 Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us at SFPL's Virtual Library, i.e. Zoom. Today, artist Chip Lord chronicles his lifelong involvement with the automobile from childhood fascination to the central material of art making with the group Ant Farm and beyond. Ant Farm was an avant-garde architecture, graphic arts, and environmental design practice founded in San Francisco in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Michaels. This visual lecture by Chip Lord was first given in the graduate lecture series at the SF Art Institute and then at the Toledo Art Museum during the exhibition Life is a Highway, Art in American Car Culture 2019. The San Francisco Public Library hosts hundreds of programs a month system wide. They are all free to log in and or attend in person always. Programming consists of film viewings, tech, job and financial coachings, knitting circles, storytelling workshops with the opera, book clubs, author lectures, instructor led arts and crafts classes, etc. This month we highlight and celebrate more than a month, SFPL's celebration of black history and futures. In the chat we'll post SFPL's upcoming events link so you know what's happening soon at your library. We'll also post our YouTube channel link where you can watch other outstanding library programs. Before we get started with our current program we've got a bit of housekeeping to do. First and foremost, land acknowledgement. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Shaloni peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramaytush community. For more information on SFPL's Ramaytush Shaloni land acknowledgement, please see the link posted in chat. This program has been sponsored by the Friends of the Library and brought to you by the Art, Music and Recreation Center of the San Francisco Public Library. You can visit us at the main library fourth floor and may contact us at the email and our phone number provided here. We'll drop our homepage link in the chat. Here are some books available at SFPL by and about Shiplord and Outfarm. We'll post this list via Art, Music and Recreation Center blog in the chat. Enjoy it all for free at your library. Shiplord grew up in 1950s America, a place that has been a sometimes source of inspiration in his work as an artist. Trained as an architect, he was a founder, founding partner of Antfarm, with whom he produced the video art classics, media burn, and the eternal frame, as well as the public sculpture Cadillac Ranch and Amarillo, Texas, and the House of the Century outside Houston, Texas. His work crosses between documentary and experimental boundaries and moves between video photography and installation. Shiplord's work has been exhibited and published widely and is included in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the FRAC Center, the Pompadour Center, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz, and is also taught in architecture at CCA and Columbia University GSAPP. He lives in San Francisco and will post his website in the chat. This will be the rules. All participants will remain muted during the presentation and 10 to 15 minutes will be reserved at the end of the presentation for Chip to answer questions that are posted in the Q&A. Library related or other, please use chat. This presentation will be recorded. We have enabled auto transcription if you need closed captioning on your screen. You can remove it from your screen by clicking the CC button. Welcome Chip and thank you for being here and I'll stop sharing my screen and hand it over to you. Okay. Well thank you Stephanie. And thank you everyone for coming out on this cold, windy day in San Francisco. I know you didn't actually come out. I know that. I'm going to go right to sharing my screen and starting the presentation. I don't have a. A lot of wonderful introduction and. I appreciate it. Okay. This was a long about in the automobile 2023 version. And, you know, and in another sense that's an artist talk, and I'm going to show eight projects today. Doug was the co-founder of Ant Farm and he died in 2003. It was the National Black History Month and I wanted to start with this image. It's a shot from the series cars and owners that Doug and I did within sort of within Ant Farm without it being an Ant Farm project but this was shot in 1973 we were in Houston near the University of Houston. And this gentleman. We asked permission to take his picture which we did and you see it here was made into a postcard. And eventually became part of the cars and owners theories which is 160 35 millimeter slides. But Doug and I took we don't know which of us took any particular one but we're going to come back to that project. A little bit later. I'm going to start with some personal history I was born in 1944, and it was a year in which there were no cars manufactured in the US because the war. There was no war to within, you know, that was going on and all the manufacturing capacity of the automobile industry have been turned over to producing tanks and planes and other weaponry. When the war ended in 1945 it still took a few years for the automakers to come out with new models it took typically three years and for Ford it was introducing the 1949 Ford. And my dad bought a car about exactly this car. So I was just five years old when that car came into the family. And in 1949 Cadillac, it was advertised. Thus, and this is probably from a life magazine at the new standard of the world, of course standard of the world was a Cadillac model. So this was a new version of that. And in a way that was the introduction to a decade in which car styling. This is called power over the advertising of the cars and the creating sales incentives for