ART / TECHNOLOGY
Talking Technology and Art With Amelia Marzec
POSTED BY SADIE WILLIAMS ON MON, SEP 25, 2017 AT 3:58 PM
After more than a yearlong break, Generator’s Big Maker series is back. The events bring to Burlington innovators in fields as diverse as environmentally conscious burial, biometrics and game design to talk about their work and process.
Next in that lineup is 36-year-old Amelia Marzec, an artist, inventor, and MFA graduate of Parsons School of Design who lives and works in Brooklyn. Marzec’s focus is on communications, the environment and “enabling activist communities through innovative uses of technology,” according to the maker space publicity.
Many of Marzec’s works pose the question: “How would we respond in the event of a breakdown in communications systems in an uncertain future?” That query might have seemed hypothetical 10 years ago, but the massive, hurricane-related power outages in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Florida, Texas and elsewhere make it all too real.
Marzec has addressed this concept in projects such as her installation New American Sweatshop. It functions as a manufacturing facility in which volunteers repurpose electronic waste to create communication devices for the future. In Weather Center for the Apocalypse, Marzec created a radio system to broadcast weather alerts, along with divinations regarding the potential for the end of the world on that particular day.
The artist will appear at Generator on Wednesday, September 27, for a workshop and a free public talk, at 3 and 7 p.m., respectively. The workshop, titled the Laboratory for What’s Possible, “is a project to share knowledge on reclaiming electronic waste and to discover possibilities existing in our cast-off items that can keep our communities connected.”
Seven Days caught up with Marzec over the phone from Brooklyn as she prepared for her trip to Vermont.
