Meet the crew of Swimming Cities of Serenissima (alphabetically)

Adina Bier is a new-comer to Brookyln and a ‘behind the scenes’ makin’ it happen person for all the floaters aboard Swimming Cities. She is also known as an international performance artist, mostly found wrapped in strange materials like saran-wrap or building installations out of wheat flour. She is an active member of International Performance Art Association, Hildesheim (IPAH) and a co-founder of International Performance Association of America (IPPA). She likes gold spandex and small feathery trinkets.

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Anton Berteaux, obsolete machine whisperer.
Raised in a nice home, by the age of 8 I knew that what I really wanted out of life was to live in a junkyard. I have achieved this goal for large parts of my life, often turning a perfectly boring apartment into a full fledged junk pile through diligence, work and superior scrounging skill. I have done lots of that art stuff, mostly as Paul Da Plumber’s groupie and head mechanic.

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Arielle Bier is a wonder woman.

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A’yen Tran manages large art and media projects for non-profits and artists, often in the interactive space. She is also an artist and story collector. A’yen helped found art collective The Miss Rockaway Armada with whom she has installed artwork in MASSMoCA and floated the Mississippi River recording oral histories aboard homemade junk rafts. In 2008 she managed external relations and logistics for Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. She recently became the Interactive Project Coordinator at Local Projects, a media design firm for museums and public spaces. Find her work at thebirdinmyheart.com and her blog at antleredlife.com

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Ben Burke is a writer, puppeteer, fabricator, song & dance man hailing from Oakland, California.
He is co-founder of the Stars & Garters Theatre Company and a proud member of the Apocalypse Puppet Theater.

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Benjamin Mortimer likes stuff that no one seems to care about. He also does other stuff that people like to hear about, but he’s really bored by. The best he was ever summed-up was when one of his friends was heard noting, ‘I have never met anyone more consistently innapropriate’. His sister also found it necessary to add a warning to Ben by making him wear a pin stating ‘I make things up’. He is part of the Black Label Bicycle Club and the Madagascar Institute. His photos can be seen at photosbybenjamin.com or flickr.com/photos/notontv

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Ben Wolf was born in Nashville, TN. He spent the first few years of life in Pegram and Lawrenceburg, a couple of small towns. Then he moved to Nashville. The youngest of five boys. He moved to Brooklyn when he was 18. Studied at Pratt Institute, getting his BFA in photography, although now he’s entirely devoted to sculpture and installation. Travels as much as possible, which leads him to various parts of the world and crevices of the country(US).

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Chicken John is a Showman living in San Francisco. A contributor and instigator with a long history of arranging Serendipity to accommodate Chaos when she comes to Destiny’s house for dinner. He is a documented confusionist. He is a qualified insultant. He also a mechanic and a writer. He owns a gigantic bus and a small dog. In his spare time he enjoys longs walks off a short pier, underwater basket weaving and writing dumb bios about himself. He is the mechanical engineer for the Swimming Cities project.

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Constance Hockaday is a Floating Neutrino. She was born and raised in deep South Texas along the US/Mexico border and has spent most of her adult life wearing cowboy boots and building community media stations in indigenous communities living in resistance. Most recently Constance has enrolled herself in an MFA program at Portland State University that is focused on Social Practice Art. Even still, the near future is uncertain, but she hopes will include: crossing an ocean by hand made vessel, playing the violin, and skinning a rabbit.

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Conrad Carlson, makes a myriad of things static and kinetic, ride-able and crash-able, legal and illegal, mostly out of your garbage. Dropped out of college to persue a creative life, landed in Brooklyn 10 years ago, Also known as Dj Dirty Finger, ass motivator general.

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Francesca Braly, emerged from The Cutthroats Bicycle Club, a group of hot extreme cyclist chicks, using her extraordinarily senses she managed to track down The Swimming Cities group in the quaint town of Ankaran, Slovenia in the midst of her spontaneous European cycling adventure. Faster than she learned the lyrics to Ankaran’s theme song she had stolen our hearts as we had stolen hers and quickly became our first and only official stow away. She currently resides in Richmond, Virginia counting down to her next unknown adventure.

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Greg Henderson

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Heather Jones is SWOON’s Studio Manager.
Often described as SWOON’s right hand woman. What doesn’t she do? She answers your emails. She answers other people’s emails. She draws and cuts and hand-paints and wheat-pastes. She orders supplies and makes inventories and lists. She haggles people for receipts. She’s on the phone with galleries in London and Paris while spray painting cardboard gold. And then she wakes up and does it again. She holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing. Previous projects include Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea at Deitch Projects and Sol Lewitt Retrospective at MASSMoCA.

