Defenses

The bugs here are incredible. My new perfume scent is Off unscented (yeah right) insect repellant. I put it on every morning and then again in the late afternoon. But i'm going to collaborate with Saskia Jorda (the artist in residence coordinator here) to design a mobile mosquito netting outfit of sorts. My preliminary sketches are shown on the left.

Some new interesting findings is that the man-made lake at Wisconsin Dells that flooded during the early June floods this year not only created a new tributary to the Wisconsin River that Taliesin sits adjacent to but was once actually a glacial lake before an ice dam broke and forged the rest of the Wisconsin River that now flows to the Mississippi. It's an interesting development to me to think of how far back disasters go and also the mirroring of current events—draining a lake and overwhelming the Wisconsin River. I still need to do more research to understand how the area here was affected by the floods but i'm definitely planning on taking a trip to the Wisconsin Dells.

I also went for a run this morning to try to get some recordings and photos of the river close up. Unfortunately, the river is pretty quiet where i took the photo you see but tomorrow i'll try out some other paths along the river's edge to see what i can discover. A plan is brewing for a piece using the knotted string masses i've been working on for over a year, video of them flowing down the river, stories of people's personal disasters (as well as my own) and a video/animation that combines all of these.