PANEL: FUTURES

Futures refers to a discussion and deep investigation of what might be future pictures of multiple aspects of culture(s) in an environmentally challenged world. Joyce Burstein, Alexander Rose (The Long Now Foundation), Amy Balkin. Moderator: Lynn Marie Kirby

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  Joyce Burstein

  Joyce Burstein has been exploring a self-created context for public art with “the epitaph project”, an interactive sculpture that functions as both tombstone and chalkboard permanently sited in cemeteries upon which epitaphs are collected from passersby, facilitating a dialogical situation where viewer statements provide the content which refers back on those who view. The subtext has been a convivial methodology for subverting taboo and introducing people to a public parkland that goes virtually unused.

  While her gallery installations explore impermanence her social sited projects attempt to contravene associations of the monument with death and history by presenting works that interact with the present. In this way all spectators are also performers, the work exists as process and object, both public and private.

  Burstein received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is a recipient of grants/fellowships from Art Matters, The Institute of Noetic Science, NYFA, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Transart Experimental Workshop for Art and Anthropology, she lives and works in New York City.

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  Alexander Rose

  Alexander Rose is the Executive Director of The Long Now Foundation. He was hired as the first employee of The Long Now Foundation in February of 01997. Alexander has been an artist in residence at Silicon Graphics Inc., a project manager for Shamrock Communications, and a founding partner of Inertia Labs. Alexander has attended the Art Center College of Design and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts honors degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Industrial Design in 01995.

  As the director of Long Now, Alexander has facilitated projects such as the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, The Rosetta Project, Long Bets, Seminars About Long Term Thinking, Long Server and others. Alexander shares several design patents on the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the first prototype of which is in the Science Museum of London.

  Alexander's personal interests include rock climbing, snowboarding, mountaineering, mountain bike riding, Bio Diesel vehicles, and travel. At Carnegie Mellon University Alexander was the lead designer for a record setting human power vehicle team.

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  Amy Balkin

  Amy Balkin’s projects consider how we occupy the social and material landscapes we inhabit. Her projects include Public Smog, This is the Public Domain, and Invisible-5. Public Smog (2004+) is a public park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale, constructed through a series of economic and political activities and gestures. This is the Public Domain (2001+) is an ongoing effort to create a permanent international commons, free to all in perpetuity, through the legal transfer of 2.634 acres of land purchased for this effort, to the global public.

  Invisible-5 (2006) is a self-guided environmental justice audio tour of California’s Interstate-5 highway corridor, made in collaboration with artists Tim Halbur and Kim Stringfellow, and organizations Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, and Pond. The project investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audio documents. The project also traces natural, social, and economic histories along the route.

  Her recent works include the video Reading ‘Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers’ (2008), and Sell Us Your Liberty, Or We’ll Subcontract Your Death (2008), a series of large-format rubbings of architectural signage of San Francisco-area entities implicated in activities including illegal domestic surveillance and the local, everyday production of war.

  She has received grants from the Creative Work Fund and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. She lives in San Francisco.