Our sole extant semi-dory (a.k.a. “HMS Biggie Smalls”) will be making made its penultimate performance/voyage this weekend as a player in Paul Benney and Robert Sullivan’s Retreat to Victory at Proteus Gowanus… before retiring to become a flower garden at Myrtle Village Green.  We are happy to see the semi-dory having a dignified run at old age.  We, of course, will always remember the semi for its less historic but no-less important voyages along the Gowanus Canal, which often looked more like this:

Retreat to Victory
A performance by Paul Benney and Robert Sullivan

Saturday, May 11th, 7:30 pm 

Proteus Gowanus
$5 admission

In conjunction with [Proteus' exhibition] Battle Ground exhibit, performance artist Paul Benney and author Robert Sullivan (My American Revolution) will join forces in this interdisciplinary meditation on the Continental Army’s not-well-remembered retreat from Brooklyn to Manhattan, from loss to not-loss. In addition to Paul Benney’s ethereal choreography and Robert Sullivan’s words and song, the performance will include quilts by Suzanne Sullivan and music by Louise Sullivan. Time past and present will merge as guests are transported down our alleyway to the performance in a wooden boat. Join us!

Robert Sullivan is the author, most recently, of My American Revolution, a book about the American Revolution described by Sam Roberts of the NY Times as “a provocative Baedeker for a landscape of loss, Gen. George Washington’s route from Brooklyn to “the very first Middle America” and back…” Other books by Sullivan include Rats, The Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, How Not To Get Rich Or Why Being Bad Off Isn’t So Bad, Cross Country, and The Thoreau You Don’t Know.  His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, A Public Space, Runner’s World, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Rolling Stone, The Independent of London, The London Times and Vogue. He was born in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn with his family. 

Paul Benney lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y. He studied Theater Arts and Dance at U.C. Santa Cruz and co-directed OnSite Dance Company in San Francisco with Jessica Lutes for twelve years before moving to New York in 2002. He was a Movement Research Artist in Resident in 2003, and he continues his performance related work with the performance art group, TRYST. His varied performance experience includes stints with the underground Rock pioneers The Residents, Joe Goode Performance Group, Zaccho Dance Theatre, David Neumann’s Advanced Beginners Group, and The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Paul has also performed on several magical occasions at Proteus Gowanus. He is a Gym Teacher and Coach at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn.

Proteus Gowanus

543 Union Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215
718.427.2200

Gallery Hours
Thurs & Fri: 3 – 6
Sat & Sun: 12 – 6

Study Hall Hours
Mon – Fri: 10 –

Semi on the Newtown, 2010

We were invited by our friend Adriane Colburn from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at UGA to come down as visiting artists in the Foundations program and do a project this spring with the students there. Our crew of one just returned from a lovely week in Athens, culminating with the launch of four little boats last Friday, April 12th.

The students of Jacob Brault’s 3-D Design Class did an amazing job building three of the boats on their own. There were two really cute Portuguese dinghies made after this design–and one of our own Liberum Dories. Having made a few of these before, I was impressed (and a little relieved) that it came together so nicely and proved its seaworthiness immediately.

The fourth boat was a collaboration between Mare Liberum and a number of the undergraduate students from Adriane’s Foundations drawing classes and several other students and classes in the art department. It was also the very first PapeREI Canoe to hit the water. (Needless to say, there are a handful of forthcoming corrections to the instructions we published for Conflux, but we will get to that soon, I promise.)

The students contributed scores of drawings of native plants they had collected. The drawings were made on 2’ long, 4” wide strips and glued in place on the first and last layers of the hull. The seats, the stems, and the floorboards were all cut on our new friend Michael Olivieri’s CNC router, and–once attached to the gunnels–made the boat plenty stiff. This makes it a lot easier to build, and the boat did great once on the water.

