Festival attendees become "instant poets" by creating a Spontaneous Pictorial Community Poem. The Project Artist will begin the Community Poem with one line. From this point, each instant poet will contribute a line. Lines can consist of any of the following, alone or in combination: text, prepared self-adhesive pictures, or prepared self-adhesive sounds. Before the project's end, the Project Artist will perform the poem as spoken word.

Megasoccer is a version of soccer where 50 to 100 people play at the same time. I propose to organize a game of megasoccer on Sunday, June 14th, and document it. Since megasoccer has never been played before, I do not have all the rules, but the general idea is that there will be many different balls, several goals, and lots of crazy fun. I will provide all uniforms, equipment, documentation, and referees. Players may sign up through Figment, though due to the large number of participants needed, I will also actively recruit.

Colors, for me, emit sounds. Cobalt blue is a high-pitched sound in twilight and a middle-range tone at midday. Could color frequencies be mapped over sound frequencies and match up, despite the laws of physics? Can anyone be taught a color/sound grammar? To explore this concept, I have created the Alphabet Game. To play, viewers think of the "ABC Song" melody and then select, from a table of color squares, the color(s) that best represents each note in the song. This concrete game offers participants the opportunity to contemplate abstract color/sound relationships, often for the first time. Motivated by the purity and beauty of color, I’m tuned in to its communicative nature. I regularly use alphabets as infrastructure in my work to explore new ideas and palettes as I continue to build a visual language in my painting.

Come join GrooveHoops for some footloose, fancy-free hooping on the grass. Pick up a hoop and dance to the beat, learn some tricks, or decorate your own hoop!

“Wrapping the Earth One Stone At A Time” is an ongoing series of works that interact with nature without leaving any lasting mark. Participants will select a stone or chunk of cement and wrap it with string as an act of consciousness and concern for earth. The art continues as participants photograph their stone in its setting, and then unwrap the string and ritually add it to the ball of string the artist is creating with contributions from all over the globe.

The MPL Project creates, promotes, and shares the idea of Magic Passion Love through the use of art, social events, and creative parties. Magic Passion Love is a renewable, sustainable energy source found within all of us. When used, life feels good…when shared, wow! Through a series of party games that you pick to play, you will learn the art of manifesting your fondest dreams into existence. Each party is as unique as the people who attend. The MPL Party Games include, among many others: * MPL Manifesting Mobiles --- Create your affirmations, design your pieces, and assemble a mobile to inspire you daily! * Dance/Movement --- Moving your body can move your life. Every body has something to say. * "Five Years From Now" Game --- Who do you want to be five years from now? Play along to see!

We would like to set up a play space for the Figment community to come and experience much of what circus yoga has to offer. This includes all kinds of juggling and manipulation of objects, like poi, spinning plates, hats, diabolo, peacock feathers, etc. We will also practice flying partner yoga and acrobatics. Folks of all ages are welcome to participate.

Try your hand at making your own universe...in a box! Using colorful clay materials, exercise your creativity to realize your vision, whether it's a dream, a diorama, or just your favorite animal. The fun is endless when you let your imagination run wild...IN A BOX!

Dagorhir is a live action combat game that uses padded, Nerf-like weapons to allow people the thrill of armed fighting with little chance of harm. We will hold demonstrations of combat, teach others to play, and have classes on how to make your own equipment.

This piece is set in a room suited for singing. There are about four boxes in the room. Each box represents a "member" of a chorus. The art piece begins when four people enter the room with cell phones. Each person dials a different number that is written on a box. It connects them to a group chat room, where a looped tape is playing one part of a chorus. People will be encouraged to sing along with the music. The more people who enter, the louder it gets, either with more cell phones set on speaker or with singers. All choral pieces will be simple call-and-response style arrangements.

I will be sitting at a simple card table, asking others to sit with me and color an amended version of an illustration from Aesop's Fables. I want participants, through through the act of coloring with the artist, to reconsider the messages of the fable and notions of artistic genius. I would like to discard the fables’ original messages of personal danger and lack of power and be reminded of the authentic risks and joys of human experience.

Has your life felt empty and meaningless without a garden gnome in it? We know exactly how you feel! That's why we've started the Gnome Adoption Agency, where a rigorous interview process to determine your suitability for gnome parentage precedes the adoption of your own tiny, ceramic bundle of joy. To make sure you are properly caring for your gnome, the Department of Gnoman Services will provide you with a camera to document the many adventures you will have with your gnome. Please fill the camera with pictures chronicling your gnome's new life, and return to us within two weeks in an SASE. The most exciting pictures will be posted on our website, gnomecamp.com, for gnome fans worldwide to view and enjoy.

Tsirkus Fotografika stages itinerant, vintage-style photo shoots using trailing edge technologies. Our goal is to bring the creative stage to the public, so that all can discover their inner voice. Images are made on the spot in front of some funky old photo gear. Participants enter into impromptu collaborations as we stage tableaux for the antique lens.

Contemporary Artistic Technologies aims to bring the delight and joy of making cutting-edge art to households across America and beyond. We have taken the same Magic Concepts employed by the most successful art stars currently reigning in the international contemporary art world, and distilled them into their most potent yet accessible form. C.A.T. also publishes educational contemporary art literature that is accessible, fun, and enlightening. Come and engage with the master in person with THE ART WORKSHOP! As the art market collapses, some careers will be taken down with it. Don’t let the opportunity pass by without putting yourself in a position to rise with the rebound of the market. Discover the hidden underlying structures behind successful art objects. Inspiring and entertaining, THE ART WORKSHOP will have something for everyone, including model drawing, a brief lecture on Western Art History, live music, and individualized tips and pointers from C.A.T. founder Jamie Vandenberg.

BIG Tangrams takes tangrams to the public space. We will have four sets of huge, color-coded (red, blue, orange, and purple) tangram pieces and eight designs. Four to six players form teams and are given one design at a time to solve. The team that solves the tangram first wins points. The teams keep going until all the designs have been solved. The team with the most points wins. The great thing about BIG Tangrams is that they are fun on their own without game play. They can be as competitive or casual as the players’ interests dictate. It is great for families and tangram fans of all ages.

New York and its spatial politics have long been both the real and imagined site for my works of video, installation, sculpture, and other performed and pedagogical acts. Now my chief preoccupation with my own work is in the process-oriented building of sculpture evocative of indeterminacy and id-driven bodily processes which are then recreated as projections in interaction with an overdeveloped urban environment. The sculptures along with their digital collage counterparts blur boundaries between male/female as well as the internal and external (environment.) They introduce fluid, moving relations between corporality and the excessive-even phallic- verticality of the 21st century landscape and the fight for space that results in an ever-changing urban environment. Their organic, bodily-oriented forms rely on process-oriented “bottom up “growth, paying homage to women sculptor’s before her in their emphasis on materials. For Figment I hope to create the illusion that 2-3 of these works are planted on a patch of earth along with their digital collage counterparts which are on foamboard..I would use stones, moss, and potting soil around the sculptures and pictures, which I could remove after the festival.

The Miss Black Rock City Crown & Tiara Factory for Adults and Kids concept is everyone is beautiful! Parents can guide their children with the materials provided to craft their own crown or tiara. Our very own Miss Black Rock City will make an appearance to read stories to the kids!

YOUR VOICE IS YOUR MUSCLE. TUUUG-of-war is a multi-player, big screen, interactive telephony-based game. Two teams of up to three players each compete by yelling "TUUUUUG" into their mobile phones in order to pull the rope. The loudest team wins.

During this class, we'll be exploring a number of improvisational forms which will include some or all of the following: 12 bar blues, call and response, trading fours, CircleSinging (as practiced by Bobby McFerrin and Voicestra) and free improvisation. We will also be creating freestanding pieces of music as a group using layers of improvised parts and Ben will do a demo of Vocal Looping. Bring drinking water.

Chi Chair Meditation, I'm a work in it's preliminary stage I'm a chair that you can sit on, lie on, stand on, fly on I move with your breath I understand subtleties You are a member of the universe You are curious about alternate frequencies Your occupation, lifestyle, physicality matter not When you play with me, on me, You are surfing the air I encourage you to play with gravity as invite you to search for my centerpoint. I am a shortcut to the frequency of peace and balance; a shortcut to meditation Join me for a 5 - 10 minute moving meditation or shavasana* * Yogis, yoginis, acrobats, eastern philosophy practitioners will fall in love me. * I please immediately and do not have the capacity to break hearts. Warmth, love, magic and prosperity for all members of the universe, Chi chair

We will be giving vegetable and herb plants away for adoption. We will be offering information on how to take care of the new baby and help it grow. There will be a blog where people can post pictures of the development.

I would love to show a large scale nude painting. My nudes have a lot of character and charm. They are simplified figures with vibrant colors and really jump of the canvas. I think it would be a unique juxtapose to the tranquility and beauty of Governors Island and the Manhattan backdrop. I am also a gifted caricaturist and would love to get people visiting involved with my art. It would be a multi functional exhibit.

Let your inner animal(s) free! Fly, prance, growl and float with Humorphous! With a foundation of field research and observation, Humorphous dancers embody animal behaviors and celebrate the animals that float, swing, slither, and soar inside us. Choreographer Philippa Kaye will lead creative dance workshops for kids on Saturday starting at 11:00 A.M. Workshops are 15 to 20 minutes long. Parents are encouraged to participate.

James Miles, an actor and creative arts teacher, will be conducting a workshop geared toward kids aged 6 to 11. Consisting of character creation, improvisation, playmaking and physical comedy, he will provide an atmosphere that will broaden creativity, expand the mind, and improve self-confidence and public speaking skills. Most of all, it will be 30-40 minutes of fun! Classes are scheduled for 12:00 P.M. and 1:00 P.M. The groups will be no bigger than 12; additional classes may be added so that everyone will have a chance to participate.

Want to learn about animals and have artistic fun? The Prospect Park Zoo has representatives to entertain the wild artist in all of us. They will engage children of all ages with animal-themed crafts and games. The zoo will be on the island Friday through Sunday, so enjoy their activities, animal artifacts, and ask all your animal-related questions.

The American Museum of Natural History will be bringing dinosaurs to Governors Island on Friday afternoon. Come see the museum’s state of the art movable museum, which includes hands-on exhibits, lessons in paleontology, and a knowledgable staff who can answer all your dinosaur questions. Like the museum's paleontologists, you will reconstruct the lives of dinosaurs based on skeletal and environmental clues.

Free Art Island Outpost, a free family arts program on Governors Island presented by the Children's Museum of the Arts, will be held Friday through Sunday from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M. CMA will provide a variety of hands-on art activities that will allow families to experiment with many kinds of creative materials. The program is designed to promote parent-child engagement and interaction, and will inspire young artists, celebrate the city¹s diversity, and foster a larger sense of community.

Frost homemade cookies with creativity, and frosting! Meg (with cookies) makes all the cookies with love in her own kitchen. When the cookies are gone, she will disappear.

It’s doodle time with Ms. B, the Doodle Queen! The spontaneity of drawing is exciting, and allows us to express what we feel inside. Whimsical expression and movement are both themes of the doodle, so come enjoy drawing while sitting, standing, or running around your paper and letting your crayon dance on the page. Join in the magical and inventive world of the Doodle Queen and open new doors for your own expression, Friday through Sunday.

Please join me, Uday, Friday through Sunday to help me decorate a tree. Parents and children will decorate the tree by hanging flowers tied with biodegradable string from its branches. Multiple garlands will be wrapped around the trunk of the tree to mark it as a shrine. The flowers will eventually decay and fall to the ground. In Indian culture, as in many others, that is a symbol of a celebration of life on earth and its passing. As an American artist of South Asian decent living in New York, I want to find a way to introduce unfamiliar ideas to a new audience. For many people in India, adopting a tree and decorating it is not uncommon. Trees are living embodiments of longevity and life and, as such, part of a continuum with human lives, as well as being repositories of prayers and well-wishes for loved ones.

Have you ever made your own musical instrument? Green Apple Kids will be helping children and parents construct their own musical instruments using plastic bottles, cans, sticks, and other recycled materials. You can use your creation to make music all around the island, hang it up with others for a wind-driven symphony, or even join the merriment of the parade. After making the instruments, they may be taken home and hung in windows, so the music will last long after this weekend.

