as Earth Rise
Children’s Ancestral Garden
Environmental Life Science Outdoors
Beaumont, Texas
2025
A bioconstruction workshop with Environmental Life Science Outdoors taught 25 high-school students to build a cob oven with locally-sourced raw materials. This oven creates a hearth for the Children's Ancestral Garden.A bioconstruction workshop with Environmental Life Science Outdoors taught 25 high-school students to build a cob oven with locally-sourced raw materials. This oven creates a hearth for the Children's Ancestral Garden.
A limited edition tarot deck designed to become an artifact. This implement of cardomancy was created at a moment of collective artistic convergence with Artifical Intelligence. this co-created tarot deck is an homage to Ernst Haeckel who merged science and art.
biota
[bai-oh-tuh] noun
The living organisms of a region.
reverie
[reh-vr-ree] noun
A state of dreaming while awake.
by Skye Ruozzi & Lysistrata Wong
Trust can only be woven over time by multiple parties. Like a tightly braided rope, it’s strong enough to lift many times its weight and endure stresses, but once frayed, the disintegration is swift.
Using locally found Beach grass, Bitter panic grass, and Switch grass (Ammophila brevigulata, Panicum amarum, Panicum virgatum), the artists wove a circle and danced a story of the vulnerability of trusting and the anguish of betrayal. Attendees were given bivalve shells collected from the beach that had small holes, indicating the mollusks inside had been killed and eaten by other predatory mollusks who had drilled through the shells with their radula.
Participants marked the shells with feelings they wished to release. When the waves came, they tossed and reformed the braided circle on the shore, before eventually carrying it all out to sea. Artists said prayers to the goddess Yemaya and offered the released emotions to the goddess Ceto.
Invoking the impermanence of memory and engaging the cycles of birth and loss that characterize New York’s physical as well as cultural landscapes, this event combined storytelling, ephemeral found object sculpture, collaborative art making, and sustainability in a series of interventions that culminated in a participatory public event.
The project solicited ten creators to submit stories about beloved lost objects, and to construct found object art dedicated to these items during a one-day event in Fort Tilden on August 7th, 2021.
photos by Walter Wlodarkczyk and Osmany Cabrera
"Unless Otherwise Posted" is a collaborative installation designed by Skye Ruozzi & Rose McShane for Shadow Traffic’s Alter/Altar tour.
This project occupies a structure traditionally used to separate people - the fence. Instead of dividing, the piece engages the fence as a platform for shared memories.
Passersby select from three color-coded categories of tags to answer the prompt "What do you miss about the neighborhood?" Visitors will inscribe the water-resistant cards with their reminiscences, and tie them to the fence. As the sharing increases, the cards and ribbons will grow across the fence, creating an abstract patterning or temporary collective reflection. We encourage participants to share their memories online.
LA PAZ, BOLIVIA. 2010 - 2014.
PARTNERSHIPS: The International Design Clinic, Lawrence Technological University, Temple University, the Universidad Catolica Boliviana, Gustu, Creativo Cultural Espacio and Teatro Trono.
In the summer of 2010, the IDC, with Bolivian non-profit partner Creativo Cultural Espacio, began a collaborative design effort with kids working on the streets of La Paz in order to generate new, street-based versions of education that more adequately fit the unique lifestyle of these children. Unlike current school systems, which demand the kids choose between working (and thus eating) or pursuing their education, the IDC’s street-based educational system is designed in a manner that allows each child to pursue learning in a manner congruent with their schedule, circumstances, lifestyle, experiences, and interests.
Installed within the Bolivian streetscape over the course of several years, these small, simple event- and space-making devices were designed to provoke, measure and react to the responses of both the children and others who might one day occupy, possess, or evolve a street-based educational system.
vendingEDUCATION is rooted upon the potentials (in terms of architecture, distribution, mutability, transportability, and programmatic elasticity) and costs (financial and personnel for the educator, time and travel for the learner) offered by the existing network of vending architectures within the Bolivian streetscape, using these attributes to virally propagate at five scales:
VENDINGeducation MEDIUM, adjusts education to the module of the handcart, offering more predictable and detailed educational events throughout the week, and
VENDINGeducation LARGE, creates micro-schools within the architecture of the vending booth, offering a light-duty center of education within key neighborhoods.
As these event-spaces propagate, the costs and potentials of each overlap, creating a networked series of educational opportunities and architectures that are hardwired to the rigors of life on the street.
Already this evolution has resulted in the creation of several classroom-scaled assets: the El Alto Makerspace, which brings metal-, wood- and fabric-working equipment, as well as a small-scale CNC router, and the educational and vocational opportunities thereby realized to the citizens of the fringe settlement of El Alto; park-in-a-Cart, which uses a mobile park platform to create social condensers in fringe settlements and realize playful, arts-based educational opportunities and the Mobile Cantina and Culinary Institute, which celebrates native Bolivian agriculture and local methods of cooking through various pop-up educational initiatives, including free cooking workshops, community kitchens, and street-festivals.
