The Iceberg

2024

Deck of cards, gameboard, table, chairs

THE ICEBERG is a card and conversation game created by Abigail Simon and Marina Zurkow that invites players to consider the beautiful trouble of complexity, with a particular focus on climate change. Like a tarot deck, the images on the cards of The Iceberg invite the user to consider a problem, give a voice to…

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The Dorises: Oystercraft from silicon to saltwater

2023

Custom software (color, silent)
Generative, non-interactive
93 editions, 6 artist editions, 1 publisher proof

In collaboration with Ira Greenberg
Oystercraft website design: Pat Shiu

Part of the exhibition “Chain Reaction” on Feral File, curated by Christiane Paul

Created for the online exhibition “Chain Reaction,” curated by Christiane Paul on the Feral File platform.

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Whale Fall Feast (Dear Climate)

2021

Marine debris, plastic bags, metal signs, CNC cut wood, mini-golf turf

In collaboration with Blake Goble, B-Space
Documentation: Jakob Dahlin

Commissioned by Putting Green, NY

https://dearclimate.net/installations/whale-fall-feast
This work is part of the project:

When a whale dies and sinks, its carcass creates an entire ecosystem on the ocean floor, nourishing thousands of organisms. Ocean pollution affects this process and disrupts the food chain, impacting species from krill to whales. Whales are some of the longest living mammals on the planet, with lifespans from 10 to 200 years. When…

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Climate Jeopardy

2022

Cardboard, paint

In collaboration with Abigail Simon

Presented at the Woodstock Farm Festival, New York

A fun, non-didactic participatory engagement “where nobody wins.”

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Soupy, Salty, Sonic!

2020

Food, ASMR, mixer and speakers, lighting, slide show

Led by Hank and Bean
Sound: Yotam Mann and Sarah Rothberg
Thanks to Sunview luncheonette and Dylan Gauthier

Presented at Sunview Luncheonette, Brooklyn, NY

This work is part of the project:

Soupy Salty Sonic, an edible exploration of fluid ocean spaces was a beta dinner and an aural/oral experiment, in conjunction with the exhibition “Wet Logic” at bitforms gallery.

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Eating the Map

2019

Food, printed fabric maps, plexiglass, prototyping materials, print graphics/texts

Chef: Jen Monroe / Bad Taste
Artists: Marina Zurkow with Lydia Jessup and Ashley Jane Lewis
Documentation: Gilad Dor

Commissioned by the Guild of Future Architects

To kick off the Guild of Future Architects’ Future Imagination Summit, Monroe and Zurkow created an interactive, edible map and visioning workshop looking at the present and future of food equity and climate change in New York’s 5 boroughs. 50 participants ate, engaged in discussion, and played — both with their food and other art-making material…

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Rising Seas Jellyfish Snack Shack (LAX)

2019

Cannonball jellyfish, ice plant, kombu seaweed, condiments, laser-cut lettering, signage, tarp, stencil, plants

In collaboration with chef duo Hank and Bean

Commissioned by LENS (Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategy), IOES (Institute of Environment and Sustainability), UCLA

This work is part of the project:

A one-day pop up jellyfish jerky snack shack on the campus of UCLA. Serving Cannonball jellyfish jerky served with a choice of seasoning condiments reflective of 5 diverse regions susceptible to sea level rise: Haiti, the US Gulf coast, Sri Lanka/ S. India, Philippines, and the Netherlands. In addition, the snack shack served “invasive” ice…

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Signs, Wonders, Blunders (Dear Climate)

2019

Locust and red oak wood, vinyl plaques, lettering

Dear Climate Collective, in collaboration with Jennie Carlisle, Curator and Director of the Smith Gallery, Appalachian State
Fabrication: Roger Atkins of Cove Creek Woodworks
Fresh cut locust and red oak wood donated by Ian Snider of Mountain Works Sustainable Development
Documentation: Cheryl Zibisky

