 I don't know if I sit because it feels weird to sit back there. Thanks so much for being here. My name's Tautje Adler. I made Floodtide along with a lot of help from a lot of people. So thank you all for being here, for watching. Thanks to the Brooklyn Museum for having us. Marshall Account, who's been a collaborator starting this film and being in Dark Dark Dark and making the music. And helping to organize this amazing event tonight. He's going to get up a little later and lead us into the next stage of this event. But first we're just going to have a few minutes. I'm going to say a couple of things about the film. Then we're going to bring up Caledonia and Curry. We're going to talk a little bit about the sort of broader network of collaborations that have grown out of the, what we call, the raft community. So I'll just say a couple of things real quick. I'm going to test it quick because I have about a 5% battery here and just a couple of notes. It's going to die and then we're going to move on. So this is the New York premiere of this really super, super extra site to be here. I've done some screenings elsewhere and I've been asked, you know, why didn't you just make a documentary? Which is a good question. That's a fair question. For me, you know, I've been involved in these projects for several years. The first raft project that this community was involved in was in 2006 called the Miss Rockboy Armada and that was a very collective project. The Mississippi took us about three months to go, 250 miles. And then the next summer that project continued and then the two summers after that, 2008 and 2009, those were more sort of Cali-authored projects. But, you know, the same community of collaborators that was on the Hudson River in which this was shot. And then the Adriatic Sea kind of crashing the Venice Biennale. Having spent a few years on this project, for me what was really interesting was just that there was no singular narrative. It was just a project that was full of contradictions and full of problems and questions and beauty. And there were just so many things that for me somehow made more sense to make something that has its own narrative and its own life that could be in conversation with the project and maybe even in contradiction to it sometimes. And so, you know, some of the stuff in there is pulled from interviews with people. You know, it took me two months to get my personality back into that trip, for example. Or some people did go to learn how to fix motors or learn how to pilot a boat. And people did give us tomatoes from their gardens. And sometimes people thought we were going to rob them. And sometimes people asked us if we had orgies on them. You know, there were all these different perceptions from people who were interacting with us and also from people who were us to work. Everyone was experiencing it in a different way. Everyone was there for very different reasons. So for me it sort of made sense to sort of explore that in some way. And for me, one of the big motivations was that I had never really worked in a big community. I had been in bands but kind of shied away from any sort of scene or large group. I had freaked me out. So, you know, jumping on board a 110-foot barge made of trash with about 50 other crazy people. And spending several months on it was like, that was a test for me. It was challenging. It was frustrating. It was also really exciting. And what was most exciting was to really experience the power of this group of people to create something totally amazing. And that continues, right? And there's this really kind of extended family of raft folks who have been making amazing work together. And that work has a lot of connections to these original projects in spirit or energetically or sometimes in process. And so part of tonight is about sharing that work in some way. We call it similar collaborations because this sort of collaborative network is a really interesting one. It doesn't really fit squarely into any category. It's not really an art collective. There's group decision making, but it's not like activist-stop consensus. It's not really studio artists or assistants. You need a big community to make something this big. So it's an interesting model that's sometimes hard to pin down. And it's sort of invisible in a way, right? It's like this invisible extended network that, you know, that sometimes those of us who are part of it don't even recognize it in some way. So tonight we kind of wanted to shed a little bit of light on that and talk about that a bit more. So let me see if there's anything else about that. Right, so that isn't just about the flood tide. And it's not just about this submerged motherland orchestra, which is this great ad hoc music group that's going to be performing music in Calais installation later. It's about this larger network in a way. So one way to start exploring that first step at it was to try to figure out a way to map it. So I'm going to try to see if it works. Let's see. Maybe, maybe not. There. Okay, showing up, yes. Okay, so this is an incomplete first attempt at a kind of map. And basically just sent out an email to all the lists, the project lists, and to some individuals too. And, you know, here's some criteria. You know, give me any projects that you know that are, some have connected in spirit to the RAF projects that are collaborative, that happen after the RAF projects that are related either aesthetically or process-wise. You know, there are a number of criteria. It was amazing, like over 60 projects, and it's very, very incomplete, right? But all these projects came in, and there were a lot of surprises in there, things that I never imagined were connected or things that I didn't know about. So we're going to sort of explore this a little bit, and Calais is going to come up and talk about the power of working in this way. Here's Cala W. So thanks to everyone who made it. There are some folks that couldn't get in, but this is a really great evening. And so, you know, I, we were inspired to create this evening for a lot of different reasons. And one of them is just because, you know, you come here to the museum and go to the fifth floor, you see that there's this installation created by this one person. Yeah, right. And it's just one of those things where there, you get into situations with art making where you get into