Children and families will create a wall of colorful ribbons and streamers that blow in the wind and dazzle the eye. Stop by the station and create streamers from discards and recyclables! Participants will learn how to crochet strips of plastic, decorate them with discs and shapes from plastic bottles and yogurt containers, and hang them on a chain-link fence. This wall of ribbons will then dance and play in the river breeze.

“Painting socks was a happy mistake,” says Joey. Now he wants to share it with you. Children will have the chance to paint their very own socks with wonderful colors. (Socks are provided, so you don't have to use the ones you wore to the island!) While they line dry, the socks will hang in the air as part of the collective art experience. When not assisting young artists with their sock paintings, Joey will continue to create his own, working throughout the weekend and revealing his creative process.

"What Kind of City Do You Live In?" includes organic, fluid, reaching sculptures that introduce fluid, moving relations between corporality and the excessive verticality of the 21st century landscape --- and the fight for space that results in an ever-changing urban environment. The sculptures, along with their digital collage counterparts, blur boundaries between human forms as well as the internal and external. Children and families will have the opportunity to explore their own ideas of growth and construction. Using building blocks and similar materials on the ground, children (and adults) will work on their own buildings and structures in this dynamic, living sculpture environment to collaborate on their own dream city.

Andrew Jimenez returns to Figment with his grunge/R&B outfit playing original tunes.

A 45 minute concert of Baroque, Renaissance, and folk music by and about strong women, sung and played on the harp. This program was first performed on January 24, 2009, at a gallery exhibit of an artist's rendering of Amazon breastplates.

A solo singer/songwriter and guitarist, performing blues-inflected original songs and covers.

A singer-songwriter of the singing-songwriting variety, I strum away at a guitar and belt out some good ones with melodies that will stick in your head and lyrics that unearth all sorts of bitter, strange, and buried thoughts, in a fun way we can all sing along to.

RADIO WONDERLAND is a solo act that turns commercial radio into recombinant funk. All sounds originate from a boom box playing live radio. All processing is live MaxMSP controlled by a steering wheel, old shoes, and some gizmos. I build grooves, step by step, and even UN-process my grooves back to the source. I interrogate the media so you can feel the truth: that deep within commercial pop is a frequency that really moves us. My transformations, taken individually, must be clear and simple --- framing, repeating, shifting. My controllers are simple, too, and visceral: the wheel a big knob or turntable, the shoes just to whack with sticks. Using ordinary objects underscores the absurd disconnect between digital controller and sound, and the fun simplicity of the algorithms. My riffs are vernacular, not elite. We've got to get down.

"Ornament and Crime" is one man cutting, pasting, mixing, and remixing sounds made by himself and others, including roomtones, buzzes, and hisses, to create a swirling, twisting, colorful, playful, noisy, quiet, plaintive, punishing, and extremely abstract DJ set.

We are a musical duo producing and performing live DubStep, as well as crossover bilingual material influenced by Japanese jungle house hip-hop. Our full performance includes an MC and a light, laser, and haze show.

The Bureau of Nonstandards is an ambient, improvisational, electronic music duo. Kevin C. Smith plays modified, circuit-bent instruments (old Casios, Speak & Spells, Furbies, etc.) while Maurice Rickard processes the sound live through a laptop. They have played a number of shows in their hometown of Pittsburgh and just released their first album on Onezero Music, consisting of songs culled from edits of those performances. They also occasionally perform with a filmmaker and video bender, John A. Landis, who incorporates bent computers and live processed video into his projections.

The Pick-Up Allstars acting as the house rhythm section. We play a variety of styles of music, including blues, jazz, rock, reggae, and Latin, selecting simple songs so that people can easily join in. The resulting music is sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes transcendent. It is an exciting and beautiful thing .

Traditional Shona mbira music of Zimbabwe.

Clutter is an interactive, improvised sound/music project. A host of rhythmic instruments from hand percussion to pots and pans are set up, miked, and sent into a PA system equipped with sound processors. Bass, cello, trumpet, bass trombone, saxophone, flute, keyboard, guitar, and voice are all part of the Clutter sound, which ranges from textural ambiance to free jazz to tribal groove to funk to rock to hip hop. Drones derived from prerecorded ambiance and electronics are often implemented in the sound. Anyone who wants to is encouraged to participate. Clutter's sound is largely based on the randomness of its participants on any given day.

Brother Joscephus and the Love Revival Revolution Orchestra is a 12-piece feel-good explosion of love, righteousness, and New Orleans soul. We are an up-and-coming musical spectacle based in New York City that plays well-orchestrated, fun, and unique music with a message of positivity, community, and growing as a species. We recently coupled with Wylie Stecklow for a Mardi Gras party at Sullivan Hall that drew hundreds and raised money for Figment.

Djibouti is a seven-piece funk and Afrobeat band (with a pinch of jazz thrown in) that always gets people moving to their irresistible grooves. If you like blaring, super funky horns and fiery rhythm sections, you'll love Djibouti.

Florence returns to Figment with their straight-ahead, metal-tinged rock.

As Hasina writes on her website, she is not your average anything. Incorporating "everything that is soulful, bold, and energizing about music," her live performance includes a full band.

A soulful indie rock band that incorporates modern dance and video into their performance.

Krista melds the aggressive, melodic and powerful elements of rock and pop with the rap she was so influenced by growing up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Her debut album, Taking Back Brooklyn, is a catharsis that is sure to touch anyone who has experienced pain, frustration, triumph, and redemption. Fresh off this year's Lollapalooza and Bamboozle festivals, and an appearance at the high profile X games, Krista is poised to become a multi-genre success and a strong spokeswoman for anyone who has struggled and persevered.

Lifted is a nine-piece hip-hop orchestra based in New York City. Composed of graduates from the Berklee School of Music, Lifted features a live horn section, bass, drums, two beautiful (and very talented) background vocalists, one unbelievably soulful guitar player and lead vocalist, and one MC. Lifted continues to stretch the boundaries of live hip-hop, incorporating elements of jazz, funk, neo-soul, reggae, salsa, drum 'n bass, dance hall, and gospel. They are able to achieve an unmatched level of musicianship for their genre. With explosive raps, catchy melodies, and great arrangements, Lifted breaks the mold when it comes to what "live hip-hop" actually entails.

RewBee - The Jewel of NYC is a female duo whose sound is often compared to X, Blondie, Hole and The B52s.

Star '69 is a Grateful Dead cover band. We love being a part of outdoor shows and playing joyous music for New York crowds.

sea chART is a project that will combine musical performance of nautically themed songs with storytelling and lectures about New York's maritime history. Eclectic Brooklyn-based band Tatters and Rags, known for delicately droning romantic soundscapes that explore folklore and the sea against the backdrop of a decaying post-industrial society, will perform a collection of songs interspersed with lectures, folk tales and storytelling by guests from various cultural institutions in the city. Just as sea charts inform sailors how to safely navigate the waters on their journeys, the hope is that sea chART will give New Yorkers a comparable base of information on their own personal journeys through the city we all call home.

Electric Junkyard Gamelan is a New York-based band that plays the original, rhythm-driven music of composer Terry Dame on invented musical contraptions such as the Kachapitar, Sitello & Rubarp. With haunting modal melodies and syncopated strings riding over funky bass lines and interlocking rhythms, we create a new sound that tantalizes the ears and eyes of all ages.

Dirty, funky, bluesy rock 'n roll, baby.

Dirty, funky, bluesy rock 'n roll, baby.

Live, noisy garage pop.

Captain Ronzo will delight and astound music lovers everywhere with his pirate songs.

Flaming Fire is a metaphysically-oriented art collective, dedicated to exploring the unity of social, physical, and spiritual collectivism through physical fitness. We would like to circle the public grounds while running and performing music with lyrics extolling the transcendent aspect of art and humanity, through vocals, guitars with mobile amps, and drums. Once our circle is completed, the band would perform a new dance and rock performance inspired by the "Freedom of Conscience" movement that was created on Governor's Island by the Noten Eylant settlers during the early 1600s, in one of the earliest examples of American moral and religious tolerance. The public would be invited to join us on our run and choruses, through a brief musical tutorial before the run.

Acoustic improvised music "from inner space."

The Teares of the Muses is both a New York University performing ensemble and a branch of the Collegium Musicum, composed of proficient musicians associated with the NYU Faculty of Arts and Science Music Department and the university community. In addition to performing at NYU, the Teares of the Muses plays without a fee for non-profit organizations and is in residence at St. Michael's Episcopal Church. Directed by Margaret Panofsky, the two to seven viols (violas da gamba) play an elegant and lively repertory from England, France, and Germany composed during the 16th and 17th centuries. Our mission is to introduce an unusual type of ensemble and its vital music to new audiences in a relaxed setting.

Didge Project is a didgeridoo awareness movement started by AJ Block and Tyler Sussman. The didgeridoo is an incredible instrument that can be used in music, meditation, and healing. Didge Project’s goal is to bring a didgeridoo into every household and to facilitate happiness and harmony on planet Earth. We make and sell didgeridoos in order to provide our community with affordable, high-quality instruments. Our didgeridoos are made from bamboo; thus, every didgeridoo sounds a little bit different and is a unique piece of art. We also teach how to play the didgeridoo and how to use it in musical, meditative, and healing contexts. At Figment, we will have a myriad of didgeridoos available for the public to play. We will also give musical performances, inform people about sound healing, and give people profound meditative experiences using a special sound machine.

The Ukulele Cabaret is a monthly gathering of 30 to 40 ukulele performers and their admirers. Musical styles range from Hawaiian, country western, rock, Tin Pan Alley, and punk to just plain weird! The show typically has a strong component of audience participation (hula anyone?). Bring along your ukes, kazoos, or other noise makers for some fun!

A showcase of brilliant dance music!

Can art and money coexist? Is art worth money? Can cash be art? Can we sell art? Can we art money? The artists of Day de Dada will mingle with the crowds and roam the island searching for “the Place Where Art and Money Meet." We’ll hand out fake money that we print ourselves and try to sell fake art to everyone we meet. Why? Why not!

Artfully AWARE's mission in brief is Sustainable Empowerment Through the Arts. Our work targets areas across the globe where communities have been stripped of their art, their voices, and their ability to express themselves creatively through music, art, dance, drama, and media. We seek to reconnect these communities to their art as well as open opportunities for new voices and provide them with the chance to re-empower themselves through expressive arts. Artfully AWARE is presenting two projects. The Benched Players uses theater games and improvisation to approach modern day issues and problems young people face. The Garden is based on a simple theater game called "Statue." Audiences will walk into an un-formed garden of sculptures, played by actors and volunteers, and have the opportunity to actually sculpt their own statue using humans as the medium. Each sculpting session will culminate in an open five-minute tour of the Garden and viewing of the other sculptures.

A combined show of live painting, original music, and dance.

We are an experimental pre-Hispanic music and dance group that brings Mexican art to life through music, costumes, and dance. It is a musical and visual experience that you'll never forget.

Manhattan Tribal, directed by Mimi Fontana and Kate Reid, is New York City's first American Tribal Style ("ATS") belly dance company following in the tradition of the creators of ATS San Francisco's Fat Chance Belly Dance. ATS relies on a movement vocabulary infused with non-verbal cues that empower a group of dancers to improvise together while giving the appearance of a choreographed dance piece. The dancers weave their story spontaneously as they interact and communicate with each other and their audience, making every performance fresh and exciting. ATS costumes display the artistry and style of different nations along the Silk Road, creating a look that appears to be ancient while at the same time being a completely modern interpretation of traditional clothing. In performance, the beauty and excitement of ATS belly dancing evoke a sense of community, tradition, ritual expression, and spontaneous movement enjoyed by dancers and audiences alike.

To Seek A Newer World blends history with fiction to re-create a candidate and a country struggling to find its way. On June 3, 1968, Robert Kennedy gave a speech at the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego. The California primary was the next day. He died two days later. The play turns Kennedy's speech into a town hall meeting, a free-flowing exchange of opinions, policy, and feelings between staff, audience members, and the candidate. The actor playing Robert Kennedy takes questions from the audience. He and the campaign staff entertain, challenge, and prod the audience to leave their comfort zone and take action in confronting the issues of the day. To Seek A Newer World captures the excitement of a candidate who dared us to dream.

