Environmental Risk Assessment Rover–AT, Version 1.0, 2008
“Sooner rather than later, one comes up against the law that so long as risks are not recognized scientifically, they do not exist--at least not legally, medically, technologically, or socially, and they are thus not prevented, treated or compensated for. No amount of collective moaning can change this, only science. Scientific judgment's monopoly on truth therefore forces the victims themselves to make use of all the methods and means of scientific analysis in order to succeed with their claims.”
—German risk theorist Ulrich Beck
ERAR–AT is a mobile, solar- and GPS-powered, networked video installation that will accumulate and aggregate the environmental threats and risks faced by the population in its immediate location. ERAR-AT performs the difficulty of perceiving, evaluating, and understanding risk scenarios and presents an assessment of its given locale by producing a unique fourteen-tiered threat level embedded live within video projections onto local natural and architectural surfaces.
ecoarttech, 2008
(ERAR-AT) A solar-powered, all-terrain mobile station that collects real-time risk data relative to its local coordinates.
What kind of local and global environmental risks do you face everyday? How far is the closest superfund site or nuclear power plant or agribusiness? How do the 148 industrial chemicals already in every American human body interact with the synthetic hormones and antibiotics in the dairy products we eat? How many chemicals are in human breast milk? How do the chemicals in your toothpaste interact with the pesticides on your food? Why has modernity, which was supposed to create a sense of security, produced more anxiety and threats than ever? Can scientific data and research help us understand the “riskiness” of contemporary life?
Environmental Risk Assessment Rover–AT (ERAR–AT) by EcoArtTech
"Off the Grid" Exhibition, March 30 - June 1, 2008
Special ERAR-AT performances 3/27, 3/28, and 3/29, 7pm
Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY
“Off the Grid” features works that subvert and circumvent conventional infrastructures. It is co-presented by the Neuberger Museum of Art and free103point9. For more information on this exhibition, please visit http://www.free103point9.org/events/1678/
ERAR Programming & Research Assistant: Colin Twomey
This work is made possible in part by contributions from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), New York State Council on the Arts, The University of Rochester, the Pine Lake Environmental Campus of Hartwick College, andTurbulence.org. All canines featured in these works are rescued Akitas brought into our inter-species family via Akita Rescue of Western New York.