authorship, and maybe a person kind of has a vision and really wants to execute it and is very specific about that. And even in that seemingly clear cut of a situation, it's just not really possible to create things on the scale that we are sort of looking at by yourself. And then in addition to that, I think that projects like The Boats and like these other projects are also not that clear cut. But for me, because I have kind of a life as a studio artist, and then I have kind of a few different other lives. So life as a collaborative and a community-based artist, you get, the narrative becomes really complex. So you walk into the installation, you see these huge boats, and okay, it's just got my name on it. But like, there's really kind of a much larger story to how this came to be. Just go zoom around like this. Yeah, zoom around. So take a look. He's going to zoom around and sort of show different projects and project names. We didn't list everyone's name because it was just going to literally be too much information. But basically, you know, like whenever I give a talk, the question I always forget to answer is kind of what this night is about. Everyone always raises their hands and they go, like, how did you do this? And actually Sharon, when we were setting up the installation, she would come in every day and she was like the most awesome cheerleader. And she would always say, oh my God, I can't believe what you guys are getting done. And it really sort of brought me back to that awareness of even though like the installation upstairs is my show, it really is the product of this larger creative community and that the people who lent their energies to it, it wasn't just about like pushing a paintbrush, it was like all of the kind of ingenuity and all of the like the ways that they were involved in the Swimming Cities project and in the Mississippi project and also all of the kind of incredible process that goes into making the installation. And so, you know, I knew which would say, how are you guys doing this? And I was like, oh right, this is a special thing. It's not, it's something to be kind of explored and appreciated. And so kind of as Todd was saying, you know, I, like years ago, I was in school and one of my best teachers, this woman, Ann Messner, said to the class, whatever you do, just find your people and stick with them. And that was like this kind of like seminal advice for me. And so I started to like kind of be inspired by a lot of activist work and a lot of different projects. And then I went to a group called the Madagascar Institute in Brooklyn and I walked in and there was this guy named Jeff Stark sitting in a chair. I was like, hey you guys, I have this idea for a project. It's going to be the street party. And I was still a snot and I was going to lay a little rat. And he was like, yeah, sure, we'll help you. And sort of in that moment I got introduced to all of, to this kind of larger network in Brooklyn of people doing these kind of crazy cacophonous, oftentimes illegal events. And everything built out of garbage and everything kind of unpermitted and everything just totally crazy and scrappy and pieced together. And then I kind of became introduced even to this larger historical context of like the Cacophony Society in San Francisco and the Suicide Club. And all of this history of people who had been doing these really intense kind of politically charged collaborative projects over the years. And then I started to realize that like in every city like there's always a house that you can sort of show up at a punk house or some kind of community space that can be like, oh, if you're going to like, if you're passing through Dallas or if you're in New Orleans you got to call this friend. And so over time I sort of started to realize like how many people were sort of working in that way and just kind of tapping each other. And the thing that's important about this is when you look at all these different projects on here it's like the reason that we were able to have enough ingenuity to build those rafts to go on the river is because every single person that was involved will at another time be the head of their own project or be involved in 15 other projects that they're indispensable to. And in this one I just happened to be like, hey, I have this idea, like let's run with it, you know. But at another time somebody will be like, oh, I really want to make drums for Haiti or I really want to make this film called Fitzgarde Brawl Tower or I really want to, you know, there's just so many different versions of events or I want to take these rafts down that the Ganges in India are like, whatever, you know, everyone's always kind of poking their heads up with these plans and then hollering up to their friends and trying to get them together to work on something. And so that's like really kind of what we wanted to celebrate with tonight with showing Tom's film with just like taking a minute to really look at the history of all the different projects, both that the raft project came from and which then kind of came out of the raft project. We had actually an interesting conversation earlier about Bobby mentioned Occupy Sandy and we were like, oh, that's a huge like political movement involving like thousands of people. How can we not stick it on here? Right. I mean, Bobby and I wrote to me in this kind of amazing email explaining how Occupy Sandy grew up out of a very similar kind of energy, this sort of sense of empowerment and possibility. And I went to bed that night and I'd be like, no way, how can we put that on there? There's 60,000 volunteers. It's this great huge thing. And then I woke up in the morning and reread it and it totally makes sense. It is the same kind of spirit in a way. Yeah. What I really loved about that story is that I feel like that there's this kind of positive feedback loop with activism and intense creative projects. And sometimes I worry, what are we doing, these kind of decadent creative things we should be doing kind of more service to the community and so on. And when I heard that from Bobby, I realized that one kind nourishes the other in a pretty real way. And that like so much like kind of so many amazing organized projects sort of inspired me to be able to call on people and work together and all of us, inspire all of us to do stuff together. And then the kind of