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is a critically acclaimed puppet ballet, with lots of fish and a spouting whale, pantomimed to the musical score by Dukas. "Dream Medley" a puppet musical pantomimed to the music of Shostakovich and Gliere, combining favorites from our repertoire: "Sebastian's Dream," filled with clouds, rain, a slinky bug, and a magic hat, and another critically-acclaimed musical piece, "What Music Looks Like," in which dancers use scarves and abstract forms to illustrate what music looks like.

A Truce Within a Grind is a modern dance piece that questions how outside sources influence inner decisions. It tears to shreds the definition of the "grind" as dancers find themselves straight jacketed, confined, hidden, exposed, bound, broken down, and beaten up. This piece is intimate and theatrical with extreme interaction with the audience. Inner demons are exposed as a theme of tablos versus clichés is explored. Riveting, powerful dance work veils and unveils itself at different places in the piece. Each dancer has a prop that is either an extension or creation of themselves, or a tool that isn't helping them in their journey. The fight they have with themselves, each other, and what is "grinding" them down is portrayed in an architectural experience.

Cast a Widening Circle is a work for solo dance, incorporating video, objects, and lights into a 45-minute multimedia piece. Music and video by Max Alexander.

This piece is in honor of the nine Muses, who in mythology are responsible for the history we call music history. Originally, the "nine Muses" in this piece referred mainly to modern day as well as past female musicians and composers like Nadia Boulanger and Clara Schumann. This multidisciplinary art presentation will attempt to cover the idea that the Muses also inspired men to create their own music, including those who combine music with other arts. There will be a wide variety of dancing used in this presentation, but most of it will cover Butoh, performance art, capoeira, modern, and contemporary/experimental dancing, combined with installation art.

The Xoregos Performing Company will do two short plays: HOW THE COOKIE CRUMBLES by Ade Ademola and SHIPWRECKED by Adam Kraar, both Brooklyn playwrights. In addition, Xoregos presents its guest company Shakespeare Anywhere, doing excerpts from MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. This program will be half an hour long.

"'TIL DEATH DO YOU PART - Marry Yourself!" is a one-on-one live art performance between you, the participant, and the artist, the Encouraging Priestess. You will marry yourself (not someone else) in this quickie, "Lost Vegas" send up of a western marriage ceremony. No need for a bride or groom, nor anything else. All you need is your body and soul. We provide an Encouraging Priestess, an assistant, some costuming, refreshments, toy rings, and multiple-choice vows. You get a personal wedding cupcake, a photo, and bubbly. If we're flush, we also give you "Just Married" helium balloons for you to flaunt. You may bring your own rings and vows. Friends can attend at your discretion. You may take vows together, but you wouldn’t be marrying each other. It would just be noisy, fun, tender, and spirited.

As the "Eternal Knitter," my performance is a continual knitting piece, presently over 90 feet long. I sit and knit.

This is a performance of two short operas in a traditional pairing: Cavalleria Rusticana by Mascagni and I Pagliacci by Leoncavallo, starring a cast of up-and-coming New York-area artists. There are no hearts and flowers in these gritty stories of love, betrayal, passion, and revenge. Rather, these are the stories of everyday people dealing with real emotions --- love, jealously, betrayal, and infidelity – in their rawest and most visceral forms. Though sung in Italian, this is verismo, or realist, opera, and is very accessible even to those who do not speak Italian.

A special performance by the group From Depth to Light, featuring dancer, choreographer, and performance artist Bayou Bennett, and electric sitar player Dawoud. Be transported to a land of monkeys, leopards, and winged creatures as Bayou's visual projections bring you into the world of Kryptozoology. Watch while a bird warrior takes the fire-leopard-winged creature's powers.

A live butoh installation with one to seven dancers, a splash of light, and a universe at a different speed.

“Street Team” is a group of musicians and dancers exploring the dynamics between improvisation and composition. The dancers Ava Heller and Keren Ganin-Pinto and musicians Westbrook Johnson and John Welsh are testing the symbiotic and contrapuntal relationships that exist between the two disciplines, and how they can mold into a cohesive sensory experience. The Webster dictionary defines "topography" as "the art or practice of graphic delineation in detail usually on maps or charts of natural and man-made features of a place or region, especially in a way to show their relative positions and elevations." We are seeking to do this with our bodies in movement and sound. The duration will be approximately 40 minutes as we develop into and out of energetic states, fluids, and textures.

The project exhibits excerpts from Almost Unreal, Amir Levi's full-length show set entirely to the music of the Swedish pop group Roxette. These pieces are set inside the "Mall of Anything," a fantastical world where everything is for sale, but not necessarily for money. Almost Unreal is about the figurative price people are willing to pay to receive their deepest desires. The Poisonous Ladies have presented nearly 45 minutes of this work at various venues across New York City, including Dance Theatre Workshop, Dixon Place, and in conjunction with 40 degree PHI.

Lightbuddies are loving creatures that spread love, light, and laughter to the world. Lightbuddies wear special designed clothing and headwear and are equipped with special bubbling backpacks and metallic handheld bubble blowers. They come from LIGHTLAND, a special place of love and light where everybody and everything is at peace with each other. In our performance, three lightbuddies will rollerblade around, holding their special bubble blowers, and on route will shower Governors Island and bystanders with love, light, and peace. Their specially formulated bubble mixture is infused with an extract of a flower from Hawaii, which has magical powers to induce happiness. This performance will be a futuristic, fun, aromatic spectacle moving around the Island. It will vibrate love and light and will inspire and empower.

This will be a performance in which a small troupe of performers will write a Mad Libs story, ask the audience to fill in the blanks, and act out the story through live action and puppeteering. We may invite additional audience participation at the end.

A group of five dancers will perform a cabaret-style dance to live, New Orleans-style jazz.

"Stop Talking" is a piece meant to bring to light the chatter we all hear in our heads. The movement is based on the notion that we might be able to hush our own thoughts, as well as those to whom we are speaking.

A reading from the recently published novel Oy Pioneer!, a humorous, feminist story of husband hunting in Manhattan.

Tap and jazz fusion dance from an all-female company.

In Michael Alan's "Human Sculpture," performers will be arranged and positioned in ways not possible for normal anatomy, assisted by trust, balance, paint, glue, rope, cast and many other supplies. Open to be drawn, watched and written about.

iDance is an interactive improv music video creation made with complete strangers on the streets of the world. Individuals are spontaneously approached and offered to film music videos of them dancing through the streets. The idea is to enjoy the moment of dancing so that people passing by are inspired to join the dance. Music is played from equipment carried by the camera operator, allowing mobility to roam around the streets with a group of dancers who never knew each other before this engagement.

BLACK & WHITE is intended to remind us all of our responsibilities while encouraging people to improve themselves and the world around them. Presenting original choreography and music in order to connect audiences to their own emotions, BLACK & WHITE provides a shared experience that transcends cultural boundaries. By offering spirituality through dance, we can affect change in the world and remind ourselves that we are all connected, emphasizing the importance of love, respect, peace, and happiness. Through the progress of the pieces presented, audiences will become aware that life’s occurrences and experiences are not as polarized as the title suggests.

Conceptually inspired by various literary works such as Melville's Moby Dick and The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry, Ahab Island is a dance party/performance voyage taken from the safety of your bed, to the dreamy place where your bed becomes a boat sailing towards the unseen, yet unmistakable, other. The piece is structured in the style of our seemingly unsystematic puzzle of thoughts, daydreams, and fantasies, through piecing together the talents and personalities of an ensemble of dancers, non-dancers, singers, non-singers, actors, and non-actors. The piece has a folk, homemade aesthetic, from telescopes made of toilet-paper rolls to sailor hats of newspaper and whales made of cardboard. The audience not only watches the story unfold but is required to take part in the exhilarating and unpredictable voyage.

Cover Girl is an autobiographical, one-woman performance piece wherein the character, Safa, rejects the poles of veiling as liberation or oppression, and looks at it from the inside as the earliest assemblage of a childhood home. This piece examines the social act of veiling in both Iran and America, and addresses issues like racism, sexual segregation, foreign policy, and patriotism. The hejab is described not as a symbol of religious devotion, but as a social construct, its importance derived not from God but from man. The relationship between narration and object manipulation is stressed, particularly in the on-stage treatment of the veil as a neutral mask. The piece also delves into issues of faith and commitment or non-commitment to religious and political practices.

The process-oriented dance group RETTOCAMME can often be found improvising on the street, in galleries, and other unusual situations around New York City. In "RETTOCAMME at Work: Fort Jay," choreographer Emma Cotter designs a structured improvisation for several dancers exploring the terrain of the Fort Jay moat, which she investigated last summer as an ideal location for a site-specific work. The piece will feature some striking "wearable art" by visual artist Ryan Roth, which will enhance visibility from a distance and distinguish the performers within the vast environment. Live musicians under the direction of composer Jordan McLean will accompany and interact with the dancers.

Dancers dance in shoelaces: caught up in them, tying and untying them, and moving through solos, duets, and group configurations connected by shoelaces. Audience members will be invited to write their hopes and fears on the shoelaces. The shoelaces will then become part of our piece, both as props and as generative material for character and movement development. Write on a shoelace and become part of the creative process!

Conversation Maps will guide participants through interdisciplinary dialogues, using speaking, movement, poetry, writing, easels, ukuleles, and a lot more. Various conversational cues and directions are physically mapped out on the ground to guide participants through a choose-your-own-adventure dialogue, with dramatic and philosophical twists and turns. Dialogues run the gamut, from poetic to philosophical to playful. Each dialogue aims to encourage and challenge visitors to break free of the constraints of typical scripted spoken conversation.

A one-hour storytelling event featuring four to five performers telling seven minute stories that take place in and around New York's waterways. We will also pick names of interested audience members from our "Magic Fishbowl" to share their mini (three minute) water tales. We may include musical interludes and a New York water trivia contest as well.

Professor Abara is a well-known Capoeirista who has been practicing and teaching Capoeira for over 18 years, earning the respect of Capoeira groups from around the world. Watch as Abara and his group demonstrate this beautiful and highly energetic martial art called Capoeira.

"Can I Get You Anything Else?" is a performance exploring the prescribed interactions of strangers, using the language of a waitress. In the performance I wear a classic diner uniform, with a magnifying glass in front of my mouth. My script, regardless of what people say to me or how they respond to my questions, remains circumscribed by my designated position (Italian, French, ranch, or blue cheese? Green beans or peas and carrots? Vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, or coffee?). Most interaction between strangers revolves around commerce --- the exchange of money for goods and services. We follow understood directions and rules that guide our behavior, yet within limited parameters, moments of intimacy might occur.

Arts Eclectic's recent works have situated elaborately-costumed dancers in both handmade and natural settings. The tableau that is created is an alluring portrayal of an unexpected character showcased in a unique format. "Lady in Blue" will consist of two dancers costumed in Baroque dress --- think Marie Antoinette meets Smurfette. The dancers will not only create still images of stoic, artistic beauty, but will interact and play with festival participants.

I will paint expressionist portraits of willing sitters, and then hang the portraits on a nearby wall under the title of "Everyone Is a Celebrity." The title of each portrait will depend on the profession of the sitter. Each portrait takes about 20 minutes.

The GPU is a character dressed in a ghillie camo suit who wears a smiling, rhinestoned lucha libre mask and carries a sampler hooked up to a megaphone. He raps over some beats, swears, and makes proclamations in different voices and languages. The GPU is a free-roaming type --- half charlatan, half instigator --- who will connect with and activate the existing sculptures and installations at Figment. The GPU is not intended to be merely a performance, but will also engage the audience in mini-raves or even dance-offs.

Members of the Alchemy Tribal Collective study in New York City under Sarah Johansson Locke. We will be improvising a live dance performance of approximately fifteen minutes in length. Our dance style is tribal fusion bellydance, which incorporates flavors from gypsy and folk dances, classical Indian dance, flamenco, and modern dance. Performing an improvisational piece will allow us to create an immediate dynamic interface between our movements, our music, and our response to the surrounding environment at the Figment festival.

