Tonight we gather in the Lenape Hulking, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their territorial, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors, and future generations, and in acknowledging as a school that Columbia, like New York City and the United States as a nation, was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples. Columbia GSAP is committed to addressing the deep history of erasure of Indigenous knowledge in the professions of the built environment generally, and in the Western tradition of architectural education specifically. With this, GSAP commits to confronting these institutional legacies as agents of colonialism and to honoring Indigenous knowledge in its curriculum. So tonight I have the distinct pleasure of introducing our guest speaker, Sean Connolly. Sean Connolly is a very smart person, and intimidatingly so. They describe themselves as a geomancer from Honolulu, Hawaii. Geomancer. Now I must admit that this is a word that I needed to look up. Geomancy defined as divination by means of figures or lines or geographic features. So the notion of geography then I think is certainly apropos to Sean's work as it cuts across different geographies and scales of the cultural landscape and cultural production, including their work as an artist, sculptor, design theorist, and grassroots architectural historian. Sean Connolly is an expert witness, a witness and an observer who brings their personal testimony to share with others. As a next generation activist driven design social practitioner working to repair the impacts of settler colonialism militarization and climate change today. Sean works to maintain an aesthetic and egalitarian vision to help advance the recovery of native, oceanic, and holographic futures with a focus that is ecological, economic, and technological and scope. From building to cosmos, Sean approaches material, information, energy, and time as biocultural and planetary entities that we have evolved to honor and replicate. Sean Connolly is transdisciplinary, fluid among the realms of architecture, landscape, infrastructure, and art. His work includes new media, land art, film, photography, design, data analysis, social practice, and more. Sean Connolly is a ghost in the field. Working in the outliers of the profession, they collaborate with those willing to legitimately intervene and address the complexities of indigenous futures for Hawaii. Sean's interest strives to connect community in resisting ways of knowing that oppose or that oppress indigenous futures. Sean incorporated after oceanic to represent their artistic social practice emerging to assist in the contemporary recovery of indigenous systems as the basis for an ecological revolution in architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Sean also co-produces Hawaii nonlinear whose mission is to create art and architecture for Aina. Sean co-founded and co-directs Hawaii nonlinear in collaboration with Dominic Leon of Leon Leon. Sean is a queer, diasporic, white passing person of color for Pacific Islander, American, local settler, grandchild of immigrants raised in a Ilocano Hawaiian family. Sean's studio-driven works include theoretical new media, open access research anthology exhibited as anti-essays such as Hawaii Futures, a virtual intervention on the island urbanism, Africa Pacific, an architectural theory of the oceanic, Alavai Centennial Memorial Project, which is a hypothetical simulation of Waikiki, Oahu 2450, the first forensic 3D mapping of the United States militarization of the island Oahu from 1898 to the present, which is currently on exhibit in Copenhagen. Is that the project? Parts of it, yes. Curated works explore and exhibit issues of material, sky ground information, space and flow, reference, climate and energy, and time, phantasmic and holographic. Current illustrations include a prominent public sculpture at the Thomas Square Commission by the city and County of Honolulu Arts Commission, which is on exhibit for a few more days as part of the Hawaii Triennial. Past installations include sculptures exhibited at the Honolulu Museum of Art, also in San Francisco and at the Akron Art Museum in Ohio. There's many, much, much more I could say, but let me certainly say that academically Sean is currently an adjunct assistant professor here at GSAP, where Sean taught last summer with Dominic Leong and currently this semester, Sean and Dominic and Hawaii nonlinear are supporting my studio, the space of water, water, coloniality and indigeneity with their platform Hawaii nonlinear. Previously Sean has served as visiting lecturer at MIT and Sean has taught and lectured at University of Hawaii, Harvard GSD. Sean has also served as a critic for design courses at UT Austin, University of Oregon, School of Architecture and Environment, the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, University of New Mexico, School of Architecture and Planning and much more. Sean holds a doctorate in architecture from the University of Hawaii and a master's in design from the Harvard GSD. So finally, and again, Sean is a very smart person, but also disarmingly so, and someone with whom it has been a pleasure to collaborate this semester. So without further delay, I present to you Sean Connelly. Thanks Mario. Thank you Mario. See here. Hello everyone. Wow, that's a great introduction. Thank you Mario. It's been a pleasure to get to know you over the past couple of months with your studio in Hawaii. I also want to thank Dominic Lyong and Chris Lyong for originally inviting me into the Columbia community back in 2020 during the pandemic. I was often Honolulu doing my thing and one email led to another and now I'm here today. So yeah, I'm incredibly humbled to be here, especially in person. I'm almost scared to suddenly not be behind Zoom facade. So yeah, we'll see how it goes. For today, let's see my title slide. Oh, I have two screens here. There we go. For today, I'm going to be sharing about my art practice. I identify as an artist, even though my background is in architecture. Sometimes I identify as an artist dismantling architecture only because I still believe in the power of architecture to change the world. So yeah, I had a lot of fun putting this presentation that I'm going to be showing you today. It was a lot of fun to put together. It was also very stressful because it's always nerve wracking to have to remember work that you've done. And so in terms of the duration of the work I'm going to be showing, it's not chronological, but it's selected works between 2009 and 2021. That has been primarily based in Honolulu, Hawaii, and that originally started off as architectural but really found a place in art. So there's so many things to talk about, but yeah, I'm really looking forward to the conversation at the end. What else is there that I wanted to mention? Usually when I give these