Miller Gallery
at Carnegie Mellon University
Purnell Center for the Arts
5000 Forbes Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412.268.3618
miller-gallery@andrew.cmu.edu
www.cmu.edu/millergallery

Hours:
Tues.-Sun., 12-6pm
Admission: Free

Free parking in E. Campus Garage
on weekends + after 5pm Mon.-Fri.

WATCH + LISTEN

The Institute for Unstable Media, Rotterdam: Cesar Harada (Open_Sailing) talk

NPR/All Things Considered: Stephanie Smith interview

The Colbert Report: Mitchell Joachim (Terreform ONE) interview

GET INVOLVED

29 CHAINS TO THE MOON
- Sign up for a workshop this Friday with Open_Sailing, 1-4pm Sept. 11 @ Miller Gallery. Limited spots! Reserve via email: miller-gallery@andrew.cmu.edu

- Submit your mind-blowing visionary idea for the future by Sunday, Sept. 13 to Visionary Ideas for this World or Another @ Waffle Shop

- Share items, info, resources, communal experiences now in the Commons(Commune) kiosk in the Miller Gallery

- Start communing + build community at WeCommune.com

- Sign up for a workshop with Stephanie Smith at 3pm, Oct. 8 in the Miller Gallery. Limited spots - reserve via email: miller-gallery@andrew.cmu.edu


EXPERIMENTAL GEOGRAPHY
- Map out sites that are significant to you as someone who lives, works and plays in Pittsburgh. Return to the Miller Gallery for inclusion in our next exhibition.


MILLER GALLERY
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UPCOMING EVENTS

Sept. 24, Thurs.
KEEP IT SLICK opens
@ Abandon Normal Devices: Festival of New Cinema and Digital Culture, with Liverpool John Moores University and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool, UK

Oct. 3, Sat.
9-10:30pm: Visionary Ideas for this World or Another, organized by Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski @ The Waffle Shop, 124 S. Highland at Baum

Oct. 8, Thurs.
3pm: Workshop with Stephanie Smith
@ Miller Gallery, Purnell Center for the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University
5pm: School of Art Lecture Series: Stephanie Smith @ Kresge Theatre, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University

Oct. 16, Fri.
6-8pm: EXPERIMENTAL GEOGRAPHY Reception

Oct. 22, Thurs.
7:30-9pm: Dorkbot: Lenka Clayton ("A Piece of the Moon"), Eric Singer (from LEMUR) @ Brillobox Upstairs, 4104 Penn Ave.

Nov. 17, Tues.
5-6:30pm: School of Art Lecture Series: Claire Bishop @ McConomy Auditorium, Carnegie Mellon University Center

ABOUT US

Images:
Fab Tree Hab Village, Terreform ONE (Mitchell Joachim, Maria Aiolova, Landon Young, Javier Arbona, Lara Greden), 2009; 29 Chains to the Moon exhibition poster; Commons(Commune), Stephanie Smith, 2009; Miller Gallery's new Store

THIS FRIDAY, SEPT. 11

Join the Miller Gallery, guest curator Andrea Grover from Houston, and Open_Sailing artists Hiromi Ozaki and Cesar Harada from London for a full day of activities launching our first exhibition of the season,
29 Chains to the Moon: Artists' Schemes for a Fantastic Future.

1-4pm:
Open_Sailing Workshop
Limited spots! Reserve via email: miller-gallery@andrew.cmu.edu

"In the time of Buckminster Fuller, the emergence of communication technologies forecasted singular global strategies for survival. Singular strategies fail to satisfy individual irrational needs in a complex society and fragile ecosystem. Today’s technology offers the potential to shift the paradigm of survival from one grand strategy to multiple individual or group strategies.

Open_Sailing is the community and infrastructure that is producing the International_Ocean_Station_1, a universal cultural symbol not made by a small closed group of rocket scientists, but by an emerging group of motivated individuals.

During the Open_Sailing Workshop, we will explore concepts of Object Oriented Politics and Adhocracy (an adaptable organization that does not have a fixed bureaucratic structure). We will use Glocal (Global + Local) thinking to design an Open Architecture. The workshop will be a physical experience – we will dance, draw, design and brainstorm about the future of our energy infrastructure, web 3.0 (virtual + physical), and novel collaborative social models. See you there!" - Open_Sailing

Open_Sailing is a multi-disciplinary international team led by Cesar Harada and Hiromi Ozaki that is revolutionizing the concept of seasteading and social production of ideas and technologies. The Open_Sailing prototype is a “living architecture” at sea, composed of multiple dwellings, ocean farming modules, and an amoeba-like design that can expand and contract, based on the existence of calculated risks. “Open_Sailing acts like a superorganism, a cluster of intelligent units that can react to their environment, change shape and reconfigure themselves. They talk to each other. They’re modular, re-pluggable, pre-broken, post-industrial.” The concept for Open_Sailing came from creating a geography of fear – a world “potential threat map” that highlighted the centers of greatest risk (pandemics, high-human density, recent violent conflicts, hypothetical nuclear fall-outs, tsunami risk, potential exposure to rising sea level, and so on), to determine the safest areas on Earth, which happened to be at sea. Open_Sailing was awarded the 2009 Prix Ars Electronica in “THE NEXT IDEA” category, and is underway with construction of an advanced prototype for their floating laboratory.


