ARK 3 The Workshop Scenarios, is a 2014 video installation embedded at the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University. This book catalogs season 3 episodes showcasing 100 video images created during the Summer of 2014. The first part of the title takes its name from an obscure and short-lived children’s television series named Ark II from 1976 where a group of young scientists accompanied by a talking chimpanzee attempt to bring new hope to a post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by pollution and waste. Their science fiction mobile lab roams a landscape populated with feral children, feudal barons, and supernatural beings.
In ARK 3 The Workshop Scenarios, we re-imagine this mobile lab to be colorful inflatable orbs, and its occupants, as performed by the artists and willing workshop participants are evolved bodies rather than glamorous youths. Void of flesh and genetically modified to be in communion with the animal and insect worlds, these earth bound bio-nauts mine the environment around them looking for clues to their ancestral past as a way to pave a way into their possible simulated futures. In search of their search, they discover recordings of Leonard Patrick Nimoy O’Neal introducing Laser Disc + CED technologies to a broader public. They also see early clues to their semblance in the images of the iconic anatomical human, the singing educator SlimGood Body and a cinematic fly head from 1986. Scripts and sonic treatments are remixed but held together by the exploratory strand of the Ark’s original mission of bringing the rationality of the pseudo scientific method back into human consciousness. Ultimately, images of their search and research are projected in multiple ways upon the mobile spheres that compelled their travel.
At either end of the main installation, experimental documentaries are projected based upon Burn’s Wiccan mother and Martin’s gay cop father, both of whom act as spirit guides to the future explorers.