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Ian Page

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Irina grew up in one of the biggest cities in the world with other 24
million souls, went to school for graphic design and photography but she
likes drawing and illustrating and sewing cute weird creatures and
printing much better. She works weird hours like Sundays at 3am.

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iris

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Jeff Stark is the editor of Nonsense NYC.

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Jonathan Kaiser is a cellist, songwriter, and artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Kara Blossom is a small girl/woman
She moves big things sometimes.
It makes her feel big.

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Laurel Bell is the other half of the octopus.

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Marshall LaCount

We make time where there is none. Whistle whistle clap clap.

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Moses Grubb is a clown. Yes, a real performing funny man. His comedic abilities match his list of bodily injuries sustained while making people laugh. He is also an expert builder and carpenter. His training began at the age of 3 under his father, reconstructing historical buildings in Austin Texas. Moses is a valued Member of Cyclecide, The Lifesize Mousetrap, Kinetic Steam Works, and performs weekly as Pa Po’Bucket in the “Ask Dr Hal” show. He is a very great guy.

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Nona Invie – accordion saint

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Orien McNeill is a fabricator.

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Fun is the universal language. Paul Cesewski AKA Paul da Plumber builds pedal powered carnival rides and other large scale kinetic sculptures for art shows and interactive carnivals. Many of his rides travel with San Francisco’s Cyclecide Bike Rodeo.  His two seater pedal powered ferris wheels floated down the Mississippi with the Miss Rockaway Armada. His 30 foot tall pedal powered itinerate Star Wheel has appeared at festivals all over. His newest project, a homemade train that travels on abandoned railroads and accompanying documentation of his adventures. See more at www.paulsrides.com

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Phlippy Müller, master craftsman extraordinaire. Loves a fine cream sauce and cigarette. If you want a good right angle, go ask the German.

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Porter Fox is incredibly punctual. It’s incredible how incredibly punctual he is, can be and is. You can read about his adventures at www.writingofthedisaster.com.
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Robin Frohardt is a puppet designer, fabricator and scenic artist working in both New York City and San Francisco. She is the founder and artistic director of the Apocalypse Puppet Theater in San Francisco who has been providing wonderfully ridiculous, occasionally historical, and often bizarre or satirical works for adults and children for over three years. Her visually rich productions utilize a host of inventive and traditional methods and contraptions, such as shadow puppets, Bunraku puppets, giant puppets wave machines and most famously, the Apocalypse Stagecoach, the bicycle powered stagecoach puppet theater. Her puppetry work took her to Asia in 2005 and 2006. where she built puppets and taught workshops for the Dream Parade in Taiwan and performed at the Hoontown Puppet Festival and the Patravadi Theater in Bangkok, Thailand. Her recent work in New York includes set design and fabrication for ”IRT, a Tragedy in Three Stations,” a full-scale play performed entirely on the New York City Subway. She is currently developing new puppets for the Apocalypse Puppet Theater’s summer performances.

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Robyn Hasty: Bittersweet talkin’ dress wearin’ boat captain from the deepest of deep deep south. Keeps her knife close and her friends closer. Sports a sideshow career as a burlesque printmaker who can weave her tassels into the most realistic visage of Poseidon this side of the Mississippi.

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Ryan Doyle is 6’6” tall and 248 lbs. Born in St. Paul Minnesota to Gregory and Ann Doyle, he first discovered drawing at seven years old. At fifteen he was accepted to The Lola And Rudy Perpich Minnesota Center for Arts Education, where he studied the fundamentals of art and art history. It was there that Doyle started honing his skills toward sculpture and 3D Design, and was influenced by the enormous works of Mark Disuvero, Claes Oldenburg, and Doctor Evermore. After receiving the Merit Award Scholarship from Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) he attended for two years and was drawn away by what he considered the new movement in art, Interactive Kinetic Sculpture. He spent the next few years traveling and tall-bike jousting with The Know Nothing Family Zircus, The End Of the World Circus, Black Label Bike Club, and Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, hitting every state by the time he was 25. It was during this time that he first attended Burning Man, whom he has worked for and been commissioned by since 1999, and met Christian Ristow, Kal Spelletich, and Chris Hackett. These three men, established leaders of underground art groups, took the young artist under their wings and showed him, not only how to run a crew of people making seriously dangerous machines, but how to get corporate sponsorship through festival participation and television programming. During this “apprentice phase” Ryan worked with some of the most dangerous art groups in America and was brought to Europe multiple times to build some of the most obnoxious, loud, aggressive, potentially deadly, and even covertly illegal interactive kinetic sculptures, and performances of the day. Constantly touring, and producing Doyle and his collaborators have been the subject’s of documentary film, television shows, books, newspapers, magazines and even web blogs. These days Doyle has only two main goals, to get on the Simpsons someday, and to build as much as he can by the time he hits thirty years old. His website: http://people.tribe.net/doyle