5-6pm:
Carnegie Mellon University Lecture Series
Gallery Tour with Curator Andrea Grover

Andrea Grover is an independent curator, artist and writer. In 1998, she founded Aurora Picture Show, a now recognized center for filmic art that began in her living room as “the world’s most public home theater.” She curated the first exhibition exploring the phenomenon of crowdsourcing in art (Phantom Captain, apexart, New York, 2006), and, with artist Jon Rubin, organized an exhibit in which worldwide participants created a photo-sharing album of their imaginings on Tehran (Never Been to Tehran, Parkinggallery, Tehran, Iran, 2008) She recently curated screenings for both Dia Art Foundation, New York, and The Menil Collection, Houston. 29 Chains to the Moon continues her research into cooperation and distributed thinking across disciplines.

This event is co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Education.


6-8pm:
2009: A Taste Odyssey Reception
The first 100 people will receive a miracle berry tablet for a taste-tripping adventure.

All events are free and open to the public. Parking is free after 5pm.
@ Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Purnell Center for the Arts

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

29 CHAINS TO THE MOON:
Artists' Schemes for a Fantastic Future
Guest curated by Andrea Grover
Organized by the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University
Through Dec. 6, 2009

Artists: Open_Sailing, Stephanie Smith, Mitchell Joachim/Terreform ONE

In the Reading Room: The Buckminster Fuller Institute, Lowry Burgess, International Space University, The Seasteading Institute

In 1938, the visionary designer R. Buckminster Fuller wrote Nine Chains to the Moon, his radical proposal for improving the quality of life for all humankind via progressive design and maximization [1] of the world’s finite resources. The title was a metaphor for cooperation – if all of humankind stood on each other’s shoulders we could complete nine chains to the moon. Today, the population of the planet has increased more than three times to 6.7 billion (we could now complete 29 chains to the moon), and the successful distribution of energy, food, and shelter to over 9 billion humans by 2050 requires some fantastic schemes. Like Fuller’s revelation from five decades earlier, 29 Chains to the Moon features artists who put forth radical proposals, from seasteads and tree habitats to gift-based cultures, to make the world work for everyone.

Nostalgia for our alternate future is in the ether on this convergence of anniversaries: 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the centennial of Futurism, and the quadricentennial of the Newtonian telescope. Over the last year, major art museums have presented exhibitions of visionary design and architecture [2], meant to reignite that spark of collective imagination that the 20th century saw via world fairs [3], the formation of international space agencies, and the promise of better living through technology.

Among the surveys was the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2008 exhibition, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe. Viewers familiar with Fuller’s pragmatic geodesic domes and octet truss structures were introduced to his lesser-known concepts for tomorrow’s cities, like Dome over Manhattan (Midtown Manhattan acclimatized by a 2-mile diameter glass dome); Cloud Nine (a spherical cloud city that could levitate an entire community), and Triton City (a modular seastead for 100,000 inhabitants). Despite having a hallucinatory, science fiction veneer, these proposals were serious enough to be examined by agencies like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which commissioned the study for Triton City, and, along with the U.S. Navy, approved the design.

If one of Fuller’s futuristic communities had been realized, it would not have been the first time that science fiction became science fact. In 1945, author, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicted geostationary communications satellites, some 15 years ahead of NASA’s launch of Echo, the agency’s first experimental communications satellite project [4]. In 1941, Isaac Asimov popularized the term “robotics” in his short story, Liar, over three decades before Carnegie Mellon University founded The Robotics Institute in 1979. Aldous Huxley foresaw cloning decades before Dolly the sheep was made incarnate (again), and countless other authors and artists envisioned technological milestones – from the creation of the atomic bomb to nanotechnology – and their social implications in advance of their manifestation.

It’s not so easy to instill in the public the same brand of wonder and nationalist pride that the Space Race evoked from 1958 to 1975. One seismic shift of late has been the redirection of major scientific exploration from countries to private corporations and citizens [5]. Unbridled individual potential is one outcome of the information age, but so is ambient fear of the future. A 2002 Time Magazine poll revealed that 30 percent of its respondents believed that the world would end within their lifetimes. The work in this exhibition corresponds to the other 70 percent of the population that is optimistic despite the massive challenges faced by civilization [6]. These artists seize technologies that provide unprecedented platforms for collaboration, and new ways of visualizing and representing reality. Theirs is a moment of fluid exchanges between artistic and scientific disciplines, and cooperation among private and public institutions, toward the realization of a possible future.
– Andrea Grover, Curator, 29 Chains to the Moon


More information about the exhibition >>>

MEMBERSHIP

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