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Incenter

date. 2022

location. Black Rock City

​aboutan ephemeral installation reflecting on the Covid-19 pandemic. This project was designed and lead by Kate Greenberg with lighting programming by Peter Slattery.  It was prefabricated in 2 months, installed in 11 days, open to visitors for 6 days, and then burned down and recycled. A team over 40 volunteers made this piece possible, notably including work by Emily Hsuing, Cameron Tacklind, Bodie Bloyd, Larry Woods, and RHBU Engineering.

In 2020, home became a place of refuge and a space isolated from community. Our worlds shrank inside four walls and we were detached from the everyday human contact that formed the foundation of our lives. It was an unimaginable situation that wrought panic, hardship, and a re-evaluation of many aspects of our lives and relationships. But as we look back on this time now, we can see that we were actually sharing this time apart together - a paradox that saw us more universally connected through isolation than at any other point in history. 

Incenter was a house that sheltered our whole world inside, and provided a view of our Earth - and our global human experience - from within. This piece shared data about the ways people made it through the unprecedented last few years around the world, including led visualization of human responses to the pandemic, climate change, and equity as published by scholarly surveys. It invited visitors to share their own story about our time apart, find overlap, process, and look forward together with greater solidarity. Almost 15% of the lumber used was salvaged, and the burn remains were donated to REAP Center in Alameda, CA, where the ashes have been used to pretreat soil for new plant life.

Data sources referenced in the piece: 

Yamada, Y., Ćepulić, DB., Coll-Martín, T. et al. COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey dataset on psychological and behavioural consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak. Sci Data 8, 3 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00784-9

Haerpfer, C., Inglehart, R., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano J., M. Lagos, P. Norris, E. Ponarin & B. Puranen (eds.). 2022. World Values Survey: Round Seven - Country-Pooled Datafile Version 4.0. Madrid, Spain & Vienna, Austria: JD Systems Institute & WVSA Secretariat. doi:10.14281/18241.18

Hannah Ritchie, Max Roser and Pablo Rosado (2020) - "Energy". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/energy' [Online Resource]

The New York Times. (2022). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 08/15/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.

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