw interpretations of U.S. $100 bills, and after 3,000,000 have been collected, they will be delivered to Congress in a vegetable oil-powered armored car, along with the request that the fake bills be exchanged for real funds.
A hand-drwan Fundred from Fort Wayne, IN
The city of Boston has pledged to raise fifteen thousand Fundreds. Participants needn’t wait for the Fundreds to come to town, as an online template will help you get involved now.
Mel Chin explains the project in his own words in the video below, from Art21.
Somerville’s speculative history/community art project by artist Tim Devin (previously seen on Groundswell here) has launched, offering a rich vision of the next 90 years, from fleets of mobile libraries to population influx due to the flooded streets of neighboring Boston. Grab a free PDF of the book, or browse the full timeline here.
We’re frequently involved in conversations about what comprises an intervention, and what makes interventions effective. The Urban Wilderness Action Center (UWAC) is expanding that line of inquiry further, asking: “What is it in which we’re intervening?”
UWAC is an Eyebeam family project, initiated by alum Jon Cohrs and in collaboration with Eyebeam Student Residents and artist Kai-Oi Jay Yung. It’s a guerrilla gardening effort, combined with a discursive online platform that seeks out the ground beyond the more common manifestations of nonhuman life in urban environments. Beyond those parks, urban farms, and the ivy that grows in abandoned lots, what is urban wilderness?
If you have an answer, submit it to UWAC here.
Some respondents will have the opportunity to present their ideas, selected by UWAC, at the international Electrosmog festival this March.
Via Eyebeam
Tomorrow night, sprout will offer a number of presentations and performances themed around money. Join us for a Food Not Bombs dinner at 7:30PM, performances begin at 8. The address is 339R Summer St., Somerville MA. We’ll have copies of Art/Work available, and a description of the performances follows:
Local musicians Jon Hersh and Kathy Fletcher playing a set of old-time tunes on banjo, fiddle, and voice.
Frank Ackerman, a research scientist at Tufts, speaks about the economics of global climate change, addressing the question, “Does it make economic sense for us to try to fight global warming?”
Shauna Gordon-McKeon, a researcher in the field of moral psychology, will perform and discuss experiments in social psychology and behavioral economics looking at how money affects our decision-making processes.
Liz Hall and Casey Engels of Artists in Context will present The Fundred Dollar Bill Project, a nation-wide drawing project started by artist Mel Chin. Audience members will contribute to the project by designing their own “fundred” dollar bills to help raise money and awareness to begin clean-up efforts of lead-contaminated soil in New Orleans.
Community members will also share personal monologues responding to the prompt “Literally, money represents gold or silver; socially, it is a status symbol; personally, it might mean everything from success to security to selling-out. What has money meant for you?”
Bilal’s tattoo design, courtesy of information aesthetics.
Wafaa Bilal (author of Shoot an Iraqi) is known for putting his body on the line. For his Domestic Tension, he lived under constant threat of a paintball gun, his Virtual Jihadi cast himself as a suicide bomber avatar. Now, back in the flesh, Bilal will soon take to a 24-hour performance, called …and Counting, in which he’ll tattoo an infographic on his body that denotes the casualties of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Designed by Kyle McDonald, the tattoo of a borderless map of Iraq includes more than 5,000 red dots representing American soldier deaths in a permanent, visible link, and more than 100,000 dots of green UV ink for Iraqi casualties, which show only under a blacklight.
Bilal’s performance takes place March 8th, and includes people of varied backgrounds reading the names of the dead as he is tattooed.
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