kinds of presentations, it feels like the last time that I'll ever have a chance to speak. And so I sort of imagine myself as a spear thrower with a message to deliver. But for today, I wanted to take a moment to really just focus a little bit more on the work. We'll see how that goes. And yeah, I had a whole like acknowledgments being set up, but I whittled it down because I felt it would be important to leave more time for the conversation at the end. But because I am from Hawaii and I'm speaking by proxy, I did want to acknowledge one thing or two things actually. First are to acknowledge the students of this institution and of institutions, architectural institutions all around, especially those who have taken their studies as more than just a chance to learn architecture, but a chance to take the idea of architecture the next level by holding their administrations accountable for social justice issues, diversity, equity inclusion, etc. I always credit students, or at least in my experience, it's always the student body who really is at the forefront of holding their educations accountable to the sort of futures that we all want to achieve. But the older you get, the more difficult things become and so we all honor the idea of optimism. And with that idea of optimism, I'm super optimistic that in the future we will have more representation of native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the institutions of architecture. I wanted to take a moment for everybody to just sort of think about all the native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students who are perhaps not studying architecture. Maybe they didn't get into a program or they couldn't afford it or they just didn't know that they should apply for architecture. I've actually met a lot of people who did their studies and then they learned about what architecture is. According to a report by the ACSA, where are my people, Asian American native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders in architecture? Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students are generally not represented in the student bodies of 73% of NAAB accredited programs and only 27% of NAAB accredited schools have one or more native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders in their programs. And in a sample of 800 architectural faculty at NAAB accredited schools of architecture, there may only be one native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander faculty member. And so that's just to quote some statistics and to sort of also as an alumni of the University of Hawaii School of Architecture, which is a state school, and the University of Hawaii is a land grant university, the program still also has yet to have a native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander on faculty.  And so if there's anything that I could start off with an acknowledgement, it's that. And if my presentation were to end at this next moment, I just need everybody to believe that in the future, if we work towards it, every high level institution of architecture, Columbia, Harvard, MIT name it all, that everybody should have some kind of endowed visiting professors professorship to support native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders in design, so that we can actively increase enrollment of native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders in architecture. Let's say $2.5 million per endowed position to create opportunities that uplift and support, you know, not just because they're native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders, but because in the communities of native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, we desperately need architecture. We desperately need architecture to help us reshape and rebuild the built environment, which has essentially across the in Hawaii and the Pacific has been destroyed by a long history of militarism, US militarism, US imperialism, and just hundreds of years of colonialism. Okay, so I have to remind myself to keep clicking because I had this beautiful like background to play, but I'm going to move past that. Let's see. Okay, so quickly to frame some of the conversation today on some questions to keep in mind. What does it mean to be radical? What does it mean to be new? What does it mean to have responsibility? And between the lines, what histories do architects today inherit and what histories do architects still ignore are sort of like things I have in the back of my mind putting this together. For me, I, you know, these are sort of three resources that I like live by. You know, I started studying architecture in 2003 and was radicalized, I think, through my architectural studies, but adjacent to it. It wasn't actually architecture that radicalized me. It was being in a community of other scholars in, you know, post colonial literature studies, political science, Hawaiian studies, and then also being a part of a family that was pretty activist oriented in terms of their long term interest in conservation issues, restoring Hawaiian ecosystems. And so the Hawaiian Dictionary, America, is just such a cornerstone of the Cultural Renaissance in Hawaii. Hanani K. Trask, who passed away last year. This is her famous book Feminative Daughter, where she really sort of pioneered the bravery and this idea of what it means to be radical and fearless. And then in the center, an image of the ahupua, which we will get into as the presentation goes. Architecture for Aina. Architecture, what is architecture? I like to think about it as common sense and constant observation. And Aina is the Hawaiian word for land or that which feeds. The key word here is land. And I think the cultural difference to sort of contend with here is what land actually is. Land is not necessarily, land doesn't necessarily end at the ocean or the sky. It's all interconnected in the Pacific worldview. As with many other sort of indigenous worldviews, this idea of continuity of resources that support us versus land as a commodity. So in terms of the work that I'm going to show now, whenever it's always difficult to apply for fellowships or grants because, which I normally don't necessarily get them, partially because the work is kind of confusing because it's like a video or it's a sculpture or it's some kind of other thing. But for me, what ties it all together is an architectural methodology, even though I'm practicing as an artist, maybe because everything that you might, that you'll see in this presentation has been run through by no. I am constantly using ArcGIS as a way to access or complicate information. And so, yeah, that's where I'll sort of give some background to the continuity. I'm going to start with this image of Lady Columbia. And for those of you who know what this image is, you're probably thinking, oh no, not the Lady Columbia painting at Columbia