Atmospherics

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: 'Atmospherics' was developed as an entry in Land Art Generator for Freshkills Park on New York's Staten Island, an international site-specific competition to find a public art work that would operate as a source of clean energy for New York's power grid. The 2200-acre site was a landfill until 2001. Since then, New York's Department of Parks & Recreation, a partner in the design competition, has been managing the site's transformation from dump to public park. Monacella and Douglas's proposal was one of 250 entries from around the world that responded to the challenging brief to create a public art work that would also be a power plant. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: 'Atmospherics' proposed an enhanced cyborg landscape in which the biological, artificial and technological are merged to enhance and celebrate the Freshkills Park site. The structure comprises an alternate ecology made from four independent cell structures. The solar bubble produces electrical energy while the water tentacles harvest and distribute water over the structure's surface and feed this water into grounded ecological cells. 'Atmospherics' records landscape conditions and produces them too. It would enhance fog in winter and haze in summer, so creating a new agrarian landscape on a former dump. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: The significance of this project is demonstrated by its selection for inclusion in 'Regenerative Infrastructures', an edited monograph published by Prestel, one of the world's leading publishers of books on art, architecture and design. Stephanie Leontiadis reviewed the book in New York's prestigious 'The Architects Newspaper' (see 'Glyptic Phenomena'). In 2012, 'Atmospherics' was also exhibited in Land Art Generator competition shows at two New York galleries: SOHO Gallery for Digital Art and Arsenal Gallery, Central Park. Jurors included Bjark Ingels, winner of European prize for architecture and Eric Shiner, director of The Andy Warhol Museum.