You are invited to explore Governors Island through sound, with Andrea Williams of the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology. This hour-long soundwalk focuses on mindful listening to the varied environments and acoustic spaces of the island. Following the soundwalk will be a brief group discussion on sound and ecology. Soundwalk is limited to 15 people and will happen rain or shine. Please bring water.

Shake Your Soul Kripalu YogaDance is a free, upbeat movement class that incorporates elements of yoga, Qi Kung, modern creative dance, and Afro Caribbean dance. It is meditative and exuberant, centering and joyful. It requires no dance experience and can be done at each individual's level of comfort. It's also a great way to relieve stress!

Using sidewalk chalk, poetry, bandoneon, pencil, paper and performance, the Harmattan Company will create a participatory cartographic installation of Dutch East India Company maps, linking Dutch Manhattan to other colonial ports of Batavia, Malacca, Cochin, Cape Town and Recife. Passersby will pick maps and sidewalk chalk, and draw their interpretations of the maps on the ground. A ritual incorporating Hudson River water and poetry will ensue following the completion of the maps. The sidewalk chalk and wet footprints will evaporate over time, evoking the ephemerality of New York's history.

"Greenagers in Love" is a fun-filled, participatory musical/theatrical piece featuring "Greenagers" Peter Carlaftes and Kat Georges of Three Rooms Press. The dynamic duo introduces "green" themes through a variety of transformed pop hits, inviting the audience to sing and clap along. This fun piece helps transform the world by emphasizing that "going green" is easy and fun, as well as inexpensive. The show ends with a hopeful message that global warming can be reversed.

Visual artist and VJ 0H10M1ke creates digital graffiti using his Wacom tablet and a projector. Utilizing screens, blank walls, and people as canvases, his single-line drawings range from portraiture to crowd-inspired, theme-infused analog animation, penned in real time to the beat of the music. For Figment 2009, the artist will create an analog version of his performance piece, using paper and markers to draw along to the event's musical acts.

We are constantly producing, regenerating, and reusing. This multimedia performance uses the resources of Governors Island as material for a musical projection and performance. The sounds of the island are collected, edited into a composition, and then combined with real time imagery, recorded by video feeds set up at different points on the island.

A painting can be as comforting as a sweater on a cold day. The colors can make you remember the tablecloth on your grandmother's breakfast table, or the dress you wore to make yourself feel secure on your first day of daycare. Using color and perspective to evoke mood and emotion, I recreate such images, appropriating them while maintaining the universal, human element that attracts me to them in the first place. My paintings explore tangents of film and painting. I paint figures that fight between the realm of motion and stillness, fiction and reality. My imagery comes from vintage suspense and horror films, and brings them into the present. I am interested in taking elements of film in my paintings and returning them to the realm of film and video. I use animation techniques to make the shapes and colors of the "characters," within both positive and negative space in my paintings, come alive in film. By relating my paintings back to film, I can take another look at what draws me to them.

1,000 Cell Phones consists of multiple displays that playfully visualize and animate discovered Bluetooth devices within its situated space. Devices are represented as abstract discs in dimensional screen space, colored by transcribing the devices’ unique identifiers to distinctive colors. This simple but evocative effect emphasizes how an ID number expressed as a one-of-a-kind color not only makes visible a distinguishing feature of our portable networked device, but also reshapes its obfuscated technical datum into an aesthetic and coherent design object. It asks us if this machine identifier expresses our persona and personality, perhaps without our knowledge and complete understanding of the implications.

These posters include art photos to encourage all ages and populations to vote.

"The Mystery of Which Mystery" is an interactive, improvisational storytelling performance between music and image. The artist is perpetually at the point of acknowledging that artistic creation is an unending interactive exchange. Ideas and expressions take precedence over ownership and start to become synonymous with the collaborative process. In this piece, thinking processes and action are changed based on different combinations of narrative. The video is the artist’s personal interpretation of the original score, and the improvisational performance is an additional narrative layer of musicians. The artists’ collaboration contributes to an interactive shared ownership storytelling between two media. There is a deeper logic to that draws its critical force from the opposition between contemporary media practices: improvisation, interactive storytelling, and inter-media work, in which art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital. additionally, videos by Yu-Chen Chiu 1.Self Portrait 2.Still 3.The Mystery of Which Mystery (music by Pei-Shan Kao)

This is a collective, grassroots project built around a loose framework with an uncertain conclusion. The premise is to turn the typical “event survey” idea on its head, and put it to good, long-term use by turning it into a longer-term multimedia project that embodies and examines Figment’s values; specifically, the roles of art and creativity in the public space, and leveraging art toward community building. Through involving a team of contributors and inviting back Figment attendees, the survey becomes an exercise in creative community building, with the goal of involving people who didn’t even attend Figment.

Underwater Listening Station is an audio work where “viewers” listen to underwater recordings of the New York Harbor via headphones, at a listening station placed at the water’s edge. The audience will be attracted to the revelatory quality of this work, using the sense of hearing to gain access to a forbidden world beneath the surface of the water. Here, water can be construed as a metaphor for the unconscious (what’s unseen below the surface and not readily apparent above the surface). This intimate work allows audience members to stop for a moment and meditate on the bodies of water which surround the City of New York, prompted by both the sounds and sights of water, allowing a momentary respite from the busy pace of urban life.

In our show "Wondermare," we have chosen the narrative template of "Alice in Wonderland" because it contains potent narratives about the rites of passage into adulthood. The story confronts the confusing and often nonsensical rituals that we must travel through in order to obtain a "civilized" or "adult" persona in the world, "behind" or in "front" of our looking glass. It is our belief that the much of the behavioral conditioning programmed in our subconscious is the unhealthy byproduct of a world out of balance. It is a "house of cards" on the brink of catastrophe, the truth of which is obscured from us by our own myopic pursuits and illusions. Wondermare creates the opportunity for a psychological "rebooting," a "do over" where through interactivity, the participant has another "chance" at addressing his own rights of cultural passage that he may not have gotten right the first time around.

"Word Tree" uses SMS interaction to map out participants' first thoughts about a word concept. By viewing these mapped-out and connected thoughts, people can gain insight into how each person associates something in their thinking.

A button, flanked on either side by two traffic cones, controls a traffic cone on a monitor. A press of the button moves the cone in the video. Usually, a traffic cone is intended to create a detour or to signify an area to be avoided. Viewers experience a moment of hesitation as they are conflicted with a desire to press a big button: what will happen? Governor's Island Conescape will raise awareness of the possibility of viewing traffic cones as an aesthetic practice, recontextualizing them as art.

A space is created with photographic art, and participants are filmed.

Panoply consists of 46 rings of 16 full-color interactive LEDs, controllable with a modified Wii controller mounted in a sphere. Users can move the sphere to control various aspects of the displayed patterns.

With future forecasts predicting ultimate doom for a man-altered world, it seems there is a clog in the conduit of information transmitted between those in control and the public at large. Black Ops, psychological torture, acoustic weapons, Project Starfire, and a multitude of other state sponsored programs exist, well-hidden in plain sight, shrouded in a stigma of conspiracy and discouraging significant public inquiry. Psych Securities LLC is an ongoing exploration of this aforementioned covert reality, most clearly seen while in an alternative psychological state. By compiling declassified documents, historical narratives, and psychedelic conjecture, a visual world is pieced together, undermining strategies of deception and concealed truths. The images, as photographic composites, mimic this process. The project’s modular presentation allows clustered photographs to resemble the structure of the intelligence networks that have inspired a number of the depictions themselves.

Party in a Box is a battery-powered sound system mounted on an adult sized tricycle, contained within a single box. The mission and purpose of PiaB is to co-create spontaneous pop-up dance parties all over New York City, mostly in parks and on street corners. While PiaB is largely organized by "party people," the random nature of the project draws in a vast cross-section of our larger community, allowing for all types of people to momentarily celebrate and connect in meaningful ways.

Diva Dutch is a series of site specific, participatory public performances in which local black women, from varying parts of the African Diaspora, acquire exaggeratedly long braids in styles created by local black hair braiders. Viewers are then invited to physically engage with the body of a particular black woman by jumping rope with the braids. The series is part of a larger body of work entitled Artifacts from Soulville, which centers around the rituals and artifacts of an imaginary black enclave, Soulville. Through the exploration of objects and rituals from the imaginary Soulville, Aisha Cousins engages viewers in examining various aspects of the psycho-social-cultural fabric that connects contemporary black Americans.

Learn about flying sculpture with these foam delta wings.

The Traveling Sound Museum is a faux-historical, new media performance piece that presents a historic collection of "sound jars," each containing a sound from a different place and time in history. The current selection of sound jars is installed in an antique cart, which the proprietor wheels through Governor's Island. At key spots he regales the passerby with the riveting history of the collection and invites them to "step right up and have a listen..." The piece is inspired by the Wunderkammer of the 16th century, as well as 19th century American traveling snake oil salesmen.

The FIGMENT 2009 Mobile Art Parade is a marked parade route offering both "self-parading," in which any number of people can choose to form an ad hoc parade along the route any time, and an official "Island-wide" parade at 4pm. Visit our "Pimp Your Bike" decorating station at City of Dreams to become a moving work of art. Visit Kostume Kult to decorate yourself. Play your instruments. Waltz your puppets. Fly your flags. Invent Mobile Art and join the Parade!

When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I enthusiastically proclaimed, "A veterinarian!" It was a vision I maintained until the second year of college, when I realized the visual study of animal anatomy was tremendously more interesting and appealing. Naturalist artists like Audubon and Durer adored animals. Their love for nature was apparent in their minute detail and dedicated examination of flora and fauna. Concurrently, I am fascinated by children's literature and cartoons. Children are enthralled by stories that feature animals, and I was certainly one of them. My work treads the fine line of intimate nature study and cartooning. Like illustrators of the Golden Age, such as Arthur Rackham and Beatrix Potter, I want to imbue my characters with personality and whimsy, while preserving the mystery and majesty of what makes them animals.

Nicholas Sale's splash paintings are inspired by New York City's walls.

We are surrounded by water, touched by it at our coast and carried by it on ferries. How much water does New York City consume? We take it for granted that water will continue to carry us, kiss our shores, and give us life. For my project I will install a series of paintings inspired by study in the deserts of New Mexico and Egypt. The stark desert scenes, with their isolated human forms, will be placed near water, where a brief glance by preoccupied passengers may pull them out of daily reveries for a moment, to consider the blessing of water that surrounds them.

The subjects are colorful, whimsical, life-sized vessels that each embody an anthropomorphic quality, so spectators will have a "body to body" scale of viewing and relating to these richly painted surfaces. This group of nine large oil paintings is coherent and interrelated by color and subject matter. I would like to do a workshop for adults and children where they can draw and paint their own versions of their favorite vessels.

I will create a selection of micro-mini paintings for display on a tiny patch of wall space. I draw inspiration from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City painter Albert Pinkham Ryder and his watery night scenes. I combine this inspiration with marine biology sources and a passion for New York's waterfronts.

I plan to create one or more wacky, large, ornate empty frames that can be hung from trees. People can stand in them and take pictures with their own cameras, like a DIY photo booth.

This photo documentary series about Haiti focuses on the country's youth, especially their happiness and resilience no matter how bad their living situations may be.

A large banner proclaiming "Coney Island ALIVE," hung for the duration of the event.

Zakiya loves to paint images from her dreams and her innermost secret thoughts.

Tortured plywood metal-clad reliefs, about the power and rhythm of water.

Paintings from the Spanish artist.

This project consists of a series of acrylic paintings representing the logical and emotional sides of one's personality. The logical side is captured with symbolic paintings incorporating a realistic style that tell stories driven by the commonality of human nature and the struggles of existence. The emotional side consists of vibrant abstracts that make dramatic use of color in various methods of applications to evoke a feeling of life and energy. These paintings seek to convey universal truths through leveraging easily recognizable objects posed to challenge one's conceptions of life and meaning. The two styles are often displayed side by side to reflect these primary aspects of one's existence, the pensive state and the active state.

