Garlic=Rich Air



Shu Lea Cheang


September 1, 2002
Web Project/ Garlic Truck in locations throughout Manhattan
Images courtesy of Creative Time

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 Lyn Blumenthal memorial fund for independent media.

In a fictional ‘after the crash’ scenario, organic garlic was ordained as a new social currency, serving as ‘credito’ for the global shared network in common exchange. 10,000 garlic plants, cultivated by organic farmer Tovey Halleck in the span of 10 years in upstate New York, were harvested by generations of old and new media makers in the summer of 2002. In this garlic credito trading system, the market denominators include digital bytes, bandwidth, domains, URLs, network, system and software. On September 27-29 garlic was trucked into the streets of New York City. This garlic was then traded for wireless networks. "We claim NYC wireless nodes as mobile urban farm stands for online and onsite trading activities in the public spaces," boasted the artists.