Living Sea Sculpture: Contemporary Art as Coral Refuge

Doors open at 5:00. Come early for food and drinks.
FAQ: http://www.omsi.edu/sciencepubfaq


Corals are in trouble worldwide from pollution, warming waters, and physical destruction. The incredibly diverse animals that live in and amongst the corals need new homes in order to survive. When searching for ways to help corals hold on, how can art play a role in solving our ecological problems?
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Doors open at 5:00. Come early for food and drinks.
FAQ: http://www.omsi.edu/sciencepubfaq


Corals are in trouble worldwide from pollution, warming waters, and physical destruction. The incredibly diverse animals that live in and amongst the corals need new homes in order to survive. When searching for ways to help corals hold on, how can art play a role in solving our ecological problems?

Moving the paradigm from "art about ecology" to "art as ecology" gives new ways for scientists and artists to work together towards the common goal of saving corals. In Colleen Flanigan's art, scientific inquiry and engineering meet with emotion, compassion, and composition to provide coral life support, shore protection, and marine habitat. Her recent sculpture employs Biorock® mineral accretion, a technology for coral reef restoration that shares electrical and chemical principles with her artistic explorations in electroforming. By charging a metal sculpture with low voltage direct current, the pH of seawater can be raised to attract limestone minerals to adhere to the frame. Since corals need calcium carbonate to build their exoskeletons, this process gives them an extra boost, a life supporting substrate to better withstand environmental stresses. In the increasingly warming and acidifying ocean, Biorock sculptures supply corals with a localized alkaline environment. Soon fish and other creatures move into the new artsy neighborhoods.

At this Science Pub, find out about efforts to reform healthy corals in tropical oceans, the scientific principles of the process, the history and hopes of Biorock, and about new ways for art and science to work together.

Colleen Flanigan, is in the first class of TED Senior Fellows and is a visual, performing, and environmental artist. Currently living in Portland, Oregon, and raised along the Monterey Peninsula in California, Flanigan has been listening to the ocean tide for much of her life. Her background is in design, jewelry, steel sculptures, conceptual and interactive mixed media, and ball-and-socket armatures for stop-motion animation (including for the feature film, Coraline.) Through her socio-ecological alter egos, Miss Snail Pail and Amphitrite, Flanigan has joined the voices defending our natural resources as an interventionist artist. The documentary, On the Trail with Miss Snail Pail has been screened at four environmental film festivals since 2009. As Amphitrite, goddess of the sea, Flanigan leads coral restoration reenactments. Working with an international team in Cancun this summer, she built a steel sculpture inspired by DNA for the underwater Museo Subacuático de Arte (MUSA).

Global Reef Alliance: http://www.globalcoral.org/

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