University. But for those who might not be familiar with this painting, I guess, of 1872 representing American progress and a manifest destiny and it's the sort of infamous image of Lady Columbia carrying the telegraph cable from the east coast to the west coast of North America. And I've seen this reference in so many different presentations, but to me the question to ask is, well, where does Lady Columbia end up? And you'd be surprised that she ends up to get a tan in Honolulu, Hawaii. This here is an image of the Ilani Palace, which is the only royal palace built within the area that's today referred to as the United States. Hawaii is not the United States. It was annexed by the United States illegally in 1898. And this image here is of the palace, which was built in between 1879 and 1881 or 83. And then it was the first, it had electricity before the White House. So it was a really advanced building and it's the only kind of its architecture that exists in the world, despite having sort of an interesting resemblance to sort of European or Western style of the time. King Kalakaua was the architect who designed this after his visit to the White House and King Kalakaua was the first state, head of state to visit the White House. So yeah, Lady Columbia ends up in Honolulu, Hawaii and there's a statue of her at the National Cemetery of the Pacific, which is where 63,000, 43 or 63,000 veterans are buried. And so this is the statue of Lady Columbia. When she gets to Hawaii, she trades in her telegraph cable for an olive branch.  We could go on and on in terms of like all the details of what the olive branch represents in terms of bringing peace, but also symbolizing victory. And so victory has been obtained by America in their annexation of Hawaii and their domination of the Pacific. There's the, which, you know, a map of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as Punchbowl and the triangulation of the statue of Lady Columbia with the statue of McKinley and the Hawaii State Capitol in Honolulu. This is all part of the project. This is a photograph of the wall map for this project learning from Le Ahe. Le Ahe is the name of the Hawaii's most famous landmark, Diamond Head, shown here from the front. The project is a testimony for justice advancing architecture. And it plays along, it's a sort of a play on a monument of its own form, the book Learning from Las Vegas.  But this one I think is actually significant because all this time on the cover of this book that for what it's worth has played such a prominent role in architectural history and theory is the billboard of Tanya, which prominently says can Hawaiian with Tanya. And so essentially this is Lady Columbia's great-granddaughter, perhaps, out there in Las Vegas. And so this installation, which was sort of the coming out for Hawaiian online year, was installed at Coal Gallery during the towards the end of the pandemic. It was still locked down in 2021 in Honolulu, so it was a quiet show. But the sculptural exercise here was to essentially reenact the image, this image that Miss Scott Brown sort of created, directed, she directed the image on the cover of the book. The book has sentimental value for me because it was one of the first sort of architectural books I read, but it was back in like 2003, 2004. And it took years before I realized like, oh wait a minute, like I see the word Hawaiian on here. And that was maybe around 2012. And then I actually got to meet the Miss Scott Brown in 2015, but then it wasn't until 2020 that I actually followed back up and had an interview and got the permission to reproduce the image as a billboard. And so in terms of the technical production, she, Denise Scott Brown provided the original, a scan of the original photograph, which I then brought into Rhino to render at full scale, and then scale down. This is about half scale model of the full billboard. That was exhibited in Honolulu.co gallery. There's Leahi on the back corner there, also known as Diamondhead. And it's gone through several name changes. It's a traditional indigenous Hawaiian name is Leahi. But then it became known as Diamondhead Military Reservation and is now known as the Diamondhead State Monument. In the way that the billboard is set on the backdrop of Las Vegas, this billboard has a backdrop of Honolulu urbanism, specifically a map of the coastal militarization, the historic coastal militarization of Oahu, which we'll get a little bit more into with the next project. It goes a lot slower than I thought, but I'm going to click next. So yeah, there's the billboard. There's a behind the scenes of the... So yeah, in terms of this idea of what is urbanism, what is US urbanism in a place like Hawaii, the idea that was driving the show had to do with what the billboard represents in terms of what is urbanism. And so urbanism is US imperialism, the objectification of land, the tourism of the idea of tanning, the ideas of colonialism with the use of the term Hawaiian, like appropriation. And this idea of what's called militarism, which is a hybrid of the word militarism and tourism that was coined by Teresa Vaugh. So this map of Oahu shows the initial sort of skeletal structure of urbanism in Hawaii, which is essentially, when we think about Honolulu and think about Hawaii, it's essentially built around the long history of initial conversion of the island, essentially into a giant military base. So we have diamond head leahi here and a coastal sort of like a snake of forts to protect Pearl Harbor and the American agriculture, specifically sugar. And this idea of what is the legacy that architects sort of inherit in working in this built environment today. Architecture is largely complicit in the militarization of Hawaii, complicit even on one hand by the types of projects that might be accepted. Military is a major source of work for architects in Hawaii, but also just a sort of like ignorance of not knowing the history makes us all sort of bad. But it does say all architects are bad 1898 to 2028 and so there's sort of like a deadline to when architects don't have to be bad anymore. If we just like wake up a little bit. And so yeah, ultimately, what the show is attempting to do in terms of like architecture is to call attention to the sort of, you know, I love the way my collaborator Dominic will talk about this like the blind spot of history. And so the blind spot for architecture is Hawaii. And as somebody who's been sort of at it for, you know, in 2006, my first sort of project was called decolonizing architecture.  