The Flock House is a re-envisioning of how communities deal with disaster followed by a steadily encroaching sea.  Imagine a community where everything is mobile.  Much like many refugee exoduses throughout history, but prospering through their nomadic path.
 
The scenario:
Effects of climate change have ravaged the world.  Sea levels rise in front of you and deserts encroach behind. Survival is keeping your community on the move.  Months between rains and little access to fresh water mandate finding new ways to live.  Moving every couple of years to keep up with the invading tides, and dwindling food sources, a new type of home emerges - the Flock House.

The Flock House finds your community living behind a protective tsunami shield, collecting diminishing rainwater, and growing food in hanging gardens with reclaimed wastewater. 

Conventional wastewater treatment plants are too big, too energy intensive, too chemically dependent and, perhaps most importantly, too stationary.  The Flock House natural water treatment system allows your community to quickly establish new systems in each successive move.  Treatment ponds and wetlands are left behind and on-board nurseries provide quick replacement. Aquatic plants and microorganisms leverage natural processes to supply your community with consistent, coveted water. - From Icon Magazine

Tressie Word’s In-process Water and Wastewater Systems Diagrams

These diagrams are the first draft for the Flock House water and wastewater systems.

Flock House Residency, paul lloyd sargent: epilogue

This is a three-part post, the epilogue of my week in Mary Mattingly’s Flock House.

Part 1: Five Days of Trash

On Monday, I went back to Smack Mellon to help Ian take down the installation, so as not to leave everyone with all my trash.  I separated it by type, bagged it, and documented what I’d collected in just approximately a half-hour of collecting each day.  Here’s what I’d gathered:

It breaks down like this: one 50 gal bag of plastic, metal, and glass recyclable materials; 2 and 1/2 13gal bags of 5¢ returnable glass, plastic, and metal containers; one 10gal bag of plastic bag and other packaging waste; one 10gal bag of styrofoam and other foam waste; one 13gal bag of paper recycling; approximately 100 plastic bottles caps; 15 [re]usable plastic shopping bags; one small bag of various junk; one biodegradable “plastic” shopping bag; various odds and ends including two working lighters, three dead batteries, numerous cigarette butts, three wine corks, a toy shoe, an old softball, a shoe insole, three working pens, a plastic film canister, and a dog’s chew toy…

Part 2: The Toll

Barring any weird diseases I may have picked up from collecting some of this stuff (I really should be wearing gloves, though I always forget that part), I came away with only a few minors cuts and scratches.  The rocks were the tough part, as the skin on my knees was pretty raw each night, even though I was only climbing around for less than an hour each day:

Part 3: Waterfront Usage

Spending a week in DUMBO’s waterfront was good for me.  I had no idea how much activity there is in that tiny chunk of park right there.  In five days I saw lots of different iterations of land usage: there were kids in the little fenced-in play area, with mothers and nannies; there were large school buses full of of summer camp kids running around in the grass and on the beach; there were hundreds of people who likely work in the area eating their lunches there each day; there were countless photographers, ranging from complete amateurs to gear-head pros, shooting thousands of pictures of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, the Manhattan skyline, fashion models, and each other; there were kayakers both pro and amateur; and there were lots of dog walkers.

Here are a few images by day:

A private boat on Wednesday morning.  I believe they were fishing.

On Thursday, a NYS Police boat racing down the East River.

On Friday, the first of two days of very serious outrigger kayak races.

On Saturday, the kayak racers in action as a large barge navigates upriver.

On Sunday, the Gowanus Dredgers offer free kayaking to anyone interested.

*      *      *      *      *     

Thanks again to Mary, Sara Reisman, Ian Daniel, and Suzanne Kim for the opportunity to participate in and help with this little experiment.  Now go paddle the Brooklyn waterfront—but please don’t litter.

-paul

Flock House Residency, paul lloyd sargent: day five

Last day in the Flock House.  I was just starting to get used to this routine, too.  Oh well.  I also realized, as I was cleaning up my last batch of gathered trash, that I kinda blew the opportunity to do an organizing project via Flock House/Smack Mellon.  Not sure why I didn’t think of it before but I should have used this weekend to recruit people to join me in collecting the trash from the Brooklyn waterfront.  Then come up with some kind of collaborative project to make something out of the trash we gathered.  Hmmm, next time.

Jen came to visit me in the Flock House today.  She hit her head rather hard on one of the hanging plant buckets (I might recommend a redesign for tall people) but she was a good sport about it. 

Then she went kayaking in Brooklyn Bridge Park.  It’s free each Sunday.  It’s run by the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club.  I need to link up with them.  I typically spend so much of the summer in the North Country that I don’t know nearly enough about the NYC waterfront.  Hence why I did the “hydronym: erie basin meets erie basin” BIKE BOX project.  Now I need to get to know Gowanus and other NYC waterways.

Today’s trash seemed to beg for engulfing the Flock House as much as I could with one day left.  So I did my best:

And so, for the last day’s drawing, I mused about what it might have looked like if I’d had more time and lamented that, despite what must amount to five huge trash bags filled with debris, I barely made a dent in the Brooklyn waterfront trashscape:

-paul

Flock House Residency, paul lloyd sargent: day four

I got a little carried away with today’s “morning exercise”: Though I probably only spent an hour or so gathering this garbage, I picked up a bunch more stuff than previous days so far.  I wish I could keep doing this for a few weeks so that the trash would eventually envelop the Flock House entirely—not that I think that was Mary’s intention but that it pretty well sums up how I feel about the overwhelming nature of trash.  You can see here that I included more shredded plastic and more paper trash today:

