ALL WorkS

    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:

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    More&More (bitforms gallery)

    2016
    Custom animated software in custom steel powder-coated housing, sculptures, shelving, crates, bathing suits, website, books

    Production: Sarah Rothberg
    Bathing suit/web site collaborators: Sarah Rothberg, Surya Mattu
    Software: Sam Brenner
    Web development: Neil Cline
    Studio assistance: Ariana Martinez

    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

    This work is part of the project:

    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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    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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    All About Logistics

    2016
    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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    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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    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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    Mesocósmico (Paulista)

    2014

    Software-driven animation, outdoor projection

    Add’l animation: Sarah Rothberg
    Software: Sam Brenner

    Commissioned by SPUrban, Sao Paulo, Brasil

    São Paulo was built on top of the Mata Atlântica, a formerly vast forest habitat that, in spite of the radical reduction to 8% of its original land cover, still contains a large proportion of unique (endemic) species. In the software-driven animation Mesocósmico (Paulista), aspects of urban life and the surrounding Brazilian rainforest–trees, animals, water–are…

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    Mesocosm (Times Square, NY)

    2014

    Software-driven animation. 73-hour year-long cycle (never repeats).
    Triptych. Color, animation, sound
    Format: Flash player/projector on (intel) MacPro with 3 monitors / projections
    Dimensions variable

    Animators: Marina Zurkow, Sarah Rothberg
    Software Developer: Sam Brenner
    Sound: Lem Jay Ignacio and Marina Zurkow
    Add’l Software: Yotam Mann

    Commissioned by The Museum of Biblical Art, New York

    Mesocosm (Times Square, NY) is an algorithmic work that represents the passage of time in a speculative, hybrid Times Square. 12 minutes of real world time elapse in each minute of screen time, one year lasts 73 hours. No cycle is identical to the last, as the appearance and behavior of the human and non-human characters,…

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    The Petroleum Manga (book)

    2014

    Valerie Vogrin and Marina Zurkow, editors

    Published by Punctum Books

    https://punctumbooks.com/titles/petroleum-manga/
    This work is part of the project:

    The Petroleum Manga, first conceived of and rendered as 10-foot banners printed on Tyvek for gallery installation is now reproduced in book form. Originally, manga was used in Japanese to refer to whimsical drawings or picture books. Long before manga was a multi-billion-dollar-a-year comic book industry, there was Hokusai’s thirteen-volume manga, depicting everything from trees…

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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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    Body Bags for Animals

    2013

    Tyvek, solvent ink, plastic regrind
    Life-size
    Unique

    This work is part of the project:

    All photos by John Berens

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    Necrocracy (project overview)

    2012-2014

    Project consisting of videos, dinners, software, sculptures, public art engagements, printed matter

    Diverseworks gallery text by John Pluecker

    Commissioned by Diversweworks, Houston Texas
    Supported by a 2011 John F Simon Guggenheim Fellowship

    This work is part of the project:

    Necrocracy is a meditation on geology, time, nature and petrochemical production. First exhibited at Diverseworks in Houston, Texas, Necrocracy featured newly commissioned video animation, drawing and sculpture. Questioning the division between the natural and the human inherited from the Romantic era, the works navigate between human manufacturing of petroleum-based products, ecology, and the geological chronology…

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    The Cute, the Bad and the Ugly

    2012

    Lecture and tasting for invasive species

    In collaboration with chef and exotic food procurer Gene Rurka

    Presented by MAM Contemporaries

    MAM Contemporaries’ presented “The Cute, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Inspired by the exhibition Marina Zurkow: Friends, Enemies, and Others, on view at MAM (Sept 2011 – Mar 2012), this unique participatory food performance comprised a lecture led by the artist and a tasting catered by Gene Rurka, the celebrity exotic chef, hunter, and farmer, known…

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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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