There's a lot that architecture in on the continent. There's a lot that architecture can learn from Hawaii. And there's a lot that architecture can do to sort of help address the sort of negative impacts of this sort of history of US urbanism and such a delicate indigenous place like Hawaii. This is a fun 3D timeline. I usually will go through each each moment in history, but we'll just go next. So yeah, I love mapping. This is also part of learning from Leah he and the sort of creation of the sort of military map and the sort of like retelling of American history. We're using architectural tools with the history of Hawaii as the spine of American history. We normally think about Hawaii as in the periphery of the United States and whatnot but not many people realize that George Washington founder of the United States and King Kamehameha founder of the United Kingdom were essentially the same age and that Captain Cook British Captain James Cook doesn't venture over into the Pacific until the American Revolution. So when you think about the American Revolution. There's all these other things happening at the same time and so the Hawaiian Kingdom in the United States are also around essentially the same age. And there's a long history of opposing the United States in Hawaii and the illegal occupation of the United States in Hawaii, following its sort of annexation which I always like annexation is specifically 1898 but it really begins in 1880s 1875 1893 1898. And there's the image of an AK Trask at the centennial of the US overthrow chanting the famous words we are not American. And there's, oh, this is the image of the overthrow the legal overthrow by the American businessman, which was supported by the US military. And it's a conscious issue because when the United States over through the Hawaiian Kingdom subsequently after that the language the Hawaiian language was banned. And then the food native food system was systematically destabilized by filling in the fish ponds and the wetlands and. The sad sort of tabula rasa of US urbanism is basically the history of destroying the livelihoods of indigenous peoples. And it just keeps going on and on. This is the image of the bombing of call a lot of a US military uses Hawaii still to this day for target practice and active military bombing. In the, the 1960s and 70s and 80s, the bombing of call a lot of a crafty aquifer, but that hasn't stopped them from just moving the bombing from call a lot of it to the big island that pull off the training area. So this is all still happening. And then today are most probably our biggest the biggest atrocity is the leaking Red Hill underground fuel tanks, which we'll get into next. So here, this is the Red Hill underground fuel tank storage. This is an architectural model that shows the tanks, which was for a long time a top secret military jet fuel storage facility very deep into the Hawaiian Island of Oahu. They are comprised of 20 vertical steel fuel tanks each tank taller than a skyscraper 245 feet tall or around 75 meters, and they hold 250 million gallons of jet fuel and diesel ship fuel constructed only 100 feet or 30 meters above our fragile aquifer. And since their construction in World War two, there have been over 70 reported leaks that the US military has been covering up for decades. And despite years of local activists, I'm protesting the existence of these tanks, and even a high level lawsuit to release for the government to release confidential files. The US military for the longest time had refused to admit leaks. That is until late last year, when according to local news reports, over 9,000 families on all who started to smell and taste fuel in the water. Thousands sought medical treatment for illness illnesses and many were hospitalized. The Department of Health issued emergency order demanding that the Navy remove the fuel from the tanks at the beginning of this year. But the military actually fought the order. And if you could believe that the US Department of Defense even sued the state of Hawaii to keep the tanks open. And so it goes to say that the United States military doesn't care about our drinking water in Hawaii because they need the fuel. Because Hawaii as a giant military base, the island of Oahu is the headquarters of the US Indo-Pacific Command, which controls military operations of over 52% of Earth's surface. And so it's a huge contentious issue and it kind of goes to the sort of like long history of how the United States government treats Native peoples is also how they treat water. It's something that is meant to be poisoned. Each year the tanks are leaking and reports claim that the lining of the tank walls are as thin as a coin in places. This next project is all, you know, part of, it's all connected. It's like one long accumulative project, all the way to the Memorial Project, which has been the basis for our architecture studios here at GSAP. It's called for reparations for the militarization of Aina or land at which feeds. And it's sort of built around this idea to recover the Oahu of Waikiki. I've given more extensive talks about this particular project before, but for this audience I'll just sort of zoom forward and say that all the way Centennial Memorial Project is a revolutionary land art and climate justice initiative. The Memorial Project advocates for the contemporary recovery of wine, fish ponds and taro fields in the heart of Waikiki. And that sort of sets up a couple of the other projects. Just a quick review of the project concept and the existing sort of urban fabric of the Alawai golf course and Fort Bruce military reservation around Alawai canal in Waikiki. And the sort of proposal over the next 20 years to recover them as fish pond and local ia. It's important because, you know, in terms of what I was mentioning in the beginning of the presentation, this idea of urbanism and the conversion of the island of Oahu into a giant military base following the 1898 annexation and the destabilization of the native food supply. This is one of the early sites where that happened where these native wine fish ponds were filled in to create the military reservations. And that's significant because in terms of this concept of which we're going to talk a little bit about next, fish pond and fish, those are the basis of the system because it's a source of protein. And yeah, we already went over this image, but it's a reminder that systemic racism is physically embedded in the places we live, such as the 1921 construction of the Alawai canal. And that social justice is a mandatory part of our framework to address public health and climate change, which may not sound like a very radical idea, but for people working in city government. Social justice is oftentimes not thought of in the same sort of realm as public health and climate change that we have a lot of healing to do. This is a map of the US military land use compared to the state land use. So basically in terms of the history of urbanism in Hawaii, if you're to layer it up, you have the sort of indigenous system of land use that's organized by Aung Pa or land division. And then overlaid on that is the sort of military infrastructure that completely transforms that. And then when Hawaii