Flock House is an airborne habitat that imagines, projects, and adds another level onto the city’s skyline. On June 20, it will be a living prototype, inhabitants will imagine and experience some level of the capsule living in a future dependent on mobile cities (the flock house will have wheels on the bottom) while the elevated habitat will be able to cope with rising sea levels.

In 2025, the Global Urban Observatory predicts that city dwellers will reach 5 billion. New Yorker’s can: move to the water, inhabit Governor’s Island, crowd Long Island, and/or take to the sky. Flock House is a proposal for a space where “the sky’s the limit...”

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

  1. mamiebarca reblogged this from flockhouse
  2. flockhouse posted this