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2007
MACRO/MICRODOMES
Designed by CAITLIN BERRIGAN
Viral capsids were magnified and fashioned into geodesic greenhouses to grow therapeutic herbs.
Over the course of the project, the counselors and 60 campers interpreted and constructed these sculptural shelters after Caitlin’s designs.
Campers learned building and creative crafts, cared for plants, discovered viruses and microbes, and explored the territories of their own bodies as fodder for art-making. They also contributed the fantastical “Beam” virus, representing their own infectious qualities. The Viral Domes became their shelters, playspaces and activity centers while still inspiring a sense of '“Eeeeeeewwww!!!”
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Meet the Artists, Caitlin Berrigan
Caitlin Berrigan works as a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer to explore poetics and queer science fiction as world-making practices through moving images, sculptural instruments, and expanded new media. Her early works make sensible the relations across viruses, disability, capitalism and contagion. Her recent artistic research into geological animacies in the climate crisis follows how minerals, toxins, and elemental media are transformed and mobilized by data capitalism and inhuman intimacies.
Currently a PI Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Berrigan has held full-time and visiting teaching positions at NYU Tisch, Caltech, Bard College Berlin and Harvard. She earned a PhD-in-Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, a master’s in science from MIT’s program for Art, Culture and Technology and a B.A. from Hampshire College.
Photographer: Meredith J
“Beam Camp commissioned this collaborative project for which I designed domes based on the protein structures of four viruses. Many viruses organize their proteins according to geodesic patterns. Among these are the hepatitis C virus, HIV, the rhinovirus (cold-flu) and the herpes virus.”
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