various models. This is a 59 Cadillac also from a from a brochure. This isn't. This is also a 59 Cadillac it's interesting. This is an ad for body by Fisher. This is a vision of General Motors, and for some reason the illustrator cut off the engine, the front of the car, and there's no wheels it's being launched into space which I think is maybe has something to do with the Sputnik era, but it's, but it's the it's the tail fin era. And it wasn't just General Motors that was pursuing this idea but also Ford and Chrysler. And actually, in this ad. I don't know if you can read you probably can't read the text but it says that excerpt would say based on aerodynamic principles. And it says make a real contribution to the remarkable stability of these cars on the road. I don't think that's true. That's a 59 Dodge owned by a local collector. I'm going to jump forward a little bit forward in time in my personal history I 1962 I went to Tulane University School of architecture and I began studying architecture and in a magazine I saw the this rendering of the Boston City Hall, which was the winner of a competition. A young architecture firm Coleman McKenna one knows, there were actually three professors or two professors and a student at Columbia, they won the competition and it took six years for the building to be completed that happened to be the same duration it took six years to complete my training as an architect and of course, by the time I did graduate. I was a little bit less interested in being an architect but I, I got in my Volkswagen beetle and headed to California to participate in the Halpern workshop. This is a photo from taking it to see ranch. It was a collective workshop for dancers and architects, and I think to me it introduced the ideas that the city could be an object the city could be a score and moving through the city is the form of performance. And I'm going to summarize them in three lines the Halpern workshop. After though, it was a 30 day workshop so it was basically the month of July. And after the workshop. So I met him the previous fall when he came to Tulane on a lecture tour. He had graduated the year earlier, and he has some of his student work shown in progressive architecture magazine. And that was enough for him to get on the phone and call around and set up this lecture trip. And we stayed in touch over that time and he came out to San Francisco. And we were having conversations about alternatives on forms of architecture. And we described it to a friend who was visiting one night that we were going to be underground architects because you had in the city at that time underground newspapers underground films underground music. There was a sense of an underground culture emerging. And she immediately said, Oh, like the toy I had the ant farm. I have that as a kid. And there was a perfect metaphor and instantly not only did we have a name but we also have an official color which was green because and forms only came in green in those days. And what you see here is a rendering of the ant farm you had to send in a coupon to get your ants but the ants seem to be building more interesting biomorphic spaces below ground. And the buzz round we see a rather really conventional mid 20th century agrarian piece of a couple pieces of architecture. It's a good name for a band and probably that's what we really wanted to do is be a rock band. But none of us knew how to play any instruments. And at the time we didn't realize that that probably wouldn't have been a detriment to the success of the band. I wanted to just quote, Michael sorkin here on the naming of ant farm he said that calling their collaboration and farm immediately signaled that the work would be of a different order than that produce under the gray flannel imprimatur of a firm such as Skidmore Owens and Merrill. Who totally true. And, you know, today, many architectural firms try to find a name that is not simply the name of the partners. We were influential over the long haul in that sense. And the group expanded over the next few years. We taught at the University of Houston in 1969, and made friends with some of the students there who were like minded, and it led to after a total five years that's the founding but it led to a commission that became Cadillac Ranch in 1974. And it was this guy Stanley March three who we met in the at the end of 1973, returning from Texas back to California he invited us to visit. And we met him and as we were getting ready to leave he said would you, if you have an idea for a project I would, you know that I might do with you on interested. So we went back to California and then we sent him basically this blueprint, the original was a blueprint this is a reproduction. And what's interesting, you know, looking back on it now it's, I think Doug Michaels drew this but the section through the grave site, the architectural form, the section drawing the plan below it. There's a budget, then we budgeted for example, $3,000 to purchase 10 vehicles to fulfill this idea. It was the literal making in three dimensions of a diagram that we is seen in a book called the design of cars. And the three of us. In our case and Michael's had all shared this growing up obsession with automobiles. And in fact at one point we realized that our fathers only got as far as automobile in the hierarchy of the idea being first you buy the affordable Chevrolet then you go to Pontiac, then you go to. And I'm just never sure whether it was Buick or always. But in other words, our dads never got to the success level to own a Cadillac. And Stanley gave us a go ahead and said let's plan a trip on why don't you come down here to Amarillo, and we'll start buying cars for the