This project couldn’t have come together without everyone’s help. I’d especially like to thank Adriane Colburn, Jacob Brault, Michael Olivieri, Steve Arnold, Chris Hocking and his son Finn, as well as Iris, Loughton, Eric, the UGA grad students, and the very helpful UGA staff.

Thanks, everyone, for coming out to our talk on Sunday at Conflux in New York City.  Had a great time sharing our project and really appreciated your questions, comments and support.  We’ll be releasing a new insert with even simpler plans for finishing the paper boat without ribs later this month.  Stay tuned and let us know what you build!

-ML

(Broadsheet 7: On Paper Boat Construction, pdf, 3.9mb)

At long last we have completed work on our three year long investigation into the histories and techniques of paper boat building, originating with the Waters & Co. paper boat and dome factory in Troy New York (mid to late 19th century) to the more recent artistic excursions on the water in… things made of paper.  The attached broadsheet details the first phase of our research.  Click the image above to download the 3.9mb pdf and happy boating!

Post any comments or questions below, on our facebook page – http://fb.me/thefreeseas and thanks for reading.

Video from Stephan’s talk at NYC’s World Maker’s Faire 2012:

A big shout out and a thank you to Nick Normal at the World Maker Faire today for the awesome writeup on the Makezine.  Nick writes about the time he spent with us up in Clayton, NY earlier this hot summer:

At NYC’s upcoming third annual World Maker Faire, Mare Liberum compatriots Marie Lorenz, A’yen Tran, and Stephan von Muehlen give a presentation on making boats and their water-based projects, while Mare Liberum will also be building a paper canoe using little more than craft paper and wood glue! In just two days they plan to go from material to finished project using “the presumably lost art of building a boat by layering paper and glue over a form to create a sea-worthy vessel.”

Read the whole thing here, and come by this weekend, lend a hand, help make our second paper boat.

(via http://blog.makezine.com/2012/09/24/hacking-the-free-seas/)

Hi Friends–

On the weekend of September 28-30th, for the World Maker Faire NYC, we’ll be building another boat out of craft paper, this one modeled on the a-historic $500 REI mailorder canoe.  Come out for the day, and stay for talk that evening between Mare Liberum’s Stephan von Muehlen, Marie Lorenz and A’yen Tran about hacking the urban watergrid.

See: http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/9138 and http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/9140

Hope you can make it!

-ML

Update: Video of the talk: Hacking the Free Seas: Water-Bourn Artists in New York City at World Maker Faire 2012″

We’ll be surfacing for Conflux 2012 in October, Curated by Angela Washko.

This year the CONFLUX crew looks forward to presenting a look at the astounding plethora of ways to move in NYC– taking subways, buses, trains, bikes, taxicabs, cars, boats, ferries, planes, by running, by dancing, by swimming and more.  Despite the impressive breadth of ways to navigate the city, there are many things to improve upon and alternatives to explore –  accessibility,  adventure, unexpected usages, policy, aesthetics and more. On Saturday October 20^th and Sunday October 21^st 2012, CONFLUX will present artists, activists, interaction designers, and pranksters who are exploring the ways we experience transportation and creating interventions to improve, shake up, or evaluate the things that we have implicitly accepted into our daily commutes.

Mare Liberum will be participating in Conflux’12, the extra special election year edition curated by artist and curator Angela Washko.  Look for us in October (the 20th and 21st, to be exact).

Other artists in the ‘fest:

Art404 Man Bartlett Daniel Bejar Anders Bojen and Kristoffer Orum Yoni Brook Emily Bunker Jason Eppink Mary Flanagan Flux Factory Moses Gates Chris Gethard Matt Green Brian House Nate Hill Institute for Applied Autonomy Robert Lawrence Marie Lorenz Mare Liberum Jeff Maki Naomi Miller Rob Ray Christopher Robbins Mark Shepard Jeff Stark Nathaniel Sullivan Tango Intervention Angela Washko and The World of Warcraft Psychogeographical Association
Caroline Woolard Alex Young

Watch the conflux site for more info!