Shu Lea Cheang

September 27–29, 2002
Citywide
Images courtesy of Creative Time

Shu Lea Cheang’s Garlic=Rich Air was an interactive online project that anticipated the year 2030 as a postcapitalist society where the global economy and currencies have collapsed and network media has nearly crashed. In this future world, organic garlic is the new social currency–bought, sold, and traded to establish a new, free media trading system. Garlic=Rich Air set forth a monetary relationship between URL information and virtual garlic. Visitors were invited to participate online by submitting various URL addresses in return for virtual garlic, or “G,” as Cheang put it. At the close of the G-Mart, virtual “G” was cashed in for real garlic; a commodity that is desired and wholly revered in the year 2030.

In order to implement this exchange of virtual and real commodities ten thousand garlic plants grown in upstate New York (cultivated by organic farmer Tovey Halleck in the span of ten years and harvested by generations of old and new media makers, according to the project’s narrative) were gathered in the summer of 2002. The garlic harvest was then trucked to New York City where participants could exchange virtual garlic credits (i.e. digital bytes, bandwidth, domains, URLs, networks, systems, and software) for real farm-grown organic garlic.

Garlic=Rich Air was the second and third phase of St(r)eaming the Fields, a field harvesting and public network project conceived by Shu Lea Cheang with funding provided by the Challenge to the Field Award from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund for Independent Media.