[ISEA2011] Pane: Eliz­a­beth Monoian & Robert Ferry – New Aes­thetic En­ergy In­fra­struc­ture and the Land Art Gen­er­a­tor Ini­tia­tive

Panel Statement

Panel: Public Art of the Sustainable City

Through a bi­en­nial de­sign com­pe­ti­tion, the Land Art Gen­er­a­tor Ini­tia­tive gath­ers ideas that seek to cre­ate sub­stan­tive mod­els for change and that ad­dress pub­lic art within the urban fab­ric of a sus­tain­able fu­ture. The goal of LAGI is to de­sign and con­struct a se­ries of large-scale site-spe­cific pub­lic art in­stal­la­tions that uniquely com­bine art with util­ity scale clean en­ergy gen­er­a­tion. The art­works uti­lize the lat­est in re­new­able en­ergy sci­ence and in­no­vate the ap­pli­ca­tion of new tech­nolo­gies. The art it­self will con­tin­u­ously dis­trib­ute clean kilo­watts of en­ergy into the elec­tri­cal grid with each land art sculp­ture hav­ing the po­ten­tial to pro­vide power to hun­dreds or even thou­sands of homes, while ful­fill­ing its tra­di­tional role—pub­lic art as con­cep­tu­ally en­gag­ing amenity to our com­mon space. In this talk we will dis­cuss both the 2010 LAGI com­pe­ti­tion for the United Arab Emi­rates and the up­com­ing 2012 com­pe­ti­tion for Fresh Kills Park in New York City. landartgenerator.org

  • Eliz­a­beth Monoian is an in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary artist and de­signer who uses the In­ter­net, pub­lic spaces, elec­tronic noise, video, and per­for­mance. She is cur­rently work­ing on large-scale in­ter­na­tional pub­lic art pro­jects that both ad­dress and ex­pose mod­els of en­vi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­ity. Her work has screened and ex­hib­ited in­ter­na­tion­ally in venues in­clud­ing: The First Bi­en­nial of Oran, Al­ge­ria; Video’ Ap­part, In­ter­na­tional Video Art Bi­en­nial, Paris & Dubai; the XXIII Moscow In­ter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val, Moscow, Rus­sia; An­thol­ogy Film Archives, NYC; Open Screen Bel­grade, Bel­grade, Ser­bia; Fes­ti­val of Ac­tual Kino, Novosi­birsk, Rus­sia; The Ki­asma Mu­seum of Con­tem­po­rary Art, Helsinki, Fin­land; and the In­ter­na­tional Media Art Fes­ti­val at the Ar­men­ian Cen­ter of Con­tem­po­rary Ex­per­i­men­tal Art, Yere­van, Ar­me­nia. Eliz­a­beth re­ceived an MFA from Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity and is cur­rently As­sis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Art & De­sign at Zayed Uni­ver­sity, Dubai. She is co-founder of the Land Art Gen­er­a­tor Ini­tia­tive and Stud­ied Im­pact De­sign.
  • Robert Ferry, RA, LEED AP BD+C, is a USA licensed architect and a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. His architectural focus is on designing buildings and other public objects that go above and beyond current popular notions of sustainability to achieve complete harmony with their local and global environments and with the people that use them. While based in the UAE, he has consulted on such projects as MASDAR City and ADNOC HQ. He is the designer of less-than-zero-impact or positive-impact buildings that double as a renewable energy power-plants. He is an Ambassador in the UAE for the Living Building Institute. He is the Principal and Co-Founder of the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI). LAGI is a worldwide public arts initiative that offers the opportunity for collaborative teams of artists, architects, landscape architects and designers, working with engineers and scientists, to create new ways of thinking about what renewable energy generation looks like. The LAGI project calls on design teams to conceive of large-scale public artworks for specific sites that, in addition to their conceptual beauty, also have the ability to harness clean renewable energy from nature, convert the energy to electrical power, and distribute the power to the utility grid of the city. The project has received featured articles in numerous local and international press outlets, including The New York Times and Dwell Magazine.   studiedimpact.com

Full text (PDF) p. 1744-17590