becomes a state in 1959, subsequently, single-use land use is sort of applied to all the land, is applied to all the land. It's either urban agriculture or conservation, but it's done in a way to reinforce the preexisting structure of the military footprint. And so what ends up happening is there's an approach to land on the left, which is the sort of indigenous, aboriginal, native approach to understanding land as moving resources, versus the way land is considered now as the sort of like something that can be regulated, controlled, restricted, quantified, etc. And there's all these sort of, oh my gosh, look at my timer already. I'm just going to move forward a little bit. Problems with separating urban, which is where people live from where they grow their food, where they conserve and access resources and conservation, whereas in the sort of indigenous approach to land, you don't compartmentalize things. There are all, like human and nature are not necessarily separated in that kind of way. This, you know, continuity of projects, all the way centennial, and sort of idea of the military as this sort of historic modifier of built environment in Hawaii. Hawaii Futures advocated for the recovery of Ahupaa and was a resource that was published in 2010 to advocate for this idea of taking the indigenous concept of Ahupaa and bring it into sort of this contemporary relevance. So Hawaii Futures is a framework for Ahupaa recovery. Ahupaa is a land of vision, typically extending from mountain to sea, but it doesn't always extend from mountain to sea. And many people refer to Ahupaa as a watershed, but it wasn't just a watershed, it was much more than that. There's different aspects of the Ahupaa that are elevational and that are specifically tied to the environment. But there's also spiritual and political and observational aspects of what defines an Ahupaa. So yeah, this kind of goes over. This is a famous, an adoption of a famous poster that was originally created in the 70s and then reprinted in the 80s and 90s and sort of every student. Like I first saw this poster when I was like in third grade. And so I grew up with the sort of concept of like the Ahupaa as many children in Hawaii have this sort of idea like embedded in their minds. And so Hawaii people are really special. We don't necessarily think of ourselves as special because where we have this sort of like a colonized oppressed mindset where there's a mainland, which is the confluence of the United States and they're always better than us and we're nothing. But what we take for granted is the fact that we have this really special understanding of land, ocean and sky and continuity of the place that we live. So yeah, today I sort of think about Hawaii features as a pre NFT GIS based, rhino driven sort of diagrammatic, diagramming of this like poster and adopting the poster for architecture and urbanism. And so this is like, if you can sort of like the reason why it's a rectangle is because the poster is a rectangle. And then going through the different parameters for like, if we had to think about actually creating a building code or zoning ordinance for the long term recovery of an Ahupaa, which is essentially going to become necessary in the future.  There's the Colts of sites, these fisheries, special sites like sacred sites, burial sites, and then even air rights airspace floor. So it's a it's sort of like a really basic diagram, diagramming of the sort of what the built environment is through the lens of in other words an applied theory of Ahupaa to the built environment. Yeah, like all the different things about Ahupaa in terms of what kind of benefits the Ahupaa affords humans and other life, the importance of an Ahupaa is an access to resources. The Ahupaa is an academy, a place for learning in Hawaii and where Hawaii education is going. It's not just about being in the classroom, like all you need as our cultural advisor, Keoni Kuoho, says all you need to learn is an interest to learn and I can happen anywhere. And Koukoukalao, who's another famous, you know, in Monolani Maya, they're all about the idea that like the entire cosmos is our classroom to learn. Ahupaa is also a way to avert a catastrophe in terms of like flooding. And yeah, I'll just kind of zoom forward, these kinds of different things. And yeah, thinking about climate recovery, indigenous climate recovery and is it possible to actually reduce the footprint of our built environment. An island is so small, over 60% of Oahu's landmass has been developed and urbanized and the material and process of the urban has largely been pushed through by the military. And so it would be a radical, it would be a radical step to begin to reduce our footprint. And then another sort of, this is a GIS based vinyl model turned into a gift to illustrate the division of Ahupaa on the island of Oahu. And so each island is divided into a district called Moku, which is divided into another land division or Ahupaa, which is then further divided and further divided and further divided. And they all kind of correspond to connect with each other, as well as align with the political system of governance. Okay, with the time I have left, I did want to actually get to like, all of everything I showed so far is like, aside from the very first sort of sculpture, is part of like, I guess you could say research, but also sort of like thinking that goes into an actual material practice. Because yeah, I guess as an artist, I am a sculptor. And part of why I got into sculpture has to do with frustrations in architecture and whatnot, but I'm not an architect in sculpture. I have to make that like, apparently I have to really care about that. I'm an artist making sculpture about architecture. Hopefully that grant comes in now that I have that training. In terms of, in terms of the idea of sculpture, I am so thankful to Aaron Cosman, who published an article about my work in the Pacific Arts Journal, the Pacific Arts Association, where I won't read the whole thing, but I will highlight this. And I will end up talking about my work through a specific piece, which I'll end on. Amasmari of land adds a divergent dimension to your American art movements, pushing back against the rigidity and firmness of minimalism and the grand imposition of land art that initially inspired them in doing so, Connolly, me expands the notion of land of beyond a material or merely site specific artist into something that additionally includes more explicit references to structural systems of disposition, exploitation, theft and lasting injustices. Connolly's work amplifies relationships to land that do not rely on economic value in the extractive capitalist sense so much as value that links indigenous ontophysmologies of ecological flourishing, providing an avenue through which we can think about histories of land labor and increasing disassociation between