Cadillac ranch. And then what you see here, a shot of me handing a check to a youth car salesman on the left. I think it's the left. And then the other shot I'm in a junkyard with two hands on two different model Cadillacs from the 50s the 58, and that was the one that was actually purchased in turquoise and a 55 is the other car. And once we had the 10 cars lined up and ready to go we started construction with the backhoe. Because the ground was very, very hard and on the site, the site is on technically on interstate 40 about eight miles west of the Amarillo city limits or, or it was at that time. If, if you can dig the 10 holes that are the same depth and the same width all you have to do is push the cars in, and they will line up. So we took a week to construct the sculpture. And then we had an opening reception party, which is was on the summer solstice in 1974. And this photo was taken. Then we didn't provide any explanation no signage no, you know, headstone that would have the credit so describe what it was. And that was Stanley Marsh's idea we agreed with it. So what you see in this picture taken a year later is the sort of the sense of the distance from the sculpture back to the highway there's actually a, a access road and then the interstate interstate 40. And you can see that the cars are in pretty good shape after one year. The glass is broken and these two cars but the paint is all original 1981. The graffiti is beginning. And you can see the pathway. There's been a number of visitors who have made a pathway out to Cadillac Ranch, and then 1984 the 10th anniversary. Basically up into this point in time, people would take out their car key and scratch into the paint, you know, either a message or a signature something like that and the, the idea of spray paint is kind of just beginning at this point in time. We never envisioned that we did have the hubcaps welded on because we could imagine people might steal hubcaps, but no other and we did weld the doors closed and so forth but already somebody has been kind of absconded with the, the trunk lid. There were 10th, 20th and 30th anniversary every 10 years on the summer solstice, but Stanley Marsh died in just before 2014, and that was the last party there. And over this period of time it was, what was interesting was that we had an agreement with Marsh and the agreement was this, the Marsh family would always own the property and the physical sculpture itself but the ant farm would own the image rights. So we had been engaged in trying to release the image rights, and since access was given to the properties for the public. It's really a public sculpture but it's privately owned or non private land. And by 2015 of the. So many people have been tagging it that you know here's. Here's somebody holding a slab of paint that has been peeled off one of the cars you can see the kind of thickness of the paint. And a couple of years later. We were contacted with by acne studio it's a design, a European design company and fashion retailer, and they wanted to do a photo shoot for which they paid a fee. And this is a shot of Cindy Crawford standing next to the 59 Cadillac which they also requested that it could we paint it black. And we said sure, why not. Cool. That was the project number one and number two media burn was done a few years later but also has a car at the center of the project. It also happens to be a 59 Cadillac, but I wanted to begin with this image because it shows that it was media burn was done before a live audience of invited and invited public. And I have a postcard that said, this postcard will admit a car load and the classic sort of drive and movie mode. And it was very simple to create, you know, this, essentially this image. This was a Diane Paul photo. And we had a press area set up, and sort of held the public back, and we populated the press area with many friends who were photographers but in this photo you can see the San Francisco Chronicle reporter on the far right another photographer. And so the car was at the center of it and it took about a year to customize and reconfigure the car which we had purchased the company car. And we actually bought it from somebody who was in the who do rhythm devils in. We bought it in 1973. A local band. And the idea was to make a version of the dream cars of the 50s. This is the firebird three from General Motors shown in front of the GM tech center. This shows was an early sketch January 1973 that the idea of the project was sort of all components were there although the model car that make of the car changed and I don't know any number reasons but the idea of integrating video and then making it a critique of the, like the monolith of the three, you know, television corporations ABC, NBC and CBS. Breaking that monolith, symbolically, naively, maybe. And the, the project then was taken once made. It was videotape. Incidentally, all the several video crews they were all volunteers, and as were the photographers. This is the John John as Turner photo that was made into a postcard. And the distribution of the project was by both videotape and edited videotape and also a postcard. The least expensive way to communicate through the mail. Eventually, more than 100,000 postcards were in distribution. And I don't know, three years ago. Steve side wrote this manuscript. It's about the making of an image, and it's very complete and tells the whole story in detail and that's readily available to be at the art book fair. The summer at Minnesota Street Project. And that's media burn the third project of the citizens time capsule was actually done the same year of 1975. It was done at our park in Lewis in New York, it's a public park. At that time, the, the