Mourning is a process we start soon after we are born. If all goes well, you mourn your separation from your mother, which is initially all-encompassing. After the first courageous steps into the world outside, you mourn your sense of omnipotence as you realize your limits and dependency on others. You mourn your youth, the people who fail and abandon you, and the ones who die. You mourn the things you give up in order to become who you are. You mourn the idealization of your parents, superheroes who eventually become frail and fallible. This project represents this process, and the fact that we recognize and acknowledge the world around us and develop our subjectivity through loss.

I will paint images of puddles reflecting buildings on Governors Island, as well as other city reflections. These images will be painted on thin panels placed on the ground, so people can walk on them. The images will either reflect the buildings, trees, and objects surrounding the paintings themselves, as if there were a true puddle there, or an image of other city buildings or places unfamiliar to the viewers.

A powerful, larger than life wood sculpture.

Being the son of a Japanese family in Buenos Aires, as well as a neuroscientist turned photographer, I have a lifelong experience in looking at things from the outside. I document urban life with a smile, showing not only humor but also warmth and acceptance, generating a feeling of awe at the beauty of coincidence.

My daily space is centered in the middle of three bridges. Routine perception of my surroundings becomes a mode of artistic exploration.

The ocean is simultaneously dangerous and beautiful, ever present and continuously changing. In "Sentient," I began to photograph waves at night, a time when the ocean feels the most unknown and un-navigable. Even photography, a medium of light, captured only the white crash of waves, the lone visible sign of the water in the darkness. "Sea Change," a series of palladium-based photograms, references the complex character of the ocean. Water is always in combination with other elements or in various transitional phases. To produce the images, I stand in the water holding light sensitive paper in the break of a wave, and allow sand to form a pattern on the paper as it exposes in the sunlight. This process entwines the material aspect of the medium with the ocean and shows the trace of water.

"LaLa Art Factory" is a series of highly creative digital compositions created by photographer Lauren Koch and partner and graphic designer Julian Zee. The work in this series consists of staging people --- mainly in outdoor, natural environments --- photographing them multiple times, and digitally merging the images.

Through countless hours of observing moving water, this work uses formal complementary elements of opacity and transparency, repetition and chaos, and uniqueness to build dialogues about observation, movement, and pathfinding. No matter what I am doing, three challenges always arise. What do I genuinely see in front of me, and how do I represent it with marks that will map what's been revealed? Is there a break in the regularity that illuminates, by contrast, the uniformity of chaos and the disorder of repetition? Does any of this dictate a specific path to be followed? Just how far can I really see?

Plain and simple, I just want to come and paint.

This project involves the creation of a big "Plastik Wev" piece formed by interlacing and knotting recycled trash bags, and then bringing them together with pipe cleaners. The participants will be encouraged to add to an existing piece that was created during an amazing weekend event in Bushwick called BETA Spaces in November 2008.

The purpose of Martin's work is to dissect the elements of light in motion and transform this into abstract and minimalist elements. With color and light as his palette, the artist paints and draws with a photo camera. Realistic form is then broken up into multiple images and overlapping fragments of color and motion.

This project provides space for people to come together and create through the use of color, shapes, and text. The surface of the four walls will be covered in white paper, each with a different shape drawn in the center of the wall. The ceiling will be covered in black paper with six yellow circles. The floor will also be covered in white paper with a spectrum of color cut-outs from magazines for collage. A large container in the shape of a head will be in the center of the room, filled with drawing materials. Around the room are smaller heads filled with tempura paint, glue, and brushes and sponges for application and painting. There will also be “The Pile,” which consists of words or text for collage. Each head represents the open mind for each participant to influence, encourage, alter, and transform the space collectively.

A canvas of mixed media --- acrylic paint, fused objects, and EL wire fiber optics --- represents the life of a musician In New York. She is balancing precariously on a bar stool, singing like a three legged contortionist and playing a small guitar with a doll-like smile on a glitzy, tiny stage. The East Village is rapidly being removed in wheelbarrows; buildings and local parks are replaced with upscale buildings. The economy is screaming, credit cards are flying, waiters are serving up platters with waxing politicians, and UFOs pop in to add to the chaos and color of a New York lifestyle. Her tiny guitar omits a gentle flickering light while her thicker microphone cable fluctuates in response to the surrounding sounds, be it the artist herself singing in front of the painting or a viewer commenting on the work. Alternators vary the resonance of sound-to-light response.

The purpose of this project is to attract viewers to the beauty of nature and hopefully encourage audience participation. The details of flowers and soothing sceneries are hopefully thought provoking for the viewer.

A group of colorful, body-painted characters will bring buckets of sidewalk chalk to the island. They will encourage everyone in attendance to participate in a giant sidewalk chalk drawing.

This project consists of Polaroids mounted on tiles, suspended with fishing line in a cascade. Each image is randomly and artfully married with a fortune from fortune cookies consumed by my friends and me over several years. The work captures that moment when you read your fortune and try to apply it to your situation in life. Everyone will read something different and draw his or her own conclusions as to the message that is being "sent." It's about the randomness of life and how we try to make our own meaningful message.

"Photoscapes" is a series of multi-layered photographs with the texture of dreams. Each contains three or more individually complete photos digitally stacked on top of one another to create the final product. The idea is to encapsulate the feeling of a single event, emotion or idea in one complex photo. The project will have all of the component images of one of the shots placed next to it so that the process can be better imagined by the viewer.

New York and its spatial politics have long been both the real and imagined site for my works of video, installation, sculpture, and other performed and pedagogical acts. Now my chief preoccupation with my own work is in the process-oriented building of sculpture evocative of indeterminacy and id-driven bodily processes which are then recreated as projections in interaction with an overdeveloped urban environment. The sculptures along with their digital collage counterparts blur boundaries between male/female as well as the internal and external (environment.) They introduce fluid, moving relations between corporality and the excessive-even phallic- verticality of the 21st century landscape and the fight for space that results in an ever-changing urban environment. Their organic, bodily-oriented forms rely on process-oriented “bottom up “growth, paying homage to women sculptor’s before her in their emphasis on materials. For Figment I hope to create the illusion that 2-3 of these works are planted on a patch of earth along with their digital collage counterparts which are on foamboard..I would use stones, moss, and potting soil around the sculptures and pictures, which I could remove after the festival.

I have been doing live paintings for parties and art events in New York for many years, and have always found that audiences enjoy watching a work of art come to life right before their eyes. Some of my past events include the Burning Man Decompression parties and many large-scale dance events.

SHEDDING IDENTITY is a community-building conceptual portrait project. The public will be invited to shed some of their hair and, with it, their identities, as a contribution to a conceptual community. Participants will use disposable combs to collect hair samples into Ziploc bags. My assistant(s) will be responsible for collecting hair, documenting the participants, and delivering the hair to me, where I will glue the hair to a canvas, loosely following a sketch of Governors Island that maps the site of our communal experience. The portrait confronts personal identity and questions our willingness to be altruistic when new possibilities of human interaction are at stake.

A gigantic canvas scroll depicting a colorful assortment of world characters and events, using a brightly luminescent, abstract background with influences from Picasso to Keith Haring.

A visual meditation upon the body, self, and memory.

The Mass Manifesting Mobile is a publicly created, hanging work of art which inspires people to state their wishes and desires and artistically display them as affirmations in a public space. The Mobile will consist of a hanging net (approx. 6' tall, 4' wide, and 8' long) supported by standing poles from which small cut paper shapes will hang. Participants are provided with art materials to color and collage their own hanging addition to the mobile. The Mass Manifesting Mobile is an opportunity for people to publicly and proudly share the often hidden and protected desires of our hearts and souls. The ultimate purpose of the Mass Manifesting Mobile is to give everyone more freedom to allow their magic, feel their passion, and live their love!

In my recent project, I look at the urban landscape via hazardous waste sites in order to explore the transformation of a space over time. The subjects in New York, Korea, and Japan are connected through my personal background. I use a combination of drawing over transparent Plexiglas and altered photographs, which create a feeling of history and time past within a space.

A gestural igloo in stone and steel.

A sculptural installation of dodecahedron shapes made from aluminum, with flowering plants growing out of them.

We are four art therapy students who are passionate about spreading knowledge about the field of art therapy. We would like to bring awareness to the collective unconscious and create an interactive, 30-foot labyrinth that is also a mandala. We are hoping that this project can be held open for the entire season at Governors Island.

Professor Faustino Quintanilla, the director of the QCC Art Gallery of The City University of New York, said, "Baatar's 45-foot sculpture --- two interlocking circles modeled after the 'Toono' --- is designed for people to walk through." Visitors enter the structure through the narrow space between its two sections and must adapt themselves to their surroundings, as water flows around and over the structure and a series of lamps illuminate it from within. The body has to be adapted to the space. As Quintanilla said, the sculpture is symbolic of how immigrants come to the United States and learn to adjust to a new culture. Just as people must adjust and morph their bodies to fit into the sculpture, immigrants are doing the same in America.

For this site-specific project, we will create a ship structure entirely out of salvaged materials, including lumber, a found shopping cart, and painted wax. This derelict formation will reference the remains of a plundered vessel. It will be constructed near life scale, with the shopping cart as the central support from which the two halves of the ship emerge. Contained in the hull, the cargo of the ship will consist of similarly salvaged items of necessity and curiosity. The outer shell of the boat will encaustically be made impervious to water. The wax will then be carved and painted, depicting a visual mythology of the object's history. This project reanimates found elements, creating a narrative of self-sufficiency, reclamation and buoyancy.

N7 is an international arts collective with members in the U.S. and Europe. "Pavilion N7" is an opportunity for this collective to collaborate on an installation project in New York. Each N7 artist creates a highly textured digital image, which is emailed to the members of the collective based in New York. These images are printed on 12′ x 12′ vinyl tarps and grommeted. A steel frame is welded together to support the tarps, and to form a shadow box of art, with images on both the inside and out.

"Guns & Poses" is a garden of three large rosebushes constructed from steel, gun catalogs, and fashion magazines. The premise is to call attention to the fact that one generally consumes a barrage of images of violence and airbrushed and altered females, without acknowledging those images' ties to reality. The seductiveness of fashion photography and firearms is based in illusion, where one is free to enjoy only when partial variables are considered, not the whole. By constructing flowers --- a form intrinsically feminine in nature --- out of these images, I attempt to repair perceptions that are skewed. The images appear far more violent when juxtaposed against the curves of a flower than they did between the pages of the magazines, thereby reclaiming a foothold in truth. In calling attention to themselves, the images reestablish intimacy with the viewer.

A garden path is "drawn" into the grass on Governor's Island, relating to the site's history and use. It reveals a route trod long ago when the island was a strategic encampment. It marks the routine of more recent Coast Guard duty. It's meander demarks a figment of the future. The installation is a of tracery of human activity, past and present, in which an image is literally drawn into the material surface of the city park. The image itself is a visual reversal of traditional garden paving where grass grows up in the spaces between paving stones. For this installation the "spaces" are made from stone, and the "pavers" are grass.

A mixed media sculpture composed of fabrics and a found television set. This piece mirrors the human body while commenting on our use, or overuse, of technology. It loosely references the idea of the cyborg and is a fun piece with recognizable materials, making it accessible to a diverse group of people.

The Rose Petal Pool is a kiddie pool filled with petals that have been picked off fresh roses. The rose petals make a colorful potpourri bed to lie down in, as well as wonderful confetti for children to play with.

As a child, I would sit beside my mother arranging blocks of colored fabric attempting to create watercolor designs. She would allow me to fuss over the blocks for hours but when the quilt was finished she had rearranged them to her own liking. She was artistically stubborn. I inherited that from her. In 2002 my mother was diagnosed with Stage 3 Ovarian Cancer. I helped her store materials and lock up her sewing machine. At 23, I have lived in over 25 houses, rentals, apartments, condos, co-ops, etc. But it was my mother who made the location in which I slept, a home. This project is an homage to her and a healing for myself.

“Aberrant Sidewalk” subverts the expectation of the sidewalk as an uninterrupted pathway between destinations, leading the viewer to mistrust or rethink familiar elements of urban architecture. Viewers are invited to question the purpose of the sidewalk and the security of the built environment, consider the mundane as a subject for sculpture, or simply smile in amusement. This piece explores my interest in the ability of environmental aberrations to provoke as well as entertain.