Commissioned by Climate Stories Collaborative at Appalachian State

This work is part of the project:

“What do I need to know for the planet to thrive?” This question animates “Signs, Wonders, Blunders,” an installation of 13 signposts, each with three multi-directional signs, located at interesting and suggestive locations on campus. The signposts use book titles and common phrases to create a set of playful proposals for new ways of understanding…

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Making the Best of It: Jellyfish

2018

Food, performance, props, slide show

In collaboration with Hank and Bean

Supported by Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES), UCLA, led by Allison Carruth

This work is part of the project:

A dinner and movable feast exploring the edible desertification of the Los Angeles region, one whose contemporary culture still holds dear the sensibility of a Mediterranean diet.

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Climoji

2017

Emoji collection, available as downloadable images, icon set, instagram filter

In collaboration with Viniyata Pany
Disaster icons illustrated by >Manuja Waldia
Resilience icons illustrated by Anna Lin
iOS & Android app developed by Johann Diedrick & >Denny George
Thanks to Richard Farren Lapham

Supported by NYU Green Grants, in collaboration with NYU Office of Sustainability.

https://www.climoji.org/

The Climoji are designed to distill some of the causes and effects of climate change into tiny, potent icons.

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Making the Best of It: Dandelion (Potlucks)

2017

Food, dandelions, placemats, writing materials, thoughtful company

In collaboration with Valentine Cadieux and Sarah Libertus
with Jim Bovino/Topos, Courtney Tchida, Tracey Deutsch
All images courtesy Dan Marshall.

Presented at The Good Acre, Minneapolis
Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn and presented as part of Northern Spark, Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, 2016-2017, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Knight Foundation

This work is part of the project:

The invitation: These Dandelion potlucks provide a community meal space to gather, share food, and explore key questions connecting food and climate change. They’re a more informal chance to add to the meal story sharing toolkit that Making the Best of It has been cultivating.

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Making the Best of It: Dandelion (Eulogies for the Human Species)

2017

Dandelions, beets, custom structure, sod, music, paper, costumes, banners

In collaboration with Valentine Cadieux, Sarah Libertus, Aaron Marx
Dandelion kvaas by Jim Bovino
Dandelions and more from Courtney Tchida
All images courtesy Dan Marshall

Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn and presented as part of Northern Spark, Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, 2016-2017, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Knight Foundation

This work is part of the project:

“Join us in a ritual festivity that invites you to become more dandelion. From trans-species oration to cow eulogies to intimate ocean tributes, this is the party of Making the Best of It, a communal service compressed into the space of a toast—to how all of us are making the best of it, now and…

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Oil Twitchers and Barge Spotters: A Field Guide to Whale Creek

2017

Field guide, self-guided audio tour, website

Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies (FSDE)
(Nicholas Hubbard, Rebecca Lieberman, Marina Zurkow)
with Bruce Shackelford (voice), Jane Cramer (audio engineering), Justin Peake (music)

Funded in part by a Tisch School of the Arts Dean’s Faculty Grant, and the Brooklyn Arts Council

Focusing on Newtown Creek, the polluted and little-known waterway that borders Brooklyn and Queens, the art collective Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies (FSDE) aims to expand awareness, citizenship, and affection for this post-natural place that is currently in the final stage of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund assessment process. We have been concerned with designing…

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A Field Guide to the Place Where You Are

2017

Site specific installation
Ladder, binoculars, stake flags, laminated key, toolbox

In collaboration with Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies (FSDE)
(Nicholas Hubbard, Rebecca Lieberman, Marina Zurkow) with Chester Dols (fabrication)

First created for Works on Water Triennial, 3LD, New York

Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies (FSDE) dreams of an ongoing and open library of citizen-driven field guides. The aim of these guides is to embrace the everythingness that—like it or not, pretty or not, dirty or not—constitutes the place where we are. We believe the first step to change requires an unblinkered intimacy with the…

