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Collaborating with the Enemy LEA Magazine Article

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Nitrocellulose created from gunpowder de-nitration. Courtesy of the artist

LEA Volume 17 Issue 1
Senior Editor for this issue: Lanfranco Aceti

Reference: Shane Mecklenburger, “Collaborating with the Enemy,” ed. Lanfranco Aceti, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (Mish Mash) 17, no. 1 (2011): 156-171.

Collaborating with the Enemy
by Shane Mecklenburger
Article DOI: 10.5900/SU_9781906897116_2011.17(1)_156

Cost of Opportunity is a project that creates a series of diamonds as artworks. The Gunpowder Diamond will be produced entirely from carbon found in .223 Caliber assault rile ammunition.The gunpowder is safely neutralized in a laboratory and the carbon it contains is isolated. Future proposed art-diamonds include the Road-kill Diamond from Nine-Banded Armadillos killed on Texas thoroughfares and the Superman Diamond from a 1983 cellulose acetate film print of Superman III (wherein Superman crushes a lump of coal into a diamond). A monetary value for each diamond is to be determined at a live auction, generating funds for future diamonds in an ongoing series of stones made from various culturally charged materials. The project explores personal and cultural valuation, materiality, and the way market pressures have altered the definition and function of art. Multiple attempts to secure research funding reveal the limits of interdisciplinarity and institutional aesthetics, inspiring the artist, Shane Mecklenburger, to steal the diamond once exhibited, a plan he has yet to reveal to his collaborator.

Full article is available for download as a pdf at the bottom of the page.

The first issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is published on line as free PDF but will also be rolled out as Amazon Print on Demand and will be available on iTunes, iPad, Kindle and other e-publishing outlets. As the Mish Mash issue becomes available on the different platforms we will send out announcements via LEA’s mailing list and through LEA’s social networks. To view the full list of articles in the table of content please click here.

Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, The MIT Press. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the collaboration of the Boston Children’s Chorus, and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.