Five boxes on a table will contain original objects that stimulate each of the five senses. Each sense box will be linked to a blank canvas, so participants can express their emotions after experiencing the stimulants, using paints, brushes, feathers, glue, charcoal, pencil, markers, and other materials.

"Am I the One?" is a site-specific, interactive, quadraphonic audio art installation based on chance operations. As participants enter the quad of Fort Jay, they briefly become the triggers of change for the many facets of the audio that is playing. The sound's composition, effects, and rate of change is generated by participants drawing playing cards. Amplitude direction and effects are related to the movement of the participants in the quad. The chance operations remove the element of design and composition, and thus blur the line between artist and observer.

Le Pettite Orbitte was born May 28, 2008, on a lunar-Orb eclipse, having been conceived as a set piece for "Nothing," a solo play in development. The Orb represents origin, openness, birth, fullness, potential, completion, moon, earth, cosmos, sensuality, embrace, motion, softness, marshmallows, ice, playfulness, community and much more, or nothing at all! Le Pettite Orbitte’s function in the universe is “Plunk 'n Play." Wherever you see Le Pettite Orbitte, it’s playtime!

"Up All Night Sleeping" is Tara Parsons’ second interactive installation on Governors Island, located in the bedroom of one of the historic homes on the island. The artist is interested in our collective dream life, and in creating an actual and visual record of it. Do you have recurring dreams? Do you always dream in a theme? Are you plagued with nightmares? Are you constantly swept away in daydreams? Come lie down in the bed and dream away. Then write down your dreams on streamers and attach them above the bed. At the end of the weekend, the room will become filled with these ribbons of words, speaking about our sleeping life.

"Line" is a project created by artist Joetta Maue that explores the memories and nostalgic feelings associated with a clothesline. By embroidering, appliqueing, and cutting words out of found and re-appropriated linens, the work explores feelings of joy, happiness, and play. This work fits into a greater body of work in which Joetta celebrates the contradictions and dynamism of the joy and sadness of life.

Harry Spitz returns to Figment with a large field marker chalk work, to be performed in one of Governors Island's parking lots. The work is a drawing, but the method is very physical and dance-like. The drawings are iconic evocations of bio-forms and life energy.

"Stir Up" is a sculptural/installation project with an upward range. I propose to reach upwards with kinetic wire sculpture. Attached to the wires will be a variety of materials, including plastic, paint, and other mixed media.

"The Ghosts That Haunt Me" is a piece about the rich history of Governors Island and New York. To an immigrant, the experiential quality of New York's history is virtually unsurpassed in the United States, but it can be difficult to get to the truth of it and find meaningful impact. With so much refuse and propaganda surrounding everyone every day, how we find things that resonate with us is even more important.This piece is an installation of sculptural works that transform the area into a visual and acoustic reminder of the spirits that have made New York what it is.

Based on Japanese tradition, Ema, or 絵馬 in Japanese, is literally a votive tablet that the participant inscribes with his hope or wish for the future, and then hangs on the planned installation. Participants will be provided with small wooden ema tablets and a means for inscribing them. The participant then designs and inscribes his hope or wish for the future onto his plaque, and proceeds to the exhibit area to hang his creation on the frame that, when completed, will reveal the kanji, or Chinese character for hope. The resulting sculpture containing all the participant-produced plaques will be an interesting amalgam of individual aspirations.

"The Hungry Ghosts" is a textile installation based on a Buddhist concept that human beings are all simple tubes. We are a vehicle and a tool to transform various forms of energy, nutrients, and poisons. The tubes hang vertically in a small crowd, referencing the way a group of people might stand together.

"Watershed" is a man-made forest of 1,500 plastic water bottles collected from the New York City area, which serves as a visual representation of one second of U.S. consumption. Out of the 50 billion bottles of water consumed each year, 80% of these bottles are currently not being recycled. Bottled water is 1,900 times more expensive than tap water, and the toxins emitted by it have been linked to serious health problems, such as reproductive issues and cancers. "Watershed" was created with the hope that viewers will shed the notion that they need to buy water in plastic bottles. If we are looking to better the environment, water is a great place to start, since we have the best quality water coming out of our taps.

Chin Chih Yang’s work addresses society’s efforts to protect itself both physically and psychologically against various catastrophes. His large-scale "123PollutionSolution" project transforms thousands of used aluminum cans collected by himself, the New York City Street can collector, and students and parents from the Tzu Chi School into a colorful landscape mimicking a varied topography. Filled with slopes and peaks, the installation features cans bunched into sculptural forms in various abstract, geometric shapes. "123PollutionSolution" represents an otherworldly utopia constructed with recycled materials, an imaginary outer space village to be inhabited by humans seeking refuge from the polluted Earth. It addresses the effects of totalitarianism, surveillance, quarantine and isolation, and environmental issues of pollution. The work satirically draws attention to the waste generated every day by the seemingly benign act of consuming a beverage. The project is also interactive, as the audience is invited to add cans.

Randy Polumbo’s work explores a dichotomy of art and life experiences. At its core, it is derived from a fascination with objects of boyhood: composites of machine parts, sports objects, toys, and reconstituted found objects from swap meets, fused with a strong feminine and sexual potency. "Galaxy, 2009," a mobile made with rubber chickens, eight balls, and bowling balls mounted on a steel armature, recalls the artist's playful penchant for re-contextualization and homemade experiments, motor-operated objects, and environmental manipulations. Central to both his work and his life are ideas of transformation.

A sphere is connected to a foot pump. As the sphere slowly deflates, it will need help from viewers to re-inject air and re-shape it. The sphere symbolizes our planet while the pump symbolizes human influence on the planet. The piece emphasizes both the endangered situation of our planet and the positive, simple actions the human population can do to reverse the deterioration process.

"Love Shower" is a freestanding, shiny, metallic bubble-blowing globe that dispenses aromatic bubbles when a person moves within the immediate area of the sculpture. The bubble solution is an environmentally safe, non-staining, natural, biodegradable solution that is infused with essence of tuberose, known for its power to induce happiness. The sculpture interacts with the viewer by showering the viewer with some love and giving an uplifting feeling.

"SHIELD/CORAZA" references the strength and individuality of people when coping with major challenges in their lives. Individually, the umbrellas represent the protection created by or around each person. As a whole, it references the unity and power of a group. Thus the SHIELD (CORAZA in Spanish) relates visually to the popular saying “there is strength in numbers,” while at the same time, it alludes to protection, individuality, and unity. During the day, the white, shiny umbrellas will attract visitors to the island. At night, they’re lighted by small, solar-powered LED lights.

The specter of mid-twentieth century domestic life --- the era of the idealized housewife — has been periodically revived by media, politicians and individuals looking for relief from the pressures of the information age. Our culture may be pushing for a return to a simpler time when both women and men knew women’s place in the world. But do we really want to bring back the dead?

"Park Poppa" is a small-scale sculpture intended for placement in parks with lots of kids. The long-term vision is to have it duplicated and made extra large in bronze, so that spectators can interact with the piece over, under, and around in an enveloping and nurturing space in time.

Creating ecologically sustainable art has never been more important then it is today. By retrofitting a vintage 1960s bicycle, I am demonstrating the joys of cycling and recycling, while letting the viewer experience the act of going green. My art form is responding to the given materials, creating a new vehicle of expression. I would like to show a wide audience that traditional forms of craft can be used in exciting and new ways. Knitting is big part of my life and a valuable art-making technique which has been passed down through many generations — yet another example of recycling. It is both empowering and meditative, much like bike riding.

I want to dress the trees of New York City. I plan to sleeve them in my signature style: gravitational contoured black lines painted on bright pink spandex, and wrapped around nature's own sculptures. Inspired by my painting and performance art piece "Peter's Paradox Box," my human dancers evolve past their natural lifespan to actually become trees in the park. The tree stands still; we move. The lifespan of the tree becomes transparent. I turn the tree inside out.

A series of photographs of a life-size cardboard cutout of my extremely vivacious and lively 90-year-old mother (a.k.a. "Moo") in a pose she seems to adopt whenever a camera is turned on her. The photographs reveal the cutout in a variety of different venues and situations, always interacting with people. The photos capture the moment at which my mother, or, her cardboard surrogate, turns on the charm and delights whomever she is with. At the end of the exhibit, the public has the chance to have their own pictures taken with "Moo." These pictures make up the second part of the exhibit.

"The Rebirth of Earth" is a series of light sculptures that explore the peaceful coexistence between organic and inorganic forms in today’s high-tech society. This sculpture is made of light switch boxes, polyurethane industrial tubing, El Wire and stainless steel. There is a juxtaposition of opposites such as warm/cold, solid/translucent, rigid/flexible, open/closed, and organic/inorganic. I utilized a technique to integrate these contradictory materials in a plant- and human-like form that twists, turns, and glows.

A 60' tall orange inflatable cone with a beacon at the top made of a cylindrical video screen.

"This Is Really Echoing Something" ("T.I.R.E.S.") is a site-specific, interactive sculpture installation inspired by Native American longhouses and dream catchers once used by the area's Lenape tribe on Governors Island. The dwelling-like "T.I.R.E.S." will be made of natural, found indigenous materials gathered from our present day urban landscape. The public is encouraged to help construct and add to the piece. Lashing tree branches and various natural and manufactured fibers together with recycled and reused materials, "T.I.R.E.S." empowers us to move forward with a wise statement of reuse, responsibility and joy. The sculpture's design evokes the spirit of the world's native peoples, who stay close to the land, listening and learning from Nature.

I will be collecting interviews of the people visiting Governors Island for Figment, asking “Where are you coming from?” and “Where will you be going once you leave the island?” The responses will be mapped as a web-like structure made out of wire, ropes, and string suspended in trees. My goal in this installation is to distill the routines, recollections, and rituals of the diverse multitude that passes through the particular site during its urban journeys. The rich complexity and uniqueness of our lives is mirrored in the sculpture, embodying the connection between us all at a precise moment in time before we are pulled apart once again into different directions --- the urban reality of separation.

"The True Mirror Palace" is an exhibit that showcases the True Mirror --- the world's only mirror that reflects you as you are, instead of backwards and altered, the way traditional mirrors do. Some surprising results are apparent when you see this new version of you, not the least of which is that you are more alive and present to yourself, whereas the traditional mirror tends to deaden your expressions and sense of how you are! The Palace is made from purple poles, bright blue cross-beams, red and gold pedestals, and red and purple curtains. Flags at the top complete the picture, inviting people to discover something brand new about themselves. Interactivity is the key, with the artist on hand to explain what you are seeing, plus boards where you can both write your own comments about the experience and read some great comments from others.

The oldest mushroom found to date is trapped in amber and over 100 million years old. Iconic depictions of mushrooms have been found in indigenous cultures around the world, from gods shaped from mushrooms in Central America, fertility mushroom forms in Africa, to ancient cave paintings in Siberia. Mushrooms can ward off disease, cure symptoms of biological warfare, send one into hyper-space, and they even taste great in a good sauce. As an artist and novice mycologist, my work tries to enlighten the viewer about the world of fungi, bringing awareness of this organism through mushroom sculptures and spore prints rarely noticed by people, especially in an urban environment. "The Fungi Field" is comprised of mushroom sculptures made out of salvaged materials like wood, metal, construction foams and plastics found on the streets of Brooklyn.

Experience "Joy," an interactive typographic installation. This project is an exploration of two main questions: How can type be more expressive? How can art create instant emotions? "Joy" is a project that makes people interact with type and live the feeling it illustrates. It is an evolving font made out of balloons. As people pop the balloons, random laughs and confetti come out of each balloon. During the experience, the font changes to finally leave the remains of the Joy that happened to the next viewers.

"Bottle Rocket" is a way into the future based on the refuse of the past. An assemblage of recycled materials represents an interplanetary vehicle and its pilot.

A series of seven forms of the Yoshizawa butterfly rise up from apparent chaos into elegant flight. The forms are constructed from photographic prints of the world's battlefields, temples, and people. The message is clear: May peace prevail on earth. The forms illustrate the making of the origami classic, and paper will be available for participants to create their own butterflies, to leave with a message or take with them.

A series of steel, brass, copper, and mixed media sculptures, including an eyeball made of discarded surgical instruments, a steel triceratops skeleton, a copper and brass dragonfly, and a brass and acrylic head.