curators that our park were inviting artists. There were a number of artists working in the area of using natural materials and, you know, doing site specific work. But the thing was our park had a rule that you came for residency and you made work but it couldn't be permanent work it would be you'd either take it with you, or it would be destroyed at the end of the summer. So we, we proposed a time capsule that would be in a late, maybe not so late model station wagon, and we would invite citizens of the area of Lewiston to make donations for the time capsule. And then, and ultimately we bought a Oldsmobile 67 I think Oldsmobile this the cruiser station wagon. It was a perfect vehicle because they had that sort of skylight, like a greyhound bus details and these 25 or so suitcases, which were on display for two weeks and Doug Michaels was sitting in a car table at our park inviting people to make donations. All all this moving towards varying the car, the time capsule as a way of circumventing the idea that the work would disappear at the end of the summer. In other words, the art park curators accepted this idea that it wouldn't be visible during its plan to be a 25 year entombment. And we wanted to come back to our park in the year 2000 and and and bring it up. And that was the concept. This is a photo of the citizens who showed up for the closing event, September 15 1975, and a detailed shot of how the suitcases were filled, and then use as a way to categorize the articles. So, so you've got, you know, over the counter drugs and cigarettes and condoms in the front row and then survey from a newsstand and souvenirs of the bicentennial the following year. And because we had to go out and commercially stop the map what the citizens donated, we went to a Kmart. So, after some speeches alone, the mayor came. The car was. This is part of the terrain of our park it was, we didn't have to lower the car into a tomb that could be dug into a hillside and that way the car could be even even possibly driven although I think it was just pushed into the site. And then a kind of roofing repair material was applied over the car and the two cases were wrapped in two plastic garbage bags and put in the car. And there were other precautions taken for the longevity to protect the vehicle until the year 2000. But, you know what happened was when 2000 rolled around there was no interest in unearthing the citizens time capsule so it remains underground to this day. So now I'm going to show some posts and farm works. This is my Honda 600 coup from self portrait 1977. And I had also done the drawing on the left list of cars. I've owned so far was 18 at that point I was approaching my 40th birthday. And last year I thought it'd be interesting to go back and then update it with us with a, you know, similar formatted drawing. So the fourth project is the Chevrolet training film. The remake and of the project that I did just after the end of and Farmer 1978 with Phil Garner. He then changed his name to Pippa and changed his pronouns from male to female. And but at that time he was the, he was also a car obsessed artists and quite a good actor performer really. And so he played the salesman. The remake of a film that we purchased the Almeida flea market it was a film that was made to train young Chevrolet salesman and would be distributed by General Morris who, you know, all the local dealerships. We did several live performances in San Francisco Los Angeles and Houston that I can remember. The buyer. I played the buyer of the car and the original film. It was an amateur actor who played the buyer and it was an actual salesman named Bob Warner. And we were invited in 1981 to come to the Whitney Museum and do it as do a live performance and then also an installation where the video. The videotape live performance and then the video tape play for another two weeks. But while we were there we did the research calling up the original Chevrolet dealership within Hicksville Long Island. And Phil Gardner was married at the time his wife Nancy Reese called them and asked if Bob Warner was still selling cars there. And somebody said well I think he's moved I think he's selling catalog now in Manhattan. He moved up but we were able to contact him and invite him to come to the Whitney Museum and see the remake of that film his only film that he performed in 1961. That's the Chevrolet training film the remake. As cars and owners. A kind of casual obsession to start documenting friends with their cars. And these two shots are from 1972. The metal and archman was a client. We were designing and building a house for her outside of Houston at the time. He was one of the owners of one of the workers on that project. Chip Lord and Doug Michaels. Doug always liked to have a suit and be the play the role of the straight guy in the group. He was far from it. But what was sort of a casual project to just document friends and acquaintances. And realize well it's maybe it's more than that you know maybe it should be a specific photo series. And these are two shots I took after the end event farm in the early 80s. Of course Spain Rodriguez the San Francisco underground comic artists. Susan subtle, who passed away a couple of years ago with her climate valiant. She I think even introduced me to Spain connections in that photo so it's 160 images I'm just showing the samples. This is under photo my T bird at the sculpture garden of the Berkeley art museum. For the premiere of the film motorists and then dog in the late 80s in Los Angeles with his Volvo project six save the planets. And catalog ranch derivatives project and in the photo here Peter Morton is flanked by Hudson Marquez myself and Doug Michaels, and