Geraldine Juarez & Adam Bobette

Adam Bobette.
b.1980 in Canada.
Lives and works in Toronto, CA.

Geraldine Juárez
b.1977 in Mexico City.
Lives and works in Mexico City and New York

• Forays is a collaborative entity concerned with the creation of more forays.
• A foray throws us into the uncertain territory of collaboration and against the autonomous ego.
• A foray is an incomplete project.  It means to head into the field with experiments and return with results, as partial as those may be. 
• A foray rarely provides final results but instead tends towards opening possibilities, confusion is acceptable if not necessary for successful forays.
• A foray must be compelled by the ethics of copyleft, hacking, larceny, and alternative forms of exchange, and released within the public domain. 
• Our investigations have tended towards creating and researching open-ended minor architectures and the modification of everyday infrastructure.
  

Pessimism has the power to turn us to what is immediately at hand; for us it has been to the excess energies emitting from the infrastructures of our cities. Here we find new resources to hack, new sources to interface, and new materials to repurpose. We are working with the principal that we thoroughly belong to infrastructures but are never quite determined by them.

The postal system, steam powered heating systems, construction sites; these have been our resources. Using steam from the street we have made two prototypes of an oven that catches the steam directly from the vent to heat food. The first prototype is a repurposed construction site light fixture that cooks food inside of it. The second captures steam at the source and sends it into an oven. With it we cooked hot dogs, but really you could cook whatever you like. A glass jar fixed to the top of the oven condenses the steam into water which drips into a cup for a nice hot cup of tea to drink with your hot dog. If the steam is released in a clean spot (not mixed with sewage run off, for instance) it is totally safe to ingest. Moreover, the steam never touches the food as the food can be wrapped in various kinds of heat conducive containers.

Our tents were made from modified United States Postal Service, Tyvek envelopes hacked from the post office and sewn together. You can take as many postal envelopes as you like from American post offices with few to no questions asked. Our sleeping bags were fashioned from cheap emergency blankets and freecycled cotton batting.

The back packs we made to carry everything in are made from construction netting which you can find almost anywhere a city is trying to re-invent itself. All you need is a knife and maybe someone else to keep watch.

We have spent nights with these objects. We have tried to immerse ourselves in the infrastructures which shape our cities, ultimately to open a perspective on who controls them, how they are utilized and how they are purposed. What happens when you repurpose their excesses, when you hack them, when you take advantage of their blind spots for your own use and your own adventures?

Our objects are prototypes for bent infrastructures. They are by no means complete, but we hope to open up the possibility of transforming infrastructures into to raw materials for repurposing and public use.

www.forays.org

“It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?”
Sun Ra, 1974 

Images

Forays,  Prototype for bent infrastructures, 2008, Courtesy of the Artists