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Making the Best of It: Dandelion

2016

Dandelion leaves, flowers, tincture, custom structures, costumes, tour guides, umbrellas, meadow

In collaboration with Valentine Cadieux, Sarah Petersen, Aaron Marx
All images courtesy Dan Marshall

Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn and presented as part of Northern Spark, Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, 2016-2017, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Knight Foundation

http://makingthebestofit.today/
This work is part of the project:

Over the course of 16 months in Minneapolis, geographer and social practice artist Valentine Cadieux and Marina Zurkow, with a group of collaborators and participants, explored what it might mean to “make the best of it” (“it” being climate change), using dandelions to think through eating differently, nimbly, with sadness, resilience and even joy.

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Making the Best of It Jellyfish (Houston)

2016

Custom Cannonball jellyfish soup powder, caramels, snack puffs

Food prototypes by chefs Ryan Pera (Coltivare), and Justin Yu and Ian Levy (Oxheart)

Supported by CENHS (the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences) at Rice University

This work is part of the project:

Making the Best of It is the umbrella concept for a series of regional site-specific pop-up food shacks, installations, carts, tea houses, delivery drones, and designed community dinners that feature edible climate-change enabled, and often not normally eaten, indicator species as part of the menu.

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Outside the Work: A Tasting of Hydrocarbons and Geological Time (Houston)

2014

Tasting/Participatory performance for 50 guests

Collaborators: Lucullan Foods

Hosted by Joseph Campana and Timothy Morton, with generous support from The Arts Initiatives Fund and The Humanities Research Center.

Presented by CENHS (Center for Energy & Environmental Research in the Human Sciences @ Rice)

This work is part of the project:

A dinner for 50, co-hosted by philosopher Timothy Morton and poet Joseph Campana, that explored the concept of Deep Time and the multiple million-years-long process of fossil fuel formation, embodied in a seven course meal. The guests were primarily from the academic and arts communities in Houston. The purpose was to field test the effect…

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Outside the Work: A Tasting of Hydrocarbons and Geological Time (Boston)

2013

Tasting/Participatory performance for 50 guests
808 Gallery Boston University

With Lucullan Foods and Michael Connor

Presented by the School of Visual Arts, in collaboration with Boston University’s Programs in Food and Wine.

This work is part of the project:

The French phrase hors d’ouevre literally means “outside of the work,” that is, outside the design of the meal. Petrochemicals infuse our foods, and while these byproducts of petroleum lie outside our designs on eating, they are intimately meshed with the foods we produce, transport and consume.You are invited to a multi-course tasting that invokes…

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Not an Artichoke, Nor from Jerusalem

2012

‘Local’ dinner for 25, menu, prints

In collaboration with Michael Connor and Alex Freedman
Chefs: Lucullan Foods (Lauryn Tyrell, Loryn Hatch, and Albert Nyguyen)
Foragers: Holly Drake, Oliver Kellhammer, Bun Lai, Andrew Nundel & your hosts
Photo documentation: M.Cianfrani, M_DOK

Commissioned by The Artists Institute

The Invitation You are invited to “Not an Artichoke, Nor from Jerusalem,” a dinner that renders the local exotic, and the exotic all too local. We are serving a meal harvested in nearby waters or foraged on the adjoining shores. Tong-ho. Whores’ eggs. Knotweed. Sapidissima. Sumac. These words feel strangely potent in the mouth. Language…

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Immortal Plastics

2012

Participatory performance

In collaboration with Sarah Rothberg

Premiered at New Museum IDEAS CITY

This work is part of the project:

Immortal Plastics (IP) Assessment Services is a performative, methodological procedure which determines the depth of participants’ relations with hydrocarbons and positions participating individuals on a timeline of plastic’s ancient past and indefinite future. 250 million years ago during the Permian Period, marine microorganisms died and accumulated in sediments on the floor of a vast saline…

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