The final piece is a 4-minute audio introduction to a podcast, dedicated to the uncovering of the eBay art.
Ebay-level // Description of Final Artwork
The final piece consists of 3 eBay selling pages(+E-Bay) and a podcast trailer, where the eBay listings have been discovered. The first product is a“1920’s Poem Print” about wildlife crossings. The second product will be a photograph of a highway from the 1960s, which displays a billboard for a new Creature Corridor that is opening up soon, and also has a roadside sign about the“organisms per mile.” The third product is a calendar featuring the recently declared extinct Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. This product is emblematic of the imagined future connected to this past, suggested by the first two products.
There is a version of our world in which we thought through the need for wildlife corridors in conjunction with the needs for crosswalks, traffic lights, crossing guards, and stop signs. In this world, animals have had the opportunity to learn and adapt to the“rules of the road” alongside humans, and untold human and animal lives were saved because of it. Three artifacts from this world have somehow worm-holed their way into ours and are being sold innocuouslyon eBay. They are completely un-noteworthy in comparison to similar items, except for the unrealized version of reality that they reflect. In total the eldest piece is indicative of a society in which people felt different. The second piece reflects how they acted different. The third shows that they have different results.
What is your specific topic?
My topic structure is Maintenance > Bridge Infrastructure > Wildlife Crossings. When viewed in the context of a“guide,” these three objects when viewed collectively act as a guide to a different path that we could collectively embark upon. However, the chances of finding and linking these objects together are relatively slim. When viewed in the context of“maintenance,” the presentation in eBay speaks to the continuity of an idea. Maintenance requires intention and care; it requires noticing. What do we sell on eBay? Things for which we no longer have a need, but we feel still have a value.
What is your critical stance?
My critical stance is that the timing and breadth of a solution are critical to the impact of the problem. There is a long-term benefit to developing solutions quickly, and to thinking them through comprehensively.(Solve for one; extend to many.)
As a collective society, there is something lost when we fail to think about the unintended consequences of our actions. Looking through the NYTimes’ records about human/animal interactions between 1916 and 1926 made me reflect on the collective learning that happened when we transitioned to a nation of drivers. While we began to introduce systems to support safe car-pedestrian interactions, we didn’t provide a single alternative for animals on highways. If we had applied some of the human solutions in a more expansive way, countless human, animal, and ecological benefits would have been here in our present.
What is your question?
My question is“What if a solution had been developed at the same time as the problem?”
What is your form and why?
My form is“eBay listings.” I realized that I wanted to speak to different moments in time, the introduction of the problem(interstate highways in the 1920s), the first introduction of the solution(wildlife crossings in the 1960s), and the present day. Ebay is one of those odd formats, where you can naturally interact with objects from disparate timeframes. Additionally, the eBay format allows me to play with a level of removal from the objects themselves, which affords them more authenticity, making it more interesting for them to be“fake.”
The items within the listings are printed ephemera, emblematic of their times. This allows me to speak directly to the individual experiences of three anonymous persons in a different version of our time.
Lastly, the idea of an entire story, an entire world being hidden within our daily lives speaks to the interactions that most of us have with wildlife crossings. There can be all of these narratives of animals existing above and below us, never intersecting with our streams but crossing over, under, and around us.
What is your metaphor?
I’m using eBay and printed ephemera as a metaphor. Both of these formats have weird relationships with longevity, preservation, and intention.
Descriptions of Final Artwork
Ebay-level // Description of Final Artwork
The Idea