EXHIBITIONS include: “Spontaneous La Paz” at the San Francisco Museum Of Art in La Paz, Bolivia (2011) and “Medium Resistance” at the Crane Gallery of Philadelphia, PA (2010).
PUBLICATIONS include works by: Structures for Inclusion (2015), the Association for Community Design (2014), the Sixth And Fifth International Symposia On Service Learning In Higher Education (2015 and 2013), the International Council For Research And Innovation In Building And Construction (2011), and the Design Altruism Project (May 5, 2011).
FUNDING SUPPORT: The Ludwick Family Foundation, Lawrence Technological University, Temple University and the International Design Clinic
The Dodecalume Quest is a scavenger hunt. Questers found 12 Lanterns, each depicting one Symbol of the 10 Principles of Burning Man (+Consent +Gratitude). Each Lantern portrayed a rhyming rumination about its Principle, and once read and opened granted the Quester the coordinating token. The tokens puzzle together to become a keepsake of the Quest.
The Social Settee was born of opportunity. In possession of Harlequin laminated plywood that was previously a dance floor used on tour by an (to remain unnamed) international pop singer. We found the reflective nature compelling, and sought to marry the ideas of zero-gravity reclining, socialization, and modularity. These custom CNC-milled seats can be reconfigured to be arranged alone, in pairs, or as a continuous set.
VARIOUS LOCATIONS. 2009 - PRESENT.
Our nation’s urban areas contain miles of chainlink fencing, guarding our property lines and defining a perceptual edge between public and private lands. Chainlink fencing, although very resistant to vertical forces, often falls victim to horizontal forces, resulting in bulges, creases and other deviations. Although unsightly, these deformations hold hidden potential: they blur the perceptual edge offered by the fence and thicken the assumed line between public and private lands. fencePOCKET is designed to create new public space within these fence-scape deviations.
To work well in these locations, fencePOCKET is designed to be:
SUSTAINABLE: fencePOCKET is constructed entirely of reclaimed tarp, becoming a consumer of waste, not a generator of it. The resiliency of this tarp, a deficit if placed within a landfill, becomes a huge asset when used to create fencePOCKET, adding durability and longevity to the construction.
LEGAL: fencePOCKET can be tailored to any deformation, eliminating any legal issues associated with trespassing into either public or private lands.
ELASTIC: fencePOCKET can be built anywhere a fence-scape deviation exists: any city, any country, any place.
EFFICIENT: fencePOCKET uses a simple weave construction – a process that allows even the smallest sections of reclaimed tarp to tap into the strength of existing fences.
USEFUL: fencePOCKET can accommodate a wide range of uses, including fencePOCKET PARK \[public lands are vanishing], fencePOCKET GARDEN \[the average American meal travels about 1500 miles], fencePOCKET FREE STORE \[Americans deposit 56 tons of trash into landfills every year, around one-third of which is related to new purchases], fencePOCKET BENCH \[US cities are quickly removing benches to combat public sleeping], fencePOCKET COT \[there are currently over 650,000 people in the US without shelter]
OPEN-SOURCE: fencePOCKET is completely open source, created wherever a fence-scape deviation exists (open-site) by anyone who would like to take possession of wasted space (open-architect/contractor), programmed by whoever has the desire to realize its utility (open-developer) and occupied by whoever desires to do so (open-user).
EXHIBITIONS include: “RIMMEA: Materials and Manufacturing for Extreme Affordability,” The Design Gallery at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. (2011); “Kickin’ Back,” Philadelphia Art Alliance Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2011); and “Small Architectures, Big Landscapes,” The Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana, The Design Gallery at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, The Goldstein Museum Of Design, St. Paul, Minnesota, The Design Gallery, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, The Design Gallery, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2010-2011).
PUBLICATIONS include works by: The Design Altruism Blog (May 5, 2011) and The Architectural Research Centers Consortium (2011).
FUNDING SUPPORT: The International Design Clinic and smallBIG.
Typi non habent claritatem insitam; est usus legentis in iis qui facit eorum claritatem. Investigationes demonstraverunt lectores legere me lius quod ii legunt saepius. Claritas est etiam processus dynamicus, qui sequitur mutationem consuetudium lectorum.
Mirum est notare quam littera gothica, quam nunc putamus parum claram, anteposuerit litterarum formas humanitatis per seacula quarta decima et quinta decima. Eodem modo typi, qui nunc nobis videntur parum clari, fiant sollemnes in futurum.
Inspired by a childhood puzzle toy, this scaled-up version was a surprise gift for my father, a mathematics fanatic. Living at Pollen Nation for the duration of Burning Man 2014, this installation allowed citizens to experience the possibilities of repeated geometry to generate form.
Pollen Nation logo
The first Mantis was a hand-routed plywood sculpture built to test lighting effects. When a child at Thanksgiving dinner asked if she could paint a piece, the Mantis Garden was born. The Garden continued to grow over 2011-2016 and was installed in dozens of sites across the country. The Mantises were painted by over 7500 different sets of hands of all ages.