I am interested in different world cultures and their customs, folk tales, and beliefs about life and death. While looking at a world full of conflicts, I imagined gods from different religions sharing food and music together. Since I started with a painting of gods in a Turkish bath, I have depicted people from different races, religions and cultures gathering together in my paintings, prints, and paper maché sculptures. In this installation, I would like viewers to join a tea party with Buddha, Ganesha, some animals, and an unknown guest.

I propose building a sculpture that resembles a life-sized toppled lookout or surveillance tower made from wood and steel. I have focused on utilitarian structures of conflict, be it at home or overseas, such as towers, barricades, and shelters. These quickly erected, logical structures represent a particular side of humanity: a rigid form that provides dominance of one over another. I am interested in subverting these forms and making them playful and disjointed, thereby creating a landscape of remains from a fictional past that the viewer can explore.

After the critical success of "DV8-Pixels of the Playa," Susan Buck and Archer Huchinson of Disorient brainstorm once again. This time, they showcase 2009 images of our freekin' beautiful community.

A hand-sculpted wooden keyboard (think piano, not computer) that allows users to activate and interact with a text/soundscape. It's a simple, archetypal instrument anybody can play. Because its keys are infinitely reprogrammable, the keyboard serves as a platform for interactive meaning-making. The keyboard is made of poplar, walnut, custom circuitry, and custom-built software.

In this era of Wikipedia, history is no longer written by the victors but by anyone with time on their hands.Come celebrate the Too Much Information Age by adding, deleting, or just drawing silly pictures to create a history of Governors Island that belongs to you, here, now, today.

More than 100 preserved silver burdock leaves suspended from the ceiling, creating a 6 'x 6' column of falling leaves.

"Spun Bulb" is inspired by International Earth Hour, a campaign that encourages people to turn off their lights for an hour to save energy. During the last Earth Hour on March 28th, in a dark shower, I was thinking about what light meant to us, and tried to rethink the light switch in a whole different way. Turning on this light is no longer about brightening and dimming. Instead, in this "Spun Bulb," you will need to spin the light to complete the shape of a light bulb. The brightness is increased by the rotation. It also acts not only a light, but a fan.

This project is a video "sculpture" installation in which two people, a woman and a child, chase each other on a beach projected onto a cardboard house placed on the floor. A big part of the projection spills on the floor and creates a shadow of the house. This project is about finding the balance between independence from and connection with the people around us. At the same time it questions the concept of home and perception. The house is a symbol for the place where we create our intimate connections. Yet, the house casts a big shadow, showing the fragility and transience of our relationships and life in general.

"Wind Waves" is a piece that seeks to visually extend the water’s edge into the ground of Governors Island. As a playful acknowledgment of the fluid dynamics of the water bodies that surround the island, the piece will immerse the public in a sea of waves that will be activated by the wind. By definition, wind waves are created by the wind’s power over a body of water, and range from ripples to rogue waves. Likewise, this installation will be composed of waves of different heights, from flat lines to approximately four-foot tall translucent waves that emerge in a curvilinear fashion. Depending on its height, each "wave" will have to adapt in order to stand upright and playfully engage the wind currents. Made of fabric used for agricultural purposes, "Wind Waves" seeks to be a delicate visual gesture that will respond to the different light qualities throughout the day.

"The 40ºPHI Information Station" is an interactive audience self-esteem builder disguised as an information booth. People approach the 40ºPHI Information Station expecting to pose a question and receive an answer, but instead they find that they are the ones with information collected at the station. This alteration of expectations provokes further engaged investigation, encouraging interaction with the art. Each unique artifact of information is called an Informational Inscription. Informational Inscriptions are collected along the 40ºPHI (latitude) line in New York City, and then transmitted into randomly selected public library books in points along 40ºPHI in Fall of 2009.

“The Stellated Dodecahedron" holds the template of all preceding templates expressed as geometric forms. It is an expression and model of integrated completion and coherent unity of all foundational templates. The Stellated Dodecahedron stimulates us to evolve into self-realized, conscious awareness with an open heart and high levels of impeccability, self-responsibility, and integrity. It also helps us integrate and harmonize a true group unity.

Twenty-nine characters in Copperplate Bold, cut out of scavenged white melamine-coated particle board, spell "YOUR PARTICIPATION IS REQUESTED." Laid out on the grass, next to a building, or along the water, they frame the events of the day and invite participation: loop the text around, spell something new, transport the letters to another part of the island. Your participation is requested!

This colorful and whimsical installation celebrates the beauty of nature. Giant flowers and mushrooms invite your eyes and imagination to explore their secret world. See more at: www.gregoryskolozdra.com

I strive to make art that plays a more active role. Literally growing before the viewer, "things which perish if not for the using" depicts specific moments that force the viewer into the realization he or she is not looking at the same piece seen yesterday. This piece is my attempt to give plants and animals the opportunity to speak, and people the chance to observe things they most likely overlook every day. In the midst of our fast food living, I want those who see my work to simply pause for a moment. The stems crawl over hair, fruit rots or is eaten, and grass wilts.

During my travels around the world, whenever I see huge chunks missing from mountains as if they were bitten off, or mining towns dyed with the mineral they mine, I think of the ceramic studio and the glaze room, and ponder the materials in art that we all learn with, use and too often discard. Every semester there are tons of leftover finished pieces that are thrown away; meanwhile, they are made from some of the earth’s most precious minerals. These finished ceramic scraps, when tied together with other discarded ropes and plastics found in the garbage of New York City’s art schools, represent the meaning of green living and true recycling. Not enough of the world thinks about the origin of life’s materials and how our lifestyle really changes the earth.

"Waterscape," constructed with PVC tube and wires, references the seascape of Governors Island and the Atlantic Ocean. This piece is part of a series of sculptural installations that mix the inspiration of Governors Island's natural landscape with the geometrical shapes of the man-made world. My focus is to construct a site-specific sculptural installation that engages Governors Island's surroundings, and creates an environment that could reference a distant nostalgic notion of the bygone, like my hometown, a seascape, a landscape, an imaginary place of wonder, or a futuristic city. I assemble industrial and everyday-life materials, elaborating on the viewer’s perceptions of them and transforming the mundane into the extraordinary.

Discarding a non-biodegradable product is not just an environmental harm, it is a waste of a highly manufactured product with great potential in fulfilling alternative and often unintentional purposes. As Buckminster Fuller put it, “Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting.” Our installation aims to bring awareness to this ideology by utilizing a commonly discarded (and currently non-recyclable, under NYC’s recycling program) item to form a sculpture that is beautifully simplistic and aesthetically reminiscent of geometric patterns found in nature.

"Welcome Home," a post-battle reenactment by artist Anna Lise Jensen, is an intimate, performative installation that mirrors and reenacts some of the services offered by a veteran's center in Brooklyn. A visitor can choose to experience one of her four reenactments, through one-to-one conversations with a counselor, an IAVA member, a community organizer, or the artist herself as the founder of the Vets & Pets program. Care packages and food are offered as part of the process. The artist will also bring her Vet Center Scrapbook to Governors Island, so participants can use some of its pages to sign up for conversations and write down answers to the question, "What do you want to find when you come home?" Answer can be anonymous or not, and will subsequently be installed on four empty walls at the Brooklyn Vet Center, along with answers from staff, clients, and visitors.

"Unchurned" is a participatory installation that draws upon specific aspects of traditional Hindu customs, emphasizing Nature’s cyclical processes. Participants are invited to join in the creation of a rangoli drawing, filling in the colors by hand with rangoli powder and encircling a central ghee entity. Individuals will then also present offerings to the entity as it slowly transforms throughout the duration of the event. www.roshanithakore.com.

"Living Lawn Furniture Project" is a set of earth-integrated sculptures intended to be installed early on Governors Island and morph with the environment. Covered with local moss and other lawn substrates, the pair of seats will provide space for a tete-a-tete with another participant visitor, raising awareness of the island's environment in the process.

As a volunteer SAT tutor through New York Cares, I was generously supplied with SAT materials donated by Kaplan to help serve disadvantaged teens in the Lower East Side, Harlem, and SoHo. I had a fabulous time with my fellow tutors, my students, and the non-profit staff members, all of whom put in so much effort to make this program such a resounding success. It is in the spirit of volunteerism, of making free (and true) education available to all, that I offer my SAT notes for the year as an installation piece at Figment.

"Marine Trio" is a set of wind-powered musical instruments that sing to themselves on the waterfront outside Castle Williams.

"Transformation Tree" will have 50 small chrysalis forms hanging in its branches.

My piece deals with letting go of the belief that one needs to control inner experiences, and dissolving the fear of the unknown or suppressed parts of the psyche by helping one realize that the exploration of one’s wounds is the most direct path to healing and for continued growth. It is comprised of thin layers of liquid latex draped on rope in a spiral. The latex represents what we have cast off through this growth, while the placement of it in a spiral suggests the ongoing exploration and numerous cycles we experience in life. My project is a continuation of a series of sculpture/installations that explore the ideas of personal transformation and inner growth.

"Inflatapus" is a series of inflatable tentacles that shoot bubbles.

Industrial parts that depict nature.

"Greenway," a whimsical bicycle wheel sculpture, has a lit base and wheel.

"Water Project NY" is a series of five, one-day performances fusing dance with a scientific message about water ecology and greenwashing. It is a collaboration between multidisciplinary artist Floanne Ankah and Piotr Mirowski, a computer research scientist and Ph.D. student at NYU who has conducted water-related science workshops for high-schoolers. The project will take place in summer 2009 and targets a New York City audience in public spaces. The first chapter of the project, performed on Governors Island, engages the public about water pollution, treatment, and the quality of drinking water.

"Ghost Net" is a giant fishing net made out of recycled plastics. The piece comments on overfishing and the depletion of our oceans and rivers, and on the masses of abandoned and lost nets that cause damage to wildlife and coral reefs. Examining the relationship between nature and synthetics, "Ghost Net" continues the dialogue established by many artists about recycled art, minimal art, soft sculpture, pattern, and repetition.

There is an intimacy with the waves that kayakers experience. Waves sneak up behind us or slam us from the side. The waves march in rows, and by watching them I can anticipate what they will do when they reach me. I don’t like paddling in calm, flat water. I like the bouncy feeling of flying on the waves. These are the waves of my metal-clad, tortured, plywood reliefs.

"Negotiation of Space" on Governors Island involves the public as well as fellow twins. Paths will be created and leads followed. This exploration is new to us, unfolding in real time. We will draw on elements that intrigue us and others. When meeting twins for the first time, a number of questions usually arise. We intend to explore questions in a various ways, including: • An hourly game show, "Be My Twin!" Contestants are challenged to step into the place of my twin and answer as her. If they get five out of ten questions right, they win a prize. • Call for Twins We want as many twins as possible to be photographed in return for one question about their Negotiation of Space. • Question Book People write questions, thoughts, or opinions for us, and we will respond through our blog.

the work is cut reflective plastic on aluminum mounted on standard sign posts. these sign posts will be driven into the ground which will take up only a 2" area. there are 4 signs in all.

The purpose of "HiveMind" is to educate and to inspire more public focus on the honeybee. Bee symbolism is pervasive, not only as an ideal structure of societal organization, but as an emblem of industry, cooperation, and mutual aid. The honeybee is also a symbol of surrendering ego in order to allow creative flow that not only nourishes the individual but the community, helping in ensure its very survival.

Designed in the shape of a three-dimensional wooden eye facing the sky, the open-air "Temple of Truth" is intended as a place of exploration, contemplation, mourning, and personal expression. The curving design of the sculpture encourages visitors to walk through the heart of the eye, sit down at its center, and interact with the Temple’s structure by leaving contributions of art, messages, and other ephemera on its wooden walls.

Evocative of a large scale, three-dimensional infinity sign, "Rhythm & Rest" is an exploration of the interruption and continuation of space. The structure is made out of oak with subtle steel reinforcements for durability. Connecting the sides of the oak frames are oak wooden dowels, essentially mimicking the way a ladder works if it were laid down on its side. The ‘‘rungs’’ are bunched together to create a comfortable seating area. As you moved up the curve, the rungs spread out, allowing for light and shadow to interplay depending on where you sit. People are encouraged to sit, recline, and explore the piece at will.

