Field Re-Mediations is an interactive installation and public workshop by Queens Museum Studio Program artist in residence Karolina Sobecka and The Cybernetics Library.

The Cybernetics Library is: Sarah Hamerman, David Isaac Hecht, Dan Taeyoung, Charles Eppley, Sam Hart, Melanie Hoff

Field Re-Mediations is a library of objects and ideas that facilitates re-framing cultural practices that underlie environmental degradation, and arise from particular shared representations of nature. The library installation will be displayed at the Queens Museum through May 13th, for the Open Engagement conference. The project allows visitors to act as both readers and librarians, contributing new objects to the library and imagining new conceptual territories through which to reclassify the objects, reconfigure their relationships, and thereby aid in transforming how we interact with the environment.

Please join us for the public workshop on Sunday, May 6th

RSVP is required! (please follow this link)

Workshop schedule:

1:1-20 Oliver Kellhammer, Bioremediation and other Earth repair practices

1:20-1:40 Sarah Hamerman and David Hecht, Cybernetics Library: library as a re-mediation field

1:40-2:00 Sam Hart and Karolina Sobecka, Simulations and mediations: how representations matter in material remaking of the world

2:00-2:15 * Q&A

2:15 – 3:00 pm Guests introductions and introduction to the collection.

3:00pm Coffee break

3:30 Re-mediation session: reading groups explore the collection and re-interpret nature imaginaries.

4:20 – 5:00 Closing discussion

Remediation is initially encountered in its standard meaning, as applied to the repair of damaged, polluted environments. In its expanded form, re-mediation implicates the usually hidden operations of representation in the process of human-environment interactions, and further, precipitates the presence of media from the cluttered discursive field. The project is thus itself a rerepresentation of Mel Chin’s Revival Field, a field test of phytoremediation technique which uses live plants for soil cleanup, as a system for constructing meaning from engagements between organisms, objects, and environments.

Our re-mediation field is a library, both a physical collection of books and objects, and a cybernetic system that adapts to the addition of new objects and responds to the patterns of its use. It is organized into remediation sites: narrative frames collected by us, suggested by participants, and contributed remotely. The work of re-mediation is done as meaning is created from new configurations of materials and ideas, through three roles visitors can enact: Writers, Readers, and Librarians.

In the physical library itself, a pair of modular, mobile bookcases house the collection — books, objects, and interfaces to the virtual layers of the system — with which visitors can interact. Small works can be displayed alongside the shelves on lightweight display stands, and visitors can use custom seating that accompanies the installation. Ultimately, the library itself is re-mediated as users redraw the boundaries of the territories in which we produce, organize, and consume knowledge about our relationships with nature.