Have you been listening to the Hell Gate Podcast? You can catch last week's episode here.
At the multidisciplinary Red Hook art space Pioneer Works last Friday evening, guests mingled as they viewed the new installations that will adorn the space for the rest of the year. The Mexican artist Raúl de Nieves's towering stained glass windows make the former iron factory feel like a kind of hippie church, but the bulk of what's on display is the exhibit "How To Get To Zero"—the first survey of the past half-decade of work from long-time collaborators Australian enviro-artist Tega Brain and New York City-based hacker-artist Sam Lavigne. One of the pieces is a video installation for "Coppelganger," which allows you to find the NYPD officer you look most like, a gamified reversal of ubiquitous surveillance; another is a matrix of bots hosted on a bunch of old, plugged-in smartphones, fixed to the wall and operating on their own, all running up the pageviews on climate news coverage. The overall effect is a pleasant feeling that you're hacking into the mainframe, finding glimpses of political possibility that both defy and sometimes reinforce the conventional wisdom that "we're so cooked."
But the main highlight is "Offset," Brain's and Lavigne's new, (sort of) satirical send-up of the idea of carbon offsets, the measly market-based answer to the generational problems presented by climate change. On a website built for "Offset," Lavigne and Brain offer visitors the chance to buy $150 certificates that would, in a roundabout way, cancel out carbon emissions by donating to activists that have been undertaking acts of sabotage against oil and gas infrastructure projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline (included in the "marketplace" of industrial sabotage efforts is also the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson).
The in-person component of "Offset" is akin to a call center combined with an alternate reality game, where you can get on a leaderboard by logging the longest calls made to oil and gas executives, reducing your own private carbon footprint by, well, being annoying. It was a good way to spend an evening.
Hell Gate spoke to Lavigne about "Offset," which forms the centerpiece of his and Brain's contributions to the new Pioneer Works season.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.