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PROJECT NEWS
January 25, 2007
"Alas" Coordinators in Provincetown
THE INTELLIGENT HOUSE**
(1)
By María Suárez Toro
The GAEA Foundation (http://www.gaeafoundation.org/seachange/) gave us a grant bringing us to this house in Provincetown. The residency lasts for two months and will be spent developing the musical Alas de Mariposa (Wings of the Butterfly) for Costa Rica.
When we received the grant, the suggestions governing the use of this old friendly cottage at the edge of the sea on the Cape Cod Peninsula and Massachusetts Bay were longer than the description of the artists' residency program itself.
After all, the residency was precisely that: Support for artists from different parts of the world to sojourn in this peaceful, simple spot near the sea, removed from the noise of the world. Best of all, the setting satisfies all the needs of the artists, one or two in the cottage at a time, to dedicate two months to developing their artistic projects. |
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Winter Metamorphosis (our cottage before and after the snowstorm)
The photo of the cottage that we received in the mail was quite beautiful, as was the description: A colonial structure with three floors, built in 1620 in the town where the English Pilgrims first disembarked from the Mayflower when they came to America.
Before the Pilgrims and before colonization, indigenous peoples, called Wampanoag, lived here, besieged by Vikings and pirates from the seven seas.
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After the pilgrims, the town of Provincetown became a port for Portuguese fishermen and later whalers. Today, the town, which has no more than 3,500 inhabitants during the year and almost 50,000 in the summer, belongs to artists and has at least 30 art galleries and 54 docks, although it measures barely 12.8 kilometers along the coast.
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(**) "Molly, La Mujer Inteligente" (Molly, The Intelligent Woman) is the title of one of the chapters in my unpublished book which is the basis of the play, Alas de Mariposa. Molly is an imaginary construction of the scientist and futurologist, Michio Kaku of the United States, in his book Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century and Beyond. To explain what an intelligent house will be like within 20 years, Kaku provides the example of an executive's apartment. It has a robotics system, named Molly, which takes care of everything, absolutely everything, in the house. Molly is even capable of guessing what the executive needs, because she is programmed to know his needs in advance. With this book, Kaku attempts to show us what an intelligent house of the future will be like given the development of technology. My book and the musical Alas de Mariposa, by focusing on Molly, shows that technology is not neutral. I won't tell you the story; read the book when it's published and see the musical.
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Photos by Margaret Thompson & María Suárez Toro
Translation by Nicole Lisa
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