WAYS OUT - OEDC

Ocean Earth Development Corporation (OEDC, USA), here represented by Peter Fend and Eve Vaterlaus, presents an earthworks proposal, an ecological recovery package for the planet. The sites here featured lie at the epicenter of global geopolitical struggle. Action here can ripple-spread on out.

The Oil Industry, OEDC says, is responsible for recent climate change, including global warming, acid rain, rising sea level, drought and floods. To reverse these trends, evident worldwide this winter, OEDC proposes actions first near The Hague, a center of world energy-policy, and then along the proposed pipeline routes from the Caspian Sea to East and South Asia, the next main markets. Given that the next (and probably last) great petroleum reserves are in the Caspian Sea basin, there has been a fierce competition among Argentina (Bridas), the USA (including companies in which Bush and Cheney have a personal interest), England/The Netherlands (Shell, BP), China and Russia over licenses for construction of pipelines, harbors and refineries—all requiring access to geostrategic sites.

Calling for a quick end to reliance on mineral fuel reserves, OEDC has been developing renewable forms of energy production that use everyday natural resources, like sunlight and water cycles. OEDC works chiefly with saltwater basins to effect large-scale harvesting of marine algae and yield methane gas or other clean-burning fuels, notably hydrogen. The territory for action is the world's continuum of oceans, extending through the Atlantic Corridor from the Antarctic to the Arctic, and then on to the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Also suited for marine algae development, are the basins which drain to inland seas in Central Asia (West China, Iran, Afghanistan), Australia, Argentina and North America.

Peter Fend: "Everyone knows that something must be done within the next fifty years. The question is: Who will do it? Where will it happen? And how soon can it happen? We the artists, who are in the advance guard, the ‘avantgarde', we can push this forward much faster than might happen with the present Powers that Be. I don't think that Dick Cheney, George Bush, or Donald Rumsfeld, or even the people at Shell and BP, are going to push forward, even though the rise in temperature, the war danger and the basic human need for new energy demands forward action now." In Fend's opinion, artists should get out of the sheltered ghetto that is the art world today and play a direct, public role in shaping the material culture of our future.

In the exhibition

The maps: regions of the intended pipelines, plus the areas featuring the saltwater lakes and inland seas along the proposed routes between the Caspian Sea and its intended major growth markets in South and East Asia, accessible either through Afghanistan (to the Indian Ocean) or through Central Asia and China (to the East China Sea); most of these regions are closed saltwater basins, each an ecosystem, each suited for growth of algae and small-scale dam industry to achieve energy self-reliance.
The wall drawing: the entire circulatory range of the Atlantic Ocean, extending from the spinaround of the Southern Ocean, around Antarctica, to the antipodal spinaround of the Arctic Ocean, around the North Pole; if the eye follows the currents south of Holland, one can see the colonial shipping routes of the 17th century Dutch East India Company and West India Company, extended along this continuum to the Southern Ocean and New Zealand (Nieuw Zeeland), Australia (Nieuw Holland), South Africa (Zuid Afrika) and Indonesia.
Five drawings: four structures for algae industry, to yield clean-burning fuels (Small, Medium, Large, Giant), and one structure for upland/clean-energy technology (an undershot waterwheel), which takes advantage of the world weather-water cycles without using the high dams that block nutrient flow to the sea.
Glass containers with algae: in these we ferment some of the algae collected in Scheveningen, The Hague, leading to the production of methane gas.
Net: a version of the algae rig, including holdfast nodes on rope-net, which is now installed in Scheveningen Harbor, allowing local macro-algae to attach, grow and be easily gathered.