Spaceship Earth Redox (2011)
The extremely slow combustion of utopian models (Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller and Walking City by Archigram) forms a symbolic image and an aesthetic experience: the ineffable beauty of destruction.
Buckminster Fuller’s Manual for Spaceship Earth embodies thoughtful early environmental activism with the adagium ‘do more with less’ (1968)
Archigram’s Walking City can be seen as a jubilant notion of consumer choice combined with optimised technology that relies on infinite resources. (1964)
Michiel Van Bakel (1966, lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands) makes films and videos as well as sculptures and interactive multi-media-installations. In these he combines the elementary foundations of photography and video with digital animation techniques. While his approach is technical, his work focuses on people in their surroundings, often resulting in a kind of poetic estrangement. www.michielvanbakel.nl/