CEAP (Center for Environmental and Animal Protection)

2018

Digital graphic

In collaboration with Sarah Rothberg

Commissioned by CEAP

https://wp.nyu.edu/ceap/

CEAP commissioned Zurkow and Rothberg to create a primary, scalable illustrative identity for the Center, who “conducts, supports, and disseminates research that contributes to the protection of both animals and the environment.”

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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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General Assembly (Dear Climate)

2018

Flags, cedar posts

Core Collaborators: Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer, Marina Zurkow
Curated by Nora Lawrence
Documentation: Jerry L. Thompson

Commissioned by Storm King Arts Center, New Windsor, New York
For the “Indicators: Artists on Climate Change” exhibition at Storm King

https://dearclimate.net/installations/general-assembly
This work is part of the project:

We want to create a public space that signals—and celebrates—a future world of multi-species collaboration. At the UN General Assembly, there’s a seat for every nation. In our General Assembly of the future, there’ll be a seat at the table for all species and all things.

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More&More (Fidelity, Luxemburg)

2017

Custom animated software, custom powder-coated steel boxes, hardware, plywood plinths

This work is part of the project:

Fidelity International corporate art collection purchased a complete set of the eight More&More (the invisible oceans) software sculptures.

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Climoji

2017

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

In collaboration with Viniyata Pany<br>
Disaster icons illustrated by Manuja Waldia <br>
Resilience icons illustrated by Anna Lin  <br>
iOS & Android app developed by Johann Diedrick & Denny George<br>
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 in the future.” MtBoI:D created a church-like refuge in which all were invited to take on a non-human persona and offer a brief remembrance of the human species.

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Whalewaste

2017
https://whalewaste.tumblr.com/archive

In 2017 I audited a class at ITP (the Interactive Telecommunications Program), Tisch School of the Arts, NYU called “100 Days of Making” led by Katherine Dillon. The class is structured just as the title proclaims: 100 days of unique creative outputs. It is a relentless process, one in which you work fast enough to…

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A Swarm Is My Bonnet

A Swarm Is My Bonnet

2017

2 Nylon banners, 42” x 84” each

Permanently installed at The Center for Coastal Studies, Provincetown, Mass.

Right whale identification relies on the distinct pattern, known as a callosity, that each whale displays like a blazon on the back of their head. These are rough skin patches — callouses. Whalers called them “bonnets.” Each whale is born with their callous-formation, which grows pitted and grooved like volcanic terrain over time. Callosities would not be visible were it not for the species of cyamids who colonize them, eating algae and the whale’s sloughing outer skin. Cyamids spend all phases of their life cycle on their cetacean hosts. The cyamids who live on North Atlantic right whales know no other species or environment. They can’t swim. They are passed from whale to whale – for instance, from a mother to calf, or while mating.  I see both an individually identified whale and its cyamid symbionts; when the whale data states “last seen” or “death year,” I experience the tensions between our capacity to care, to not care, to prefer nameable species, to shun the nameless or “uncharismatic” swarm. These banners honor a colony of commensal animals who, coincidental to their lives on the whale, inadvertently “sign” the whale’s individuality to us human creatures.

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Greetings From _______ Postcards

2016

Custom commercial postcards, 4″ x 6″

This work is part of the project:

A selection of geographically distributed port nations were analyzed for their relative trade stronghold in particular materials and items. These were then converted into textile designs for new national identities based on the materials’ / items’ corresponding iconography.

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Tiny Containers

2016

Custom bathing suits

This work is part of the project:

A series of swimsuits that visualize the global circulation of stuff, shrinking the overwhelming system of complex trade relationships to a human scale.

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A Guide to the Harmonized System

2016

Chris Piuma and Marina Zurkow, editors
Contributors Stacy AlaimoHeather DavisKathleen FordeDylan GauthierElena GlasbergKalliopi MathiosSteve MentzAstrida NeimanisChris PiumaElspeth ProbynSarah RothbergPhil SteinbergRita WongMarina Zurkow

Published by Punctum Books
To order a print copy or download the ebook:

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/moremore-a-guide-to-the-harmonized-system/
This work is part of the project:

This experimental “brick” of a book intervenes in the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (also known as the HS Code). Tucked into the alphabetically sorted 26,000 lines of code are poetic, personal, and scholarly annotations that are focused on ocean-related entries.

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More&More (the invisible oceans) software

2016

Custom animated software in custom powder-coated steel housing

Production: Sarah Rothberg<br>
Software: Sam Brenner

Commissioned in part by Borusan Contemporary

This work is part of the project:

Unifying the disparate commodities from large port nations into a phantasmagoric depot, MORE&MORE: China, India, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, USA, Russia, and Brazil are eight sculptural animations with custom algorithmic software generating hypnotic patterns of export products. These exports are both material trade items as noted in the Harmonized System (HS) tariff code and the nations’…

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More&More (the invisible oceans) catalogue

2016

More&More (The Invisible Oceans), is a catalog of the eponymous project’s first exhibition at bitforms gallery in New York, featuring full-color images of the art on display (including video stills, bespoke bathing suits, and fungal sculptures), as well as an introduction by Marina Zurkow and a conversation between Zurkow and international curator Kathleen Forde.

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/moremore-the-invisible-oceans/
This work is part of the project:

More&More (bitforms)

2016
Custom animated software in custom steel powder-coated housing, sculptures, shelving, crates, bathing suits, website, books
Production: Sarah Rothberg <br>
Bathing suit/web site collaborators: Sarah Rothberg, Surya Mattu <br>
Software: Sam Brenner | Web development: Neil Cline | Studio assistance: Ariana Martinez <br>
Commissioned in part by Borusan Contemporary
This work is part of the project:

The ocean makes up 71 percent of our planet’s surface. So, how is it that we know more about Mars than the marine environments of Earth? As impenetrable as the deep oceans are to humans, we imperviously live in a black box of international shipping, reducing the ocean to a surface rather than an environmental…

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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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Accretions

2016

Silkscreen on found/used cardboard with rubber stamping
14″x14″
Edition of 3
Additionally unique, SP collages on silkscreen

Accretions is a series of silkscreens on repurposed packaging cardboard. These works describe agglomerations of consumer goods: the result of what is bought, shipped globally, and discarded over time. 

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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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Dear Climate

2014 – ongoing

posters, sound, installations

Core Collaborators: Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer, Marina Zurkow
Web Development: Pat Shiu
Sound Design: Pejk Malinovski
Typography: Nancy Nowacek
Voice Overs: Eliza Foss, Seth Kanor, Jane Cramer

Supported by NYU Visual Arts Initiative Awards

http://www.dearclimate.net
This work is part of the project:

Dear Climate is exploring new modes of address through the creation of a collection of ”inner climate” tools. These tools—posters, audio meditations and letters—are designed to nudge participants toward new relations with the greater-than-human world. The free, downloadable posters use the language of agitprop and a “fast read” to create a jolt of relational suggestion. Alternately,…

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All About Logistics

This work is part of the project:

Surya Mattu, Sarah Rothberg, and I had a Process Space residency through LMCC on Governor’s Island. We spent a few months traveling by boat(s) to meet, study, and discuss logistics. We took Matthew Sparke’s free online class on Globalization and Personal Impacts, and read Deborah Cowan’s The Deadly Life of Logistics. We participated in Open…

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