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.

I was discussing this project with my brother, and in one message he sent me he said, “Regardless of whether global warming is an anthropogenic phenomenon or not, all evidence indicates most of our ‘renewable’ resources running out in the next 50-100 years (because our economy doesn’t value them).” He also sent me the 2001 paper “The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics” by Charles Hall, Dietmar Lindenberger, Reiner Kümmel, Timm Kroeger, and Wolfgang Eichhorn. This is an excellent work that I would recommend to everyone. From the abstract:

Neoclassical economics, the dominant form of economics today, has at least three fundamental flaws from the perspective of the natural sciences, but it is possible to develop a different, biophysical basis for economics that can serve as a supplement to, or a replacement for, neoclassical economics.