A mystical creature crafted entirely from furniture left on Brooklyn’s sidewalks on trash night, "Discarded" deals with the evolution of objects: from trees to raw materials to commodities to household items to trash to art. By creating a new and beautiful use for objects that have been discarded as useless, this piece blurs the borders between trash and art, scavenging and craftsmanship. The piece challenges our rampant "consume and discard" mentality, proposing instead a careful consideration of purchasing, ownership and the ecological consequences of generating trash.

Jesse Walker and LIVING come together for the summer of 2009 to contemplate life and set a scenario on Governors Island where others may join them on their explorative journey. The set comprises a carefully cut-out, plywood rendition of the Hollywood sign, but with the question ‘‘LIVING?’’ One of Jesse’s large silhouette figures joins the sign. Jesse’s work brings together wide open spaces and simple iconic figures. LIVING is a new pop-up phenomenon that emerged with the fall of the economic empire and the shockwaves of the global recession, a company born with the mission of propagating free will and the fulfillment of dreams. Unlike companies before it that failed in their pursuit of capital wealth, LIVING was driven by the intent to generate the wealth of life experience.

MORE (the Ministry Of Random Events) is an arts collective from Australia. For their first arts installation in the United States, MORE will utilize approximately 20 to 30 plastic industrial drums and assorted percussive implements, to be played by members of the public using wooden dowels with the ends wrapped in material.

This installation involves two primary components: mirrors on yokes and a fragmented reflective object. By aiming one or many of the mirrors at the fragmented object, viewers activate the sculpture with sunlight, causing moving reflections to appear in the shaded area around the fragmented object.

"The Agony of Man" is a 1,200 pound, larger than life, anatomically correct rendition of the human form built entirely out of steel scrap. Some of the components include an I-beam, railroad track, rebar, boilers, New York City garbage cans, and bits from road resurfacing equipment. The eye/zygoma bone is salvaged from the original park benches at Madison Square Park. The ribs are salvaged from the original concrete island of Worth Square, where all the water from upstate New York comes to lower Manhattan. The inner thigh muscle, or sartorius, is made from an extinct type of rebar salvaged from the original foundation of the Union Square subway station. Some of New York’s construction history can be found in the construction of "The Agony of Man."

The Flower Pedal is a bicycle and trailer decorated with giant flowers and grass. It is a playful and ironic attempt to increase our awareness of the importance and beauty of nature, and the ecological and health benefits of bicycling. See more at: www.gregoryskolozdra.com

FIGMENT organizers will be conducting a session each day after the 11 a.m. ferry lands on Governor's Island to provide interested members of the press and public with background on FIGMENT and highlights of the day's activities. FIGMENT organizers and artists will be available at each session for interviews and questions.

Erik will begin with an overview of some participatory art projects and thoughts on the value of collaborative art in general, followed by an explanation of why traffic cone viewing is a valid aesthetic practice. The lecture will conclude with discussion of some collaborative traffic cone-related new media works in progress.

Burning Man Founder and Director Larry Harvey discusses how the principles upon which Burning Man was founded—the power of community, collaboration, radical self-reliance, and the gift economy—are enjoying a resurgent relevance in the new economy.

A common story often told by commentators about the emergence of internet culture is that it opened unprecedented new avenues for anyone to distribute content, remix, and to gain public notoriety. This was argued to be more broadly participatory than earlier models of mainstream media production in TV, print, and radio. How valid is this story of democratization? How broadly participatory has our culture become with the rise of the internet? Taking a crash course tour of the world of memes, internet celebrities and web culture, this lecture will take a realistic assessment. Then, taking that analysis, it will discuss how current trends might threaten the vibrant cultural ecosystem of the web into the future. It will also meditate on how we might collectively defend that universe, preserving participation and broad contributions.

Wooster Collective is interested in how we alter and adjust public space to make it more “livable” and creative. That first moment when you notice a stencil on the pavement, a poster wheatpasted to the wall, or a metal sculpture attached to a street sign, you suddenly become transported into another world—a vibrant subculture that eradicates the monotony of daily life. Your commute to work or that short trip to the store now becomes an adventure as you search for creativity in unexpected places. The artist's motivation is to beautify buildings and to create something truly special. Wooster Collective will explore what makes street art so infectious and show some interesting examples of street art from around the world.

LoVid will present aspects of their participatory installations and performances, Wirefull Interventions. These Interventions highlight physical connections between human bodies and electronics as well as connections between people in the networked/virtual era. Wirefull Interventions continues LoVid's work with custom-made electronics in live video installations, performances, and objects. We use the term "wirefull" to discuss our ideas and aesthetics. This work exposes and expands on the processes that comprise and create communications technology. It comments on an industrial society where the details and workings of widely used, popular public technology are becoming increasingly hidden, private, and wireless. Wirefull directly refers to our use of electrical wire. This physical conduit for electricity symbolizes other conduits, including veins and arteries that carry nutrients for the body, and invisible conduits of information such as language.

Sal Randolph, a social artist who gives away money, explores the interactions provoked by these gifts through her ongoing project, Free Money. In her recent work, she has left cash in public spaces, given it to volunteer distributors, given away stacks of dollar bills at galleries and art fairs, and met with people one on one in cafés, offering them both money and a choice. In her talk she will tell the story of the Free Money project, seek out volunteer distributors, and discuss some of the consequences of looking at art as an experience rather than as an object. Free Money distributions have recently taken place at 16 Beaver Street, Creative Time’s Democracy in America, the LIVE Biennale, and the Conflux Festival. Randolph's work has also been seen in solo and group shows at Roda Sten in Gothenburg, Sweden, La Box in Bourges, France and Glowlab in New York.

Gotham Guide is New York's first multimedia tour using QR (Quick Response) code technology to add a contextual layer of information on top of Manhattan's city streets. Anyone with a QR reader-enabled mobile phone can snap a picture of a Gotham Guide code, which then automatically redirects the user to recorded audio, video clips, or webpage snippets that tell more about the user's current location and the surrounding buildings. Users can download free software to participate from the Gotham Guide website, where they will also obtain a map of New York with the locations of the QR codes highlighted. Gotham Guide gives people the opportunity to serendipitously discover new things about the buildings they pass each day and for tourists to use advances in mobile technology to interact with the city in a brand new way.

Andrzej Liguz co-founded the Australian branch of the Mutoid Waste Co. in Melbourne in 1990, and subsequently started Imagineer and Regeneration before founding MORE (Ministry Of Random Events) in Sydney in 1996. MORE built a series of large sculptures from recycled materials and worked with the MORE Drums, which are part of this year's FIGMENT, on Reclaim The Streets. He will present a talk and slide show on sculptures constructed by MORE in Australia as well as the concept behind the MORE Drums. Some of the sculptures he will discuss include The Recycle, an interactive 30’ x 20’ bicycle which stands at the entrance to the largest recycling center in the southern hemisphere; the Recyco Dragon, a 20’ long fire breathing dragon made from car hoods on Bondi Beach; and the Garbo Man, a 20’ tall garbo man sweeping up a car at one of Sydney’s busiest traffic intersections.

Dance Parade is a charity whose mission is to promote dance as an expressive and unifying art form by showcasing all forms of dance, educating the general public about the opportunities to experience dance, and celebrating diversity of dance in New York City by sponsoring a yearly city-wide dance parade and dance festival.

What's wrong with advertising? Steve Lambert makes the case with a fast moving lecture that's as funny as it is informative. Steve's anarchist/sociologist take on how modern, non-stop persuasive messages have distorted and altered our culture will leave you plenty to ponder on the ferry ride home. Steve Lambert recently made international news with the The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, lead developer of Add-Art (a Firefox addon that replaces online advertising with art) and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab, and the Yes Men. Lambert has appeared live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on in the New York Times, Harper’s, The Believer, Good, Dwell, and Newsweek. He is a Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, and teaches at Parsons and Hunter College.

Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere has executed more than 80 missions involving thousands of undercover agents. In 2009, Charlie Todd and Alex Scordelis co-authored CAUSING A SCENE (HarperCollins), a book about the group's infamous exploits. Improv Everywhere is based in New York City.

Jeff will present several projects in which he plays with the relatively new phenomenon of "crowdsourcing," how it can be used in a creative practice, and the moral issues that he has faced in the process. The first project is Invisible Threads, in which Jeff hired Second Life avatars to work in a jeans sweatshop to make real jeans for real customers. Second, in Dirt Party, he crowdsourced the task of digging up "dirt" about party-goers from the Internet in order to project it back at them in playfully reconstructed creations.  Finally, in a new project, Laborers of Love, customers pay workers on the crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk to make a custom fantasy pornographic image, and then watch as it is assembled.

The Towel is a model airplane built from scratch out of foam, trash, $100 worth of parts, and three hours of effort. Its primary goal is to channel everyone's inner eight year old. It also serves as the foundation for an excellent night flier and has great repairability and crash tolerance. We will present the Towel, possibly build some parts, and then go outside and fly it. With conditions permitting, we will let other people fly the Towel as well.

We are a global collaborative of thirty artists who mail work to each other and collaborate on pieces. Usually three different artists work on each piece. We also hold workshops in New York. Our work was exhibited last year at ABC No Rio's "Ides of March" collaborative show. We would like to have collaborations with the public in the space allocated to us at FIGMENT and have local artists contribute to new works.

The Kostume Kult returns to FIGMENT with a costume giveaway and makeup station.

A collaboration of sculptural installation, live dance and theatrical performance, acoustic music, on-the-scene painting, and visual art.

Three days of free electronic dance music on the grass of Governors Island, New York City, facing the Statue of Liberty. Friday June 12, 2009 - 12 Noon-5PM techno, trance Guillaume (Disorient) Mic Rage (Kostume Kult) Saturday June 13, 2009 - 11AM-7PM deep house day Friar Tuck (Disorient) The Bass (Disorient) Been Jammin' (Gnome) Down Deep (downdeepnyc.com) Sunday June 14, 2009 - 11AM-7PM ecstatic island house & techno 11:00 Jason BK (Konundrum Records) 1:30 Reda Briki (Disorient) 3:00 Bellydance performance by Alchemy Tribal Collective 3:15 DJ Balls (Disorient) 4:45 Arrow Chrome (Disorient) Drop by AKAirways Inflatapus & Lady Octobubble by Archer's Vision

The Fairytale Experiment is a troupe of fairies and artists who create and explore modern fairytales in many mediums, from theater and performance to art, music, costumes, dance and more.

A showcase of brilliant dance music!

Down the Rabbit Hole What's on the other side of the Rabbit Hole? Hop in and find out! Wander through the forest maze, join the Mad Hatter for a tea party, and see what awaits you at the end of your journey.

Fri: throughout the day: Interplanetary Exploration: an adventure into your sensual universe. A combination of meditation and massage using a variety of items to stimulate each of your 5 senses! Sat: Throughout the day: Interplanetary Exploration 1:00 - 2:30pm: ZenSensational Walk... Will be an interactive meditative walk through the land of the sensuously stimulating Figment. Walk will last approximately 1.5 hours. It will start with a special sound meditation process that will induce a higher awareness of the self and the surrounding environment. The group will then leave and follow as a group wandering around the enchanted Figment land being nourished by the amazing sights, sounds, smells, tactile sensations and even tastes that the that Figment provides. The Walk will end up back at the Gelato! camp. A higher state of awareness in the participants 5 or more senses will occur. This will also transport them to a high creative state. The group is free to then process their experience with the group verbally and with art materials available. 3:00pm Blind Mute Walk... Similar to Zensensational walk, but with an added twist. This walk will be done in pairs: One person will be blindfolded, the other can't speak. Sun: Same schedule as Sat

In February of 2007, Lou Auguste and Sinton Vignos rented an art space at 451 Grand in Brooklyn. Their idea was to spread the idea of environmental consciousness through art. Together they went through local dumpsters collecting wood and old paint cans. They created a canvas from the found wood and invited local street artists for a month long paint jam. The project was recreated outdoors for the first time in 2008 at Figment. This year's line up features over 20 of New York's top street artists including the ELC crew, Destroy and Rebuild, Robots Will Kill, Cake, and Peru Ana Ana Peru.