the two, as well as how material choices are indicated with personal and political complexities in Hawaii. So I was like super thankful for that because I could not have articulated that myself. And so the first two works, Thatch Assembly with Rocks on the right and Six in Cube Press on the left are two sort of connected works that are essentially material studies that are time traveling one into the past and one into the future. This one Thatch Assembly with Rocks is time traveling into the past to sort of recreate a moment in architectural history in Hawaii that didn't happen, which is sort of critical regionalism of emerging indigenous materiality of Thatching with the more sort of modern structural form. The sculpture is assembled, Thatch Assembly with Rocks. The Thatching is the indigenous material for Thatching, which is Pertrata Ramota or Lolu Palm. And I am so fascinated by Lolu Palm as a building material because on one hand the sort of colonialism of architecture might look at this and think, oh my God, it's like a primitive material. Every continent has this form of Thatching and that's sort of like non-modern or like the P word. But it's actually quite sophisticated. And so there's a thing about this, well, in terms of the distribution Lolu Palm, palm trees for Thatching are sort of widely distributed around the tropics. But what makes it sort of special is that you have to harvest the material when the leaf is on the tree, when the dead leaf is on the tree, or in other words, the leaf has to die on the tree before you harvest it. You can't just pick the green leaf and use it in Thatching. And it has to do with what's called an epicoticular wax. And so what makes the palm a genius building material is that it naturally becomes waterproof. And you'd be surprised that the palm leaf after it's died in the tree can have a life cycle of almost 10 to 15 years. Of course, when it's exposed to all the elements of the life cycle dwindles, but when you take care of a roof, that roof can last for a very, very long time. And that's because as the leaf is dying on the tree, there's a sort of process where the wax forms. I won't spend too much time on this, but these are sort of microscopic comparisons of when I was harvesting the material of the green leaf versus the dead leaf. I'm not a biologist, but I'm just looking at it and like, okay, I guess, yeah, it looks like the leaf that died in the tree has a little bit more crystallization than the image on with the green. And the sort of striation of the material is more pronounced. And so, yeah, I can sort of believe the practice. I learned the practice of letting the leaf die on the tree with the practitioner. But then I had to take that information. I had to do additional research to sort of find out the specific details of what an epic particular wax is, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, these are just some sort of detailed images. There's all these, there are essentially 30 different conceptual strategies that I had embedded into this particular sculpture. But the one I wanted to share today was about the utility of the leaf. Oh, yeah, speaking of the utility of the leaf, this is my mentor, Trisha Lagosso Goldberg, and her husband, David Goldberg, lying down in the backside of the sculpture. Because if this was a metal roof, like a corrugated metal roof or an asphalt shingle roof, like this space would have been super hot. But the thatching also has a really high, it's really like a thermally sound in terms of cooling the space because there's so much air that gets packed into the structure of the roof because of the pleating of the thatching. And that's the thatching from the distance. And the sort of last thing I'll sort of mention about this sculpture is that the, typically the thatching is on the outside, but I inverted it so that there'd be these like the form which was skewed, there'd be these moments to, for the viewer to witness the sort of difference between what you might see on the outside of what might be called like the grass shack, which is sort of like a derogatory way to think about indigenous building in Hawaii, versus what most people don't get to see, which is the interior of a hall or house or structure, and the rigor in, within which the lobo palm is bound to the structure. And so it's quite, quite modernist in its craft, even though it's also an ancient technique that's still alive today. It's not ancient, it's what do you call it, oppressed. And this sculpture 16 cube trust was along similar lines where, whereas the Patch Assembly of Throx was time traveling through this moment in architectural history that didn't happen. This is sort of time traveling into this moment to the future that could happen, where the idea of a, of a trust is a or space. Well, I originally wanted to be, I won't get into that part, but I'll just sort of say for like students that there's always iterations right and so there was an iteration where I really wanted to be a space frame and all those kind of things, but then, you know, one restriction and one budget at line item after another, it sort of turned into a truss that was held together with lashing. And so this here is showing the base detail of the sculpture, which is built of wood painted white, a very, very simple wooden box trust frame. That is held together by what you see is lashing. Every time I do these works, I, you know, if I was doing it as an architect, I might like try and learn how to do the building in the way that I learned how to use a chainsaw and an impact driver, which by the way I didn't learn how to use a chainsaw or impact driver in architecture school, I learned how to do it in art and so art made me actually a better builder. And when it comes to the sculpture, I do try and be really specific and so I always work with the indigenous or native wine practitioner. And I do not interfere, like we have a conversation and, but then I don't necessarily, I try my best not to interfere in the production of it and what's significant about this is that the practitioner who's an expert canoe lasher had to take the canoe lashing, the lashing for the canoe and then adapt it to this structural form and so essentially what we did in the process was invented sort of new lashing, new typologies of lashing that was specific to this architectural form. And so this is, you know, the sort of genius of the lashing is that it's self organizing interlocking. And so you just lash it enough times where it holds it together, the lashing itself holds itself together, which is why there's so many crisscrossing. Of course there's an element of ornament that's there but it's purely functional. And these are more variations where at the very end on the left, at the very end after the lashing that the end of the cord is just sort of rolled around. And then on the right the detailing of the interlocking