he called us one day, and we had not been working together for almost 10 years at that point. And he said I'm building a new hard rock cafe in Houston I'd like to commission you to do an artwork with the front of it. The Cadillac branch had been perceived as being a negative idea, you know, very the gas guzzlers and although that may be part of it, it's not all of it, but it led us to think well if we're going to do something for the hard rock we're going to do something optimistic, you know, in nature, and the only car that you could imagine being launched into space is the 61 62 63 Ford Thunderbird model. We've seen a conceptual sketch on the left of all this project was pretty much built just exactly as the sketch portrayed it. Hard Rock Cafe is known for marketing its t shirts and sweatshirts and various things. And do you think that a display case in the foot of the sculpture might have those products in it but instead we wanted to fill it with petroleum based products including STP tide and other laundry, you know, petroleum based laundry products. And we, we luckily had a friend who was working for an architect that was the local architect for the project and it was able to coordinate with them for all the architectural details and get the project built in 1986. And then capitalism being what it is the hard rock definitely was sold to new owners they wanted to move it to downtown center of Houston and the building was abandoned and as I point a sign company came out and took down. It was considered a sign in 19, around 1992 I don't know the exact date. End of STP. The seventh project motorists. In some ways is a adaptation from a book that I did the text I wrote it in 1976, it was published by EP Dutton. They made the mistake of placing it in the automotive section of bookstores it was more of a cultural analysis of the way the automobile automobile has shaped the American landscape over the 20th century, which was not over three quarters of the way over at that point. I'll, of course, to make a narrative so based on what was a nonfiction critical analysis book or essay meant that there had to be a character at the center so the motorists played by character actor Richard Marcus you see him on the right here is driving this car across the US and talking to himself, or entertain himself with memories and thoughts and things that go back to his childhood and lots of different things. And that's the, that's the structure of motorists. There were, I had written a 20 page screenplay but there was a lot of improvisation involved on top of that. And, for example, the car actually broke down when we were in Arizona, had to have a gas, the gas pump replace the fuel pump. And so we built that into the film and we videotape the tow truck pulling into the nearest town. And so I'm going to go on to the eighth and final project. And for our media van version, oh eight time capsule. It was a collaboration, of course, Doug Michaels having died in 2003. And this work was curated by Rudolph Freely, as a woman. Shortly after he arrived from Germany, I met him at an exhibition at CCA. And there was a flyer for the featured the media van in a, in the train. And Rudolph said, does the media van still exist because I'm, I have an idea I have an exhibition I'm working on it might be, I might be able to show it in some context. And I said, well, you know, it might still exist. I'm not sure. And it didn't. But we had done these projects in the 70s. And this project was like an interview project for related to the mayors. People running for mayor of San Francisco in probably 1972 or 74, I'm not sure which. And this project was also connected to the idea of the media van but it was called the truck felt network master plan. The idea being that in the counterculture so many people seem to want to be nomadic and live in in vehicles or modify vehicles that they could live in and actually travel around the North American continent. And so this is a basically a recreational vehicle park proposal, but one that has offers services of a community of a commons, including, you know, some sort of visionary ideas. This is a 24 hour video projector. These trucks stops, this network of these trucks up to be connected by video link. They would have daycare centers and access to computers and other tools. And that was the idea it was, of course, never built, and maybe never meant to be built. But as part of that we did. We did go out on the road in the media van in 1970. And Curtis designed this map that you see of the US the truck stop network map to look like a place, place map. And it actually has specific names of groups and things we wanted to visit along the way. And the van itself was outfitted as, you know, a mobile TV studio well with one single Sony quarterback Jim mayor showing here may he rest in peace. And we did have the ability to play back in the van. Or theoretically even edit, but we didn't really edit very much. While traveling. So, that's suggested that if we were going to revisit in 2008, the idea of the media van, maybe, maybe we no longer have to actually physically move around, maybe because we can do it so much with over the internet. And the iPhone had just come out in April or May 2008. So we decided, okay, we're going to create the stationary vehicle that fulfill some of the same functions the the gathering of video information the exhibition of video information, and it's a place for people to gather and interact. This is this is some early sketches, and Rudolph was a was the curator but he was a kind of partner in designing the way this project proceeded I think. The first thing the first gesture we did was to remove the engine the wheels anything having to