The last time the Harvest Dome--a floating orb made from soda bottles and the skeletons of discarded umbrellas--set sail towards the Inwood Park Hill Inlet, weather caused it instead to shipwreck on Rikers Island, where perplexed Corrections officers, trying to remove it from the water, promptly destroyed it.
It was a setback for the SLO crew and Bronx teens who designed and built the Dome--an art installation made to bring attention New York City's waterways and watersheds--but the group's gearing up to the bring the Dome back, and they need your help.
A new Kickstarter (paging Christine Quinn) is raising funds for the construction of Harvest Dome 2.0 which, this time around, will "introduce light into the work, and have an array of light-emitting-diodes, inserted into each of the bottles and powered by tiny photovoltaic cells to create a glowing halo in the water at night." Sounds pretty!
The destination is still the Inwood Park Hill Inlet. Why, you ask?
The Inlet, Manhattan Island's last remaining Saltmarsh, is a remnant of Spuyten Duyvil Creek's marshland, reconfigured and dredged in 1895 to create the Harlem River Shipping Canal. It is is home to saltwater cordgrass, a species particularly adept at trapping and converting flotsam into the nutrient-rich mud called detritus, which supports abundant life on the marsh. Twice during the course of each day, the buoyant sphere will rise and fall with the tide-- alternating between floating on the dark water and sitting on the uncovered mud-flat. The Dome engages circadian rhythms of the water and emerges from the mud-flat as a curiously out-scaled harvesting of human-generated urban flotsam.
Currently, the project's Kickstarting at $1,826 of its $7,500 goal, so if you like what you see, or think we should really do something about all of the city's trashed umbrellas, go here to donate.