I decided that, for this project, unlike with my Freed: Maquette for an American River project, where I build artificial rivers out of trash I collect in communities along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, I would actually rinse this stuff off.  Smack Mellon is kinda upscale for the way I usually treat a space for something like this, so I quickly washed off the worst of dirt, rinsed out the stale stench of sun-cooked Gatorade, and shook out all the ants, spiders, and earwhigs that invariably live in this kind of trash.  Here’s today’s haul pre-rinse cycle:

It’s funny, though I went to the opening of the exhibition and was totally art-crushy and too shy to go talk with Mierle Laderman Ukeles, it didn’t really dawn on me until yesterday that her infamous “Touch Sanitation” project is displayed all but ten feet away from me and my little beach/park cleanup installation in the Flock House:

I love that piece, love her work, and am really grateful to Mary for including me in something alongside such a hero of mine.  So in a rather fanboyish move, here’s a little cross-gallery art conversation imagery:

Ukeles’s “Touch Sanitation” documentation with Mary Mattingly’s Flock House reflected appropriately in the glass.

And a shot of my humble little trash piles, in homage to both Mierle and Mary, as a tiny part of a long line of socially responsible public practice projects:

And lastly, Day Four’s drawings and little rants about the various types of trash that I tend to find while cleaning up the waterfront of Brooklyn Bridge Park:

-paul

Flock House Residency, paul lloyd sargent: day three

As much I can’t stand the prevalence of the trash I gather…it really is overwhelmingly everywhere…I do have to admit to finding aesthetic beauty in the weird mini-landscapes that I discover (and thus ruin) when I set out to forage.  Today I decided to document one specific set of these kinds of trashscapes: trash lodged within waterfront rocks.

Today’s trash contained a lot more styrofoam than previous days.  I think I’d been subconsciously avoiding the foam pieces I saw because it’s so obnoxious the way it falls apart even as you try to pick it up.  The claim that our oceans are swiftly becoming a soup of toxic plastics and other chemicals seems all the more real if you have ever tried to keep even a tiny (say 10’ x 10’) plot of waterfront 100% clean.  It’s impossible. 

The big stuff, the stuff I tend to collect in projects like this, is the easy part.  It’s those millions upon millions of shredded plastic bags, scraps of styrofoam cups, crumbling insulation foam, fragments of beach toys, straws, plastic cutlery, decayed water bottles, shattered lighters, bottle caps, and the like that you just can’t pick up, can’t get out of the rocks, the sand, or the water.  When you note that plastics such as these didn’t exist 60+ years ago and multiply by the exponential population explosion and…well, we really will be what we eat (and drink) soon enough.

On a lighter note, I found this today:

My first thought was that it was a sad find: a corrective shoe for a baby with malformed legs.  Then I wondered if it was some sort of ridiculous dog-owner paraphernalia, like a tiny Timberland work boot for a pedigree pup.  As I cleaned it off, I discovered exactly what it is (and yet another answer to the question “why do they hate us so much?”): it is a tiny suede hiking boot for a Build-A-Bear brand teddy bear.  Accessories for your teddy bear, now floating in our oceans, lakes, and rivers.  Delicious.

So after arranging all the trash that I found this morning…

…I drew a couple of pictures and ranted a bit…

…and watered the Flock House plants.                                                          

-paul

Flock House Residency, paul lloyd sargent: day two

This morning I decided that I’d document the bike route I’ve been taking to get down here, so here it is, according to GoogleMaps:

And here it is, according to me and my amazing rendering skills:

Basically, this is what the trip looks like, as documented by cell phone camera, starting in Crown Heights at the corner of Empire and Washington and wandering on down toward DUMBO…

In keeping with my daily routine here, I spent the first half-hour this morning cleaning up more junk off of the DUMBO beachfront.  This is what I collected today:

-paul

Flock House Residency, paul lloyd sargent: day one

Working on lots of little things over this week in Mary’s Flock House.  Need to finish up my article about C.U.P. for Proximity Magazine, submit a proposal with Jenna Loyd for our comparative border video installation for the Strong & Chata show in Chicago, shoot the video component for my entry to Jordan Dalton’s Beyond the Multitude tribute to Scajaquada Creek show in Buffalo and continue work on my hydronym: erie basin meets erie basin project (see a short video from the tour here) about the Red Hook waterfront that I started for Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown’s BIKE BOX exhibition at Devotion Gallery. 

But I figured I’d do a little morning exercise here each day, starting off with a half-hour trash clean up around the DUMBO waterfront.  In just the first half-hour of my first day here, I collected this:

And I had a lot of competition.  At 11am on a Monday, there were three separate groups cleaning up the tiny Brooklyn Bridge Park right in front of Smack Mellon. 

There was some sort of army of “friends of the park” type volunteers, all very excited to pick up trash, weed the grounds, and rake the play areas:

There was a crew of youth who looked like they got dragged there against their will but were at least enjoying the sunny day (and those “grabby extender” things):

And then there were the two city workers for whom this was just a job and not at all a field trip or feel good volunteerism or art or whatever:

And I most likely just looked like a sweaty, out of work guy picking up 5-cent returnables (which I guess I basically am):

-paul

ecoarttech indeterminate hike #4

Watchtower Hike > This is our fourth and final indeterminate hike inspired by the Flock House.  From Smackmellon follow this southwesterly indeterminate hike under the Brooklyn Bridge and over to Hillside Park. There are two lookout points along this trail that are known for providing close encounters with canines, pigeons, starlings, and human “others.” We look forward to your image documentation uploads from the field. -ecoarttech

ecoarttech indeterminate hike #3

Dumbo Hardware Hike > From the Flock House take a trip south down under the BQE. This indeterminate hike circles down near Dumbo Hardware. Stop, be very still, and you might encounter some wildness in the everyday at one of the four lookout points along this hike. -ecoarttech