My name is Deb Todd Wheeler, and I am an artist living and working in the Boston area. I would like to introduce my most recent project, Live Experiments in human Energy Exchange, which was an installation of kinetic experiments fueled entirely by bicycle power, installed Oct-Dec,2006 at the Green Street Gallery in Jamaica Plain, MA.

Central to the installation was a modified bicycle, which was hooked up to a generator and various rigs, gears and pulleys. By pedaling the bike, the rider (a gallery volunteer) activated the installation, generating light, wind, sound, and motion to fuel a series of kinetic studies on the fraught relationships between nature and technology. In one piece the bike powered a DC generator that in turn powered fluorescent lights embedded in hacked ant farms, in which worker-ant tunnels were dug beneath looming silhouettes of 1964 World’s Fair pavillions. In another work, the same bike turned gears that transfer energy to wind power by turning a windmill-like form with sails made of recycled plastic grocery bags.

At the end of this energy chain, the last bit of energy, animated paper butterflies cover a scale model of Biosphere 2, as do a growing abundance of flowers made from plastic bags. Visitors to the gallery are invited to sit at the work table and construct their own plastic bag flowers to place into the Biosphere 2 model. At the exhibit’s end, there were over 600 flowers covering the form.

A pulley-powered 8-track deck connected to the bike plays a modified soundtrack from 1964 World’s Fair Video titled, “Futurama”. Also in the gallery are wire-frame models of flight experiments, inspired by the aerial pursuits of 19th century natural philosopher Louis Pierre Mouillard.

Making models of spectacular failures, such as the Biosphere2 in Arizona, and the flight experiments, was an effort to examine how creativity and courage are found in the quest, rather than the current day obsession with outcome.

The Gallery at Green Street was a very public venue in Jamaica Plain, located in a MBTA stop. This gallery was a meeting place of sorts for a diverse community which included not only artists, but students of every age, and professionals of many disciplines. This project brought to the gallery a basis for discussion, both formal and informal, about power and possibilities. The significance of this work lay in its attempt to bridge the acceptable divide between aesthetics and ethics in our culture, to work on a new model for power-bound media, where artists’ visions become integral to the social, environmental, or spiritual life of the community. Susi Gablik writes, “Instead of art-as-commodity, deprived of any useful social role, I believe that art can help us to participate in what geologian Thomas Berry deems the “great work” of our time: moving from a devastating presence on the planet to a more benign presence.”.

I’m not sure there is a more timely topic than sustainability. As science presents us as humans with possibilities beyond our wildest imaginings and filled with moral dilemmas and utopian fantasies, we have real choices and decisions to make individually and as a people about how science, yoked to technology, can positively fuel our lives. The Live Experiments project operated as a think tank as well as a literal source of energy for this artist to take her practice and apply it to these ideas. If artists are our culture’s visionaries, projects of this nature will contribute in unexpected ways to the ongoing investigation of humanity’s relationship to energy.

Thanks for reading my post! More info can be found on my website: babel.massart.edu/~debtoddwheeler.

-- deb todd wheeler