Over the past few years I have been talking with friends in the California Building about creating a live art installation like the ones I did in the 80’s and 90’s. John Kremer, one of the building owners suggested years ago that the phonebooth on the first floor might be an excellent location.
This could be a building-wide collaboration. Jim Gregory, Richard Bonk and I have been making sketches during Friday night dinners with Aribert Munzner. Greg Volker, on the 6th floor has deep expertise with tropical fish. El Stewart, who is now sharing a studio in the building, knows more about plant life and paludariums than anyone I know. Evan Thomas and I have been toying with an idea to make the installation interactive by including an chatbot powered by the new ChatGPT technology. Other artist may be added to this list of collaborators as we discover new avenues to pursue and other expertise in the building.
So why not. This page is our first step.
First stab at how it might look
The Space: The phonebooth is just a recessed space on the first floor of the California Building between the foyer and the mailbox room. It’s where the stairs go up to other floors. It’s 34″ wide, 82.5″ tall and 23″ deep.
Cabinet: So it looks like we need a vertical cabinet on rollers to move it in and out for maintenance. Also, it can be rolled to different studios depending on which artist needs to work on it.
Note: as I look at these images, I’m wonder if a plywood cabinet is wise give the amount of humidity the artwork will generate.
Elements: We know we want a place for a fish tank and above it a place for plants and animals. We will need another space for utilities, which usually means plumbing and electricity. See Life Support Systems one of my first live-art installation.
I’m sure between Volker and Bonk we should be able to build a watertight fish tank. Richard Bonk worked for many years creating zoo displays.
Note: I can already see a problem here. There may not be enough space to run tubes from the water source, through the pump in the utilities at the bottom, them up to the top.
Keeping the water clean and healthy for the plants and the animals is going to be a tricky issue. We have to be able to regulate the temperature, humidity and PH for a variety of plants, animals and fungi.
In the past I have used Styrofoam to great irregular interior walls the resembled earth and rock, see Plato’s Cave at the New Museum in NYC. They were temporary installations. I wonder what chemicals will leach out of Styrofoam over longer periods of time. I see this installation as evolving over a period of several years. We might need better materials than plywood and styrofoam.
The white Styrofoam comes in convenient 4-inch sheets. It doesn’t take long to create a cave-like interior as seen here. It does however, take some time to carve it into a believable rock formation. We might want to consider another way to create the interior, especially because we will need a lot of real soil for the plant life. That adds weight.
The image below shows the installation with wooden doors on the utilities section and clear acrylic doors on the area above the tank. These doors will have to be lockable.
Holly Tappen, a painter and Sci-fi writer expressed interest in helping. I wonder it she would be willing to help me continue with this WordPress website.
