Making Utopia
Future Migration’s Frogs-In-Residence have received a lot of press recently. Please check out this link to an interesting article on Eben’s work and research around frog populations by Nick Normal of MAKE Magazine. Thank you to Nick for this thoughtful look at the making of the Utopia For the Golden Frog, by Eben Kirksey and […]
Speculative Migrations: The Future is Garbage
One afternoon, while on assignment at the daily newspaper where I used to work, I received an invitation to visit a waste incinerator. The plant sat along a river, in the center of the town that was my “beat” at the paper. The aging facility had been there for decades, dark and solitary, pumping out […]
Material Meaning
At the opening of Object Migration on January 12, the second show in the migration year of Proteus Gowanus, I witnessed something unusual to such an event: quiet contemplation. Lining the bookshelves and encircling the room are objects contributed by participants who were invited to lend an object to the show and include with it […]
The Reanimation of Gowanus
Randy Dudley (American, born 1950). Gowanus Canal from 2nd Street, 1986. Oil on canvas, 34 x 63 5/8 in. (86.4 x 161.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchase gift of Charles Allen, 87.31. © artist or artist’s estate I recently visited Proteus Gowanus to see their Migration show, which includes photocopies of a portion of The The […]
Migratory Media
Proteus Gowanus hosted the first screening of our yearlong Migration Film Series on Tuesday, November 1. Migratory Media, An Evening of Appropriation and Experimental Animation, focused on the migration of visual data throughout multiple mediums and across timelines. The program of shorts included films from two filmmaking eras that produced breakthrough work using computers: the […]
Part II: Liberators and the Liberated
It is often said that history is written by the victors (“Speciesists,” cry the inchworms, “we thread the trees but no one reads!”). It is hard to know, however, who the victor might be in the case of the sparrow migration. While accounts in the document (Excerpt of the Source of the English Sparrow, Manuscript […]
Brooklyn Bird Lovers
Thanks to Proteus Gowanus extending a hand (or rather, wing) to the Brooklyn Museum Libraries & Archives for the purpose of its “Migration” exhibition series, we couldn’t help but delve a little further into our own history with the topic of migration. As it turns out, this took a rather literal turn and we didn’t […]
Little Exiles
(from News and Events) Proteus Gowanus is pleased to announce a Migration collaboration with The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives. The Museum has loaned us a facsimile excerpt of an archive manuscript by Wallace Gold Levison, written in the early 20th C. for a book (never completed) on the early history of the Brooklyn Institute, […]
Paper Feathers
I am sitting in a room (different from the one you are in now), observing Ami Yamasaki attach hand-torn paper feathers along the walls according to the resonant frequencies of Proteus Gowanus. Yamasaki orients the feathers to the acoustics of the space, which she tests by touching surfaces, tapping on pipes, whistling and trilling her […]
Here We Begin
Migration is movement and change. It can be cyclical, habitual: a bird flies south for the winter; a school of fish swims upstream. Migration can be unexpected, forced, violent: the result of wartime cruelties or the indifferent destruction of natural disasters. The earth shudders, people rebuild, and somewhere overhead a bird changes course. Transhumance means […]