wrapping and lashing of the cord. Traditionally, you know, for as one option I looked into Ola now which is five native Hawaiian fiber that was conventionally used for lashing but in this case we ended up going with paracord. And the paracord is rated at 1200 pounds. And so the cord is essentially stronger than the wood. And there are areas where the cord was wound so tight it was actually causing the wood to dent. Here's another beautiful lashing here. And so I'm going to, I think I'll end here on this sculpture, A Small Area of Land, which was my very first sculpture from 2013. And the full title is A Small Area of Land, Cock Cock or Earth Room. And it, you know, the first time I came to New York was 2007-2008. And then I came again in 2012. And I went to see Walter de Maria's Earth Room. And that sort of became the beginning of me becoming an artist. There's a whole other, there's a whole little interesting story about how I became an artist there. But just sort of seeing, being exposed to the sort of possibility of like what I could do with a background in architecture. And that was a sculpture. But in this case the sculpture is modified from Cock Cock or I mean from Walter de Maria's Earth Room, which is, you know, for those of you who are familiar, the entire room is filled with Earth. But I wanted to, but if you did that in Hawaii, it wouldn't necessarily be the same because you just go outside and there's like dirt right there. And so it doesn't have the same sort of, there's like a regional consideration. And so I took in a couple of different steps and wanted to focus on the sort of several things. One was the, this idea of what is our relationship to land. And part of this sculpture was an act of objectifying it. But then also allowing it to resist that objectification return to its natural sort of state of being. There's a, I'm kind of out of time, but there's a whole process of how it was extracted, where it was extracted from. The Earth comes from the mountain top, it comes from the valley. And then the sort of, so the sculpture is also like a microcosm of an ahupua. Because the dirt from the mountain top is on the bottom and then the dirt from the valleys on the top. But there's also a functional reason for that, which is, has to do with the soil order and the soil type. And so I didn't know anything about soil order or soil types for my architecture studies until I did this sculpture. And then I learned all about soil and eventually you learn about it in your architecture exam. But I guess I gotta take some of them.  And then Aina Aloha, love of land, and the sort of like care and sort of like ritual that went into processing the soil, like removing all the rubbish. There were like secret butts and little things like that that we cleaned out of the work. And then it was in a gallery run by Miley Meyer, who's essentially, if you think about the Astrid Gates, like Miley Meyer is the native Hawaiian female version of that. But has been doing it since the 70s, runs the art has been single-handedly in many ways of organizing community such that she has carried the art scene in Hawaii for so many years. And there's a really beautiful legacy to be witnessed in Hawaii today around the arts. And this was one of their galleries with Wei Fang and curated by Trisha Legosa Goldberg. And the earth was sort of like rammed into this concrete formwork that my cousin Jason helped me construct.  And then he, you know, made his modifications. But he does concrete formwork. And so that's why it looks so intense. And then, yeah, this image after it's been sort of falling apart. I'm reluctant to show the video at the end because of time, but I'm going to go ahead and maybe just show the video. Okay. Oh, yeah, this is actually like the whole thing about the sculpture that I always forget to talk about, which is the actual form making of it and the name of the sculpture, a small area of land, which is the legal translation of the Hawaiian word Kuliana. Kuliana generally means responsibility. But Kuliana also means a small area of land. So in the idea of responsibility is this idea of land. In terms of the form making the work was also a compass and so it wasn't just an object in a gallery, it was relating to the cosmos, specifically the slope corresponds to the altitude of the moon as it's facing sunrise. And that line is sort of extruded along perpendicular to the angle of sunset. So sometimes I'm like, I don't know what I was thinking, but yeah, it was like 2013 and I was like this like playing around with how to embed these sort of historic, celestial, historic references on this sort of like relation to larger within this sort of like form. And so in many ways, it looks really like, like I was trying to make a form, but I wasn't actually trying to make a form I was trying to relate to the sort of external influences on this block of earth. I'll end there. I mean, I can keep going. I have Africa Pacific, which is a whole nother thing, but maybe we'll I'll just let these videos play in the background while we move to our next part of the conversation. Cool. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Sean. I'd like to invite Dominic beyond to join us. Thank you so much for that Sean is really great and glad you showed us the video of a small piece of land that was a really great small area of land that was really a great way to end. I do want to go back and Dominic and I will just ask a couple of questions and then we'll throw it open to the audience.  I was also fascinated by your story of Lady Columbia and that Hawaii exists in the periphery. And so I want to ask you, what does it mean to be an expert witness in the periphery? Not a peripheral expert witness, but an expert witness in the periphery. Cool. Well, technically, the expert witness part comes because I had to when we were doing the olawaii, when I was doing the olawaii Centennial Project, there was an army core. There's a huge public controversy around a proposal by the army core, which is to build the tension basins, seven detention basins and the last remaining portions of natural native stream, coupled with four to seven foot floodwall around the canal. And it was sort of this outdated proposal that was really just furthering the sort of hardening of the landscape there. And so long story short, the only way to stop the project was to form an organization and ensue the city and state to intervene and halt. And so in that process, I technically became an expert witness because I had to testify in the court of law on architecture. And so the judge, the lawyers on the state and the city side try to have me thrown out. And they sort of, what is the word, contested my expertise in architecture. But it was upheld. And so I was like, great. I don't have my license yet, but I can say that I'm an expert witness in architecture. And so yeah, you can also get for the