do with the fossil fuel economy. And so it becomes more of a neutral box of it's covered with this roofing tar, just to indicate the archival nature of it is something from the past, but it's also something of the future. The center, if you climb into the media van and it was the exhibition was called the art of participation so the idea was, yes, you get in the van and interact with the media hooker, which basically had an animation showing you plug plug in your handheld device. And the media hooker would grab a file from your let's say you had an iPhone, it would grab a file it would show it to you, it would become part of a stream of other images. And then it went print out a receipt and the receipt was a low resolution, low resolution image as well as the file name and date and, and so forth. So creating a digital time capsule in that sense and it accumulated over 2000 files between November 2008 and February 2009. And of course we didn't really know how to preserve it as a time capsule. So we, we did some research we talked about this we thought oh maybe exhibiting it is one way to preserve the idea of it. It's an opportunity to do that at Southern exposure gallery and opening their new space in October. So what you're seeing here is a transparency that displays every file that had been collected by the media hooker hooker to channels of video one being the discovery of the van that was a fiction and the other being. You know, resting place in a co location facility, also a fiction. And at that time, it had a media hooker had the capability of grabbing music files as well as picture files. So it was able to play be put in playback mode, and create a slide show that would have a music track of a company match. So, originally, the media van was kind of an exhibition space so we turned the, the placemat into a menu for DVD, and you could a viewer could select along this road, any of these titles, and view them. And this is a shot from the Walker Art Center show hippie modernism. Castile Hilton is the video plane, and maybe seven or eight or 10 people could squeeze into the van and watch all this, what was then archival, historic video. The media van contains its own archives and these are the title several of the titles that are available in the media van for viewing. So, um, there, there were six exhibitions San Francisco MoMA in 2008 through a final exhibition in 2016. So the project had a duration of eight years, and for that exhibition at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. The media van was housed inside a made in situ inflatable structure. So you had to first enter the inflatable then you could enter the media van and make a donation. This little exhibition of some of the other and farm time capsules including the Simpsons time capsule. But each time at each location, the media van had collected these files and we realized that each time we would outfit a hard drive to collect the digital files and those that medium, they keep getting smaller and smaller. When the catalog came out and the catalog wasn't ready in time for the exhibition but with post exhibition. We decided why don't we put the time capsule itself in the binding of the catalog and that's what you see here the diagram, so that the buyer of this limited edition version of the catalog becomes a custodian of the digital time capsules. And that is the long goodbye to the automobile. But wait, there's an epilogue. And the tales and era, which is where we began the 1950s. This is the symbol of the end of that idea. It's a 1958 Packard Hawk hard top coupe only 588 were made it was the last Packard model ever. And I went on to do other work because I got interested in the climate crisis that we were obviously looking at. This is Venice underwater and these are a series of video works. That was 2013. I had read Elizabeth Colbert, Sixth Extinction 2014. And that same year, I was invited to attend the Anthropocene campus in Berlin. And kind of realizing, you know, now maybe I like trees more than cars. Maybe I should be looking at trees rather than cars. And this book is a fantastic account of a by a woman who is an expert in the subject, but it begins from her childhood experience where she was introduced to Celtic forms of wisdom in native Ireland. Then I went on and made a video work about Miami Beach, Miami Beach elegy suggesting it's not going to be there forever. This is a few years, of course, before the condominium collapsed. And I'm now completing a version of 15 minutes in Phoenix. So, just a brief view of some current or recent work. But I'm going to end here. And these are places you can find more work. My video works are available on Vimeo. You can follow and farm on Facebook, my site, chip lord.net. And of course, I'm on Instagram also. Now, we're going to open the floor to two questions. Right. Thanks Chip. That was great. So Chip I'm seeing the first one I'm seeing is a question about how, how was the van moved. That's a great question. You know, once we took the wheels off, it had to go on to dollies. And that was how it was moved so it was moved by hand by pushing on dollies or on a truck. And you know that that underlined the fact that it was now an artwork and not a vehicle. And I see Serena Warner former student of mine. I mean, while we're waiting for the questions come in, I have a, I have a question I'm curious about the time capsule that this to cruiser I know it was supposedly going to be undug in 2000. Are there any other plans or thoughts of digging in the future. You know, it's interesting because in 2000, they were very difficult. They were not communicative at all. But recently, I heard from a curator in the area and he sent me a magazine article was