Abstract
Our practices are research-driven and typically site-responsive, sparking conversations about everyday life and survival in a rapidly changing environment. Recent projects critique notions of expedition in the 21st century and play with the idea of an island as a met-aphor, exploring notions of adaptation and survival, community and individualism, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, nature and technolo-gy. Our collaborative project, Another Final Frontier, investigates an artificial island located inside of Kennedy Space Center and Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.
Spoil islands like this one are waste products from dredg-
ing channels. The focus is on the channels, which are measured and maintained-not on the islands, which are left to their own devices.
They are cast to the side and often overlooked, if not forgotten en-tirely. This chain of spoil islands was formed in the late 1920s and early 1930s when the US Army Corps of Engineers was cutting an East Coast channel through Florida's Mosquito Lagoon that would become the Intracoastal Waterway. Grey Island is a bit younger. The island first appears on a USDA aerial photograph taken during the third flight line on March 18, 1951. Its form, already rounded by cur-rents, looks like a white hole in the metal-gray waters of the lagoon.
Grey Island floats in two overlapping areas refuge and
a space center, one founded on nature and the other on technology.
Both came after the bucket and pipeline dredgers had laced the lagoon and the Indian River with spoil islands. Grey Island comprises two acres of the 140,000 acres that NASA acquired in 1962 to expand its exploration of space, specifically its lunar landing program. Look south from the island, between palm trunks and pepper tree limbs, and you can see the Vehicle Assembly Building on the horizon. That is where engineers assembled the rockets for the Apollo missions that sent us to the moon. If there were a large enough crane, the VAB could be lifted and placed over the island like the glass cover of a bell jar. We lived on an artificial island within Kennedy Space Center in a habitat of our own design. We constructed our own tools and systems to catalog this cast aside, yet rich habitat, basing their design on those developed for the Apollo space program.
From this vantage point on the spoil island, we embark on our own mission, exploring what we don't yet know and training ourselves to live in a place that is both near and far, a place that is remarkable yet also quite ordinary. A place forgotten in plain sight. We have found our own landing site amid the constellation that is this 3,000-mile string of islands, stretching from New York City to Brownsville, Texas. It is hot, the mosquitos cloud like moon dust, the ground is hard, and the sea is rising. We have traveled far into space without ever leaving Earth.