Our background in community-engaged art and conscientious architecture merges thoughtful and deliberate research with radical creative action. The collaborative working process includes careful dialogue with the built, natural and social environments we are situated within. Each project connects with its surroundings and encourages social cohesion and considered action. Previously, our practices overlapped in rural Utah, where we have worked creating social systems and architectural interventions for a small town on the edge of the San Rafael Swell. We welcome the opportunity to shift perspective from the vast American West to Rabbit Island, a microcosm of our rapidly evolving world.
With existing technology, we’re training ourselves to see cities and islands from above, still and removed, abstractions in soft consistent colors. But when an island inhales, so does a shoreline exhale; these internal and sentient landscapes can be brought back to the life with the right set of tools. Re-contextualizing and sharing a story of place is ever-crucial because investment in landscape is the key to better stewardship of our living earth environment.
Buoys track weather, humidity, pressure, and wind, every 20 minutes. We can be human buoys. Our collaborative process of looking, listening, and translating will be represented so that someone else can root themselves into that ever-present moment of flux and feeling. From our research, we will produce a series of new living portraits of this place. Ideas include: bathymetric and topographic technical drawings through the island, stopping not at the water’s edge but continuing until a new extent is discovered; water depth measurements using rope segments; anti-data based in experience and feelings; drawings of the lakebed from exploratory diving; an island-sized drawing recording the minute changes in water level over a full day; circumambiations of the island from water; and maybe even a call-in hotline that dials a person-perspective (instead of a buoy). Like a landscape, our practice can shift, erode, accumulate and accommodate the shape of more mindful futures.