a kind of a small release or small circulation, literary magazine, but there was an interview with the current and new director of art park. And she mentioned the services time capsule that she actually says in this article, we're going to bring it up. These days it will be on earth. That's a very exciting development and I immediately sent her an email and made contact and but it's not that's not a plan but it may and they happen. And it's going to be great because the, you know, the previous and farm time councils, included one that was a refrigerator. In 1972, and it had videotapes in it. The contemporary artist museum in Houston was opening a new building. And as part of the, the festivities they commissioned us to videotape the each of the artists and make interviews with them. And that went into a refrigerator with other things. Well, we, we never specified how that refrigerator should be stored and it was in the building in the storage area. Several years later, when there was a flash flood in Houston. And there was a, the loading ramp went down one flight to the, not really a basement or partially submerged space which was a storage area of the museum. So the time capsule floated or found in it. And the, then it was taken to Marilyn Oshman's house she rescued it, and it sat there for several years, then it was rescued again. And you can see the opening of that time capsule on. So if you still have a DVD player on the ansarm video DVD, this was made for the in association with the Berkeley Art Museum exhibition 2004. Okay, we have another question in here. Vivian asked, did you continue architecture practice among all these projects or transfer over to academia entirely. Well, there were several architectural projects done. During that form period of time, and one was a remodeling of a house on Telegraph Hill, it was very small project actually remodeling a kitchen and then after the end of our person and I did another kitchen remodeling for a family and put some of the kites and I recently ran into that client and she said, you know, we, we love that kitchen. It was done in the early 80s and still filling you so yes, there were but you know I always think it was a business plan for continuing. And there were a number of experimental architecture groups, you know, the coming out of the 70s, or during the 70s. And only one of them was able to make that transition I think into a kind of commercial architectural practice. And that wasn't that fun. But Curtis is available for kitchen remodeling so if anybody out there is interested you can easily find me on online. Okay. Cheryl's asking, are you interested now in what cutting edge architects are doing or do you still find the fine arts more interesting and possibly more important for our future. Yes. I had the opportunity to teach a class at CCA in the architecture program in 2019 it was a optional studio and I co-taught it with a former student of mine he had been a student undergrad at UC Santa Cruz and he went on to Harvard and got his degree there. And that was very exciting to do that and be engaged with this new generation of architecture students. We, we gave them the problem to design a monument to species extinction could be one particular species or multiple species. And the idea was to do it on the site of the parking lot at the ballpark. It's a huge parking lot as you may know, but during a month into the project the Giants announced their development plan. Probably the only available site was also what was going to be a parking garage so we told the students. Now you have to design a monument to species extinction as part of a parking garage, which I think is a wonderful idea. But there were some great, great projects that came out of that. So, yeah. I'm not totally up to date on the architecture world or the avant-garde architectural world, but I'm still engaged to so much that. And the, and my co-teacher's name is Matt Waxman. Okay. Here's a comment by WU says the van would be a great parklet. Yeah. And Darlene asks enjoyed your video auto parts 1979 with you and Phil Garner was at the Bay Bridge you were driving on during the performance. That was called auto parts and it was done electronically we were sitting still and I think it was it was the Bay Bridge and the background that we're driving across. And I don't know it was more of an experiment in the technology but also misunderstanding of language I think Pippa is will be the subject of a one person show. It's been about a year from now, and she lives in Long Beach and has a gallery representation in LA and shows there periodically continues a form of her work which is kind of a critique of often of the automobile. And yes, I would, I would be interested in documenting other versions of bidding goodbye to the automobile here in San Francisco. Actually I ironically just a few days ago I got an email from somebody in France, who was writing me to tell me tell me about his project with which was he had owned a Ford Fiesta in Europe for many years and it could no longer pass inspection. And he decided he would return it to Detroit. So, he had not seen motorists, but there were so many kind of parallels between this project he was engaging in at the present moment and, and what motorists was about which was, which was really selling this classic American car to a Japanese buyer. At the end of motorists you see the buyer this young Japanese man played by Toshio Nuki, driving the Thunderbird through the streets of Tokyo, which we couldn't afford to actually send the car over there so we shot it in China town, and tried to edit around you know the Chinese characters on the signage behind him. It's available on Vimeo for full length version