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
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