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sandi abram was, is, will be

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Spy Emerson: freelance thinker, full-time hustler, international curator, and subversion artist extraordinaire. born in the rhythmic shadows of industry, spy’s childhood toys were big machines, and trains rocked her to sleep at night. she found her first dead body at the age of 6, and from then on, fear was a caged animal. she began as a club kid at the infamous limelight in NYC, moved to California and eventually opened The Bedroom gallery, a conceptual art space in Prague. Spy currently lives in San Francisco, and travels nationally and internationally with her work. She makes art, writes, and performs vaudeville with her partner Moses, and son Lucky. www.spygirlfriday.com

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Steve Valdez

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Swoon is a Brooklyn-based street artist who creates life-sized portraits of people she meets, using woodcut block prints and paper cutouts. Swoon’s galleries are city walls, often in the environments that inspired the prints. With influences ranging from German Expressionist wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets, Swoon is a master of using cut paper to play with positive and negative space in a conceptually driven exploration of street environments.
For the past three years, she has also designed, built, and organized fleets of rafts including those of the Miss Rockaway Armada and most recently the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, a large scale installation at Deitch Projects in New York City. Swoon’s boats are inspired by dense urban cityscapes and thickly intertwined mangrove swamps from her Florida youth.

She is an international artist with major pieces in the Museum of Modern Art, PS1’s groundbreaking exhibition GREATER NEW YORK, and Brooklyn Museum of Art. Swoon has been traveling for the past several years creating exhibitions and workshops in the United States and Europe.

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Tianna Kennedy is the Swimming Cities Project Manager. She doesn’t get much sleep. In the old days, Tianna earned degrees, fancied herself an artist, worked a weird array of jobs, and administered for the transmission arts nonprofit, free103point9. Tianna was also a founding member of radio art and action groups, Ladio and The August Sound Coalition. For kicks in 2005, she and a few friends dragged a salvaged WWII rescue boat from the Bronx to the Gowanus canal, called it “The Empty Vessel Project,” and ran it as an action, art and design center and point of public access to the Gowanus Canal. They pulled it off for almost three years. As a cellist, Tianna plays with anyone who asks nicely, but most often with Stars Like Fleas, Mike Wexler, Hannah Marcus, Daniel Carter/Ryan Sawyer/Patrick Holmes, Zeke Healy, and Kevin Shea. Her ensembles, according to Time Out, are ‘marked by chance and joy, as collectively they are about as predictable as chimps in a mall.’

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Tod Seelie is a photographer, artist and founding member of the Miss Rockaway Armada. He has traveled and photographed in fifteen countries on five different continents. His work has appeared in publications such as Rolling Stone, The NY Times, New York Magazine, Spin, Men’s Journal, Marie Claire, Jane, Vice, i-D, Paper, XXL, Art Forum, Art In America, Flash Art, Parade Magazine, Adbusters, Death + Taxes, and Hamburger Eyes among others. Tod has exhibited work in solo and group shows in New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Cleveland, Miami and at Mass MoCA. His work has also appeared in various photography books, such as The Vice Photo Book, Street World, Backyard Shakedown, Hijacked, and Various Photographs curated by Tim Barber.
suckapants.com

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Todd Chandler is a filmmaker and musician. He is currently directing FLOOD, an experimental narrative film shot aboard the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. He is a member of the bands Dark Dark Dark and Fall Harbor. This is his fourth year of an ongoing relationship with a fleet of junk boats and their brilliant and insane creators.

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Tony Bones was born in Dallas Texas in 1983. He spent his early childhood drawing on just about everything he could get his hands on, decorating his toys and applying secret images to the bottoms of tables and chairs. As time wore on he began taking his artistic inclinations out doors, working in the streets with various mediums including spray paint, wheat paste, wood, house paint and a wide variety of inks and toxic chemicals, affixing his simple imagery to public surfaces . After spending the better part of a decade adorning city streets all across America and avoiding authorities he has began showing his works in more traditional environments that allow for more complex works and larger scale installations. He currently lives and works in Texas. www.tonybones.net

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Vasja Nagy is a Slovenia based but transnationally oriented independent curator who in greater part dedicates his work and life to Photography and enjoys contributing to independent, socially committed art projects. He mostly knows where is coming from but almost never aware of where is going to. www.vasjanagy.org

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