which is 60 minutes. I have a question from Dorian says hi as an artist, how do you feel about being critical about cars. I think about the paradox of Diego Rivera, when Henry Ford or his son, who ordered him to draw the mural in the Detroit Institute of Art and his strange position between being critical against cars, and at the same time answer the order from Ford. That's Dorian is the French man who I just mentioned. And after I got his email I sent him invitation to watch this talk it was lined up pretty well. I'm interested in you know complicated ideas and not providing simple answers but I do think that the 20th century belong to the automobile and obviously the 21st century will not. I don't believe that electrification in the kind of numbers of world of worldwide automobile use is going to solve climate change. And I want to mention the name river simple as a car manufacturer in Great Britain, and they're working on the assumption that the entire car should be recyclable. And the company that manufactures it should have the responsibility of recycling it, and it will be hydrogen powered vehicle the prototype is very small. So it's not going to solve all the transportation issues. But I think that's that's it's a model of where we should go. And it's going to mean also reshaping lifestyle or not. It's going to mean stopping on a plane to go somewhere for a weekend whenever you feel like it, because there are costs to that kind of movement. The energy costs are huge. So, that's my two cents on that but, you know the catalog ranch will have its 50th anniversary. In 2024. And you're all invited. It'll be on June 21 at catalog ranch 2024. Well we'll see you there chip. Thanks for the invite. And thank you everybody for tuning in with us today. I don't mind I do actually have a question for you chip, clearly have a huge body of work and I'm just curious. And you couldn't fit it all within the hour presentation today and I'm glad to see that some of the inflatable was shown in the end where it was encompassed with the van so that was nice to see. I'm just curious though why you decided to leave out house of the century, which is one of my very favorites, and I thought the, the eternal frame was really interesting as well. Any reason why you just did not included or just too much. Well because this was more about the automobile at the center of the project and so the house of the century is architecture. And, you know, I can obviously I can do a separate presentation about architecture. And, and the eternal frame seems to have a car that at the center of it but I think it's really more about reenactment and revisiting that catholic event. So, and it's a, it's a collaborative work to so it's a little bit more complicated to present and that's why those two were, were not shown today. That makes perfect sense. Let's see Stacy has a question would you be interested in documenting other versions of bidding goodbye to the automobile here in SF. She does leave her email contact if you would like to do so, which we can forward that to you chip if you can't see that. And, and Morgan asked what is most important in life. There you go. That's a good answer is for us chip we want to know. Yo, that's Mr natural. trees maybe trees right. trees. That's right trees. Go out and kiss a tree today, or hug a tree. That would be my advice. That's what's most important. There's so many, so many things are important in terms of the climate emergency that we're now seeing. And, you know, there's so many entry points to do or artwork that questions and and contributes to the dialogue around climate change. Yeah, so I can't be more specific than that. That's, that's the subject. And Good luck with that too. Okay, we'll take this final question here from Nancy. She's asking if you've ever had any connection or interest in mobile projects going on in the UK or Europe, including Arcagram and the interaction arts trust in London. Arcagram of course was very influential when I was a student. And that was the beginning. I think the their publication, although somehow they're the specific archer ground which is the name of the publication initially became the name of the group that never got to my library in New Orleans. But still, the images that the scene that they were creating, you know, we're so far ahead of their time, you know, floating screens and mobility walking city is a conceptual ideas. And then so I think, you know, we were among the number of architectural say, let's say alternative architecture groups that were sort of following in the footsteps of Arcagram. And I like the things that we, you know, diverted more away from architecture than that they did they were still on. I'm sitting at drafting tables, I believe, but not a critique, you know, I know that all those partners have gone on to have architectural careers either an architectural education or in building so you know, and, you know, now it's much easier to follow, let's say what's going on in the UK than it was in this in the 60s and 70s. Long time ago. Okay. Thank you so much Chip. Yeah, that was lovely. Thank you so much for being here. And thank you everybody for joining us. This is, this has been recorded so and we'll push that out to all registrants at some point and probably uploaded on to our YouTube channel. And Chip has put his contact or contact information or his, I'm sorry, your website. If you guys want to explore further and do please come in and or place holds on his books and media that we have at SFEL. So, thanks again. Thank you Stephanie and I'm very easy to find online so you can you can get my, you can find me on Facebook and find my email very easily. Okay. All right, take care. Okay, bye bye.