WILDING TOWERS: PUBLIC ART FOR A CITY WITHOUT A POPULACE, LEA COUNTY, NM
The project was designed by Jared Winchester, Entropic Industries and Cory Greenfield, CampoVerde Architecture, both in Albuquerque, NM.
New Mexico’s Lea County will very soon become the location for a full-scale fake city. This intelligent ghost town will be used to test emerging urban technologies and tactics ranging from driverless vehicles and smart grids to drone surveillance and beyond. Known as CITE, the Center for Innovation Testing and Evaluation will be the largest testing and evaluation center in the world. Paralleling this simulated urban environment will be a vast underground laboratory to monitor the results.In the fall of 2014, a City of Albuquerque call for public art used CITE as a project site and asked for proposals to consider the implications and possibilities for a work of public art in such a scenario. Our response to this call acts as a form of harmonic resistance to, or atonement for the potential uses this site may take on. To contrast against the inherent contradictions of this test city, we propose the introduction of an additional ‘test site.’ A series of earthen monoliths packed with seeds from native plants species will be strategically distributed across the city. The towers are intended as a propagative program with a calculated, though unpredictable result – the slow reintroduction of native species through artificial means. The earthen forms work as a reverse geology where strata of soil and seed mixtures contained within each block of earth shelve future worlds to be revealed through time as wind and water wear away each consecutive layer. The imposition of the towers intothe content of the CITE site and the resultant broadcasting of seeds that will occur over time will provide an alternate geography and ecology according to natural phenomena and weather that stands out in contrast with the simulated urban geography of the complex.