total, the incredible like realization of possibility that happened to all of us during our time on the river was also kind of equally fed back into other projects. The other thing I don't want to forget to mention is that there's a pretty long history of people building boats, homemade boats in Minneapolis and going down to Mississippi. And so, you know, we just kind of did it in this really loud, showy, offy way. But it's actually quite a long tradition. And so we were really inspired by those guys as well as the floating neutrinos. And I also want to say thank you to Jeff who died, I don't know if you made it in the room yet or you'll be here later. But anyway, he was a, you know, such an incredible force in New York City and it was somebody who was so supportive of us working on this. And also I see Duke is here and he's maybe not on this list, you're Riley, but he's also a huge kind of like comrade of inspiration as far as like the sort of nautical work. So I guess that's it. I think we should open up to questions unless there's anything else. No, I think we can take, you know, a couple of minutes of questions. It can be about this stuff. It can be for Callie, the work upstairs. It can be about the film. Yeah, and there are microphones on either side. Also thanks to the Brooklyn Museum for organizing this. It was really important for us to be, for me to be able to speak about the larger context out of which the installation grew. And to be able to celebrate everyone who's kind of creative energies were involved. And I know we're not necessarily listing everybody's names, but just to really talk about the larger context of this creative community seems really important. Reid, what's on the screen is that? Okay, cool. So, yeah, you should look into some of these projects. There's really incredible... Yeah, in fact, it's in complete right now, so work in progress. But it is online, so you can look at the same thing online. It's just at missrockaway.org slash map. So Miss Rockaway, like the Rockaways, missrockaway.org slash map. Thank you so much for the film. I just kind of mentioned about, not just the network, but about the distribution of molecules into the river after death and how the ecology of this work and of Cali's work and the way it's reduced seems to be a big part of it. I mean, is that something that there seems to happen systematically? Anything more to talk about? I mean, in the film, it made sense to me in a lot of different ways, like thinking about the Hudson River and spending so much time on the Hudson River. At the time, I was actually living in Troy, New York, on the river basically and sort of thinking a lot about loss and both the terms of the environment of the river and personally, and so I was interested in exploring that and asking some of those questions. But I think it manifested other ways in a lot of different projects I guess I'll speak to the reuse, but I think that at the time that we started on the Rockaway and I think that we were largely unsuccessful in this goal, but we really wanted to think about how we can live in a way that just had a different environmental impact. And so in our kind of very like what can we do with what we can get our hands on kind of mentality, we really focused a lot on reuse and on just trying to kind of like revision how we use resources and to be able to also communicate that with people as we traveled. We can take one or two more questions and if you're not able to make it to the mic, Todd, if you could just repeat the question. Sure, sure. Thank you. And yeah. Pretty small, but arguably, we're seeing fewer and less people and then don't seem to leave ahead and suddenly it's much larger when we don't have What's that going to say? I said, don't need to go out and play. Yeah. I sort of just I decided to let that hang out there. It's a movie. It's not exactly like a tight narrative, so I figured people are going to make that leap or they're not. And in some way, it was this idea of starting small and then expanding. It was both in terms of focusing on sort of individuals creating their own small worlds in isolation and then sort of having this expansion in a way. And that's both in terms of, you know, how people are working together and coming together. Even just in the way we shot the film and there's something, you know, at the beginning as everything is very close up and then it opens in a way. We're there for it, right? Yes. The question is, I'm curious. I'm talking about it. I'm sorry. How did it happen? How did the group enlarge? Well, this, I mean, the film isn't actually, because it's not a documentary, you know, all of that narrative is narrative. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So this, you know, so this, it's, you know, the way I shared it before, but how I tend to describe it is, you know, it does document some things about this real project, but it sort of layered with fiction and mythology and oral history and all kinds of things to sort of create its own, have its own life. Have it be good. Okay. That's a question I think. End of live. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a great question. So I think that the, the sort of functional distinction that I tend to make is that when we come together collectively and collectively envision an idea and execute it collectively, then everyone's just in it and no one's getting paid unless somehow there were money to pay people and that kind of, we like stipends or something. But, but on the installation, for example, if you worked on it, you also got paid. And even if you were part of the sort of no matter what degree of sort of vested interest you had in it, it's like time and energy and people have to pay the rent. And so, so for me, if it's like, if I'm thinking in that kind of single authorship kind of way, and I know that I'm going to make something which may or may not like, which can have a monetary value attached to it, then I, then monetize that. And I think that, yeah, that's my sort of simple answer to that personally. And then, of course, there's a little sort of complicated stuff about living and traveling together and how we kind of pass the hat that shows and just the complicatedness of trying to imagine alternatives and kind of like you mentioned, finding yourself drawn back into systems that perhaps are reached very differently. Okay, we'll wrap up.