students, or maybe even practitioners, you can also get paid to be an expert witness. It's like being paid like a lawyer. So it's like being a lawyer, but an expert witness in your discipline. In terms of the periphery. That's sort of a acknowledgement that Hawaii's overlooked. And that we're like, not many people like know much about white history. And a lot of people are just learning about history there and what it is. And so it really is a, it operates in the periphery, even though the struggle is to make it a central for the people who are who are there. Yeah. I mean, I think to this idea of history and design, I thought was first of all, I know I think you're. I think it's, I think it's important to also publicly acknowledge like the nature of our collaboration and continuity of you allow me to create back to my ancestors through the lens of architecture. I'm always grateful. And one of the things I was really struck by when I first saw your practice, just internet was a couple things one is like it bridges, it's trans scaler inherently. And it bridges so many different scales from the urban to the material and that that was always really kind of compelling to see you move seamlessly from you know through all these different scales. And also the kind of fluidity that you move between history and design, and that to think about history is also to redesign it in ways, and also to think about design as an active recovering history. I think that is such an important lesson that in a lot of ways we do that implicitly when we design but your work I think does it very explicitly in a way that does recover stories and pluralize our histories that have been lost so much a question but I guess just like a comment but I'm curious like how do you how do you think about design and history and the relationship in your work. Yeah, thanks Dominic. I guess, while I process some of that. Another thing about expert witnesses that it's also called responsibility. And so, I guess, you know we all have a responsibility, or we have an opportunity to have a responsibility to participate in the public process. And I think that's where, for me, our design is is a perspective to understand history, and then history is also perspective to understand design. And so, like how that is like well what does that mean so like understanding the, you know, like impact of material I mean there's all the sustainability things about material. And also, like the political things about material and so maybe ramped earth might sound like a really sustainable building material, but then if the land is a contentious material, and you're just any old person.  And so like it, and what makes it sacred is that it's a container of eating bones. And so like the island itself is like a sacred place because it contains the bones of ancestors, like, and this is like all around the world right. And so someone might not someone who doesn't understand that history and doesn't understand that as a designer might take more liberties in working with material. Whereas if you understand the history you might be more ceremonial about doing the work or the same goes for water and understanding how water interacts with your site. And understanding all the non human, the non physical like all the different components. I think history is an important way to help understand why it might be like more meaningful to other people. We all come from our own different cultures and different things like that but yeah. Maybe I'll just ask one other question and we'll throw it out to the audience but at the beginning of your talk you put up three questions what does it mean to be radical. What does it mean to be new. What does it mean to have the responsibility or just talking about the third question. I want to go back to that first question about what does it mean to be radical, because it seems to me that the learning from sort of project with with Tonya and all architects are bad that radical but not subtle at all. And the small area of land was radical but maybe more subtle and just wondering how do you in your in your work sort of calibrate those sort of between I suppose the kind of the subtlety of one and then the, I don't know if I would say sort of in your face and I know there's a little bit of controversy about the all architects are bad kind of more confrontational I suppose of the other. Yeah, thanks for that. Well small area of land was 2013 and then learning from leahe all architects are bad. This room 20, like 2017 2018 to but then gets built in 2021 and all architects are bad. Really is sort of like a response to 2020. There's a little bit more frustration maybe in the, like, the all architects are bad which is maybe why it's like less. Let's settle a small area of land. Yeah, that's really good question I never to be honest and I really thought about it. But yeah, I'll sort of think about it in terms of like, like the time that was grew between the works. But yeah, in terms of being radical I think I think it's about like a part of it has to do with acknowledgments and references like, like, like everybody should should ask themselves like, like, what in what moments may have felt radical or been radical like I was much more radical in 2019 than I am like right now. At least in terms of like, actively going to every single neighborhood board meeting and going to all the like actually practicing like being radical. But I think the, like, yeah, and just foregrounding within the work. Trying to advocate for what's what's still missing. I don't know. Maybe Dominic you can answer that question for me. It's a great question. It's hearing what you're saying now it seems to be that you're suggesting the time in which you conceived of those different projects. I don't know what was happening at the time you're responding to that was different for small areas of land versus learning from the IE and somehow the messaging seems to be learning from the IE was and was a lot more antagonistic, not just in its critique of the status quo. And so I would say learning from the IE is more about critique. And it's drawing the line between, you know, learning from Las Vegas as a critique, or an observation through the lens of sociology of like what is the status quo of US and then drawing and learning, like the connected learning from the IE is also a critique of US urbanism as the status quo that's complicit with US military and US imperialism. And that's sort of update to that way of looking at US urbanism is through a lens of critique, like at the time of 2020. But I think it's, I think it's the practice is really fascinating because you can move between the different modalities of expression critique, mapping a kind of generative sculpture practice in which you start to suggest possible architectural features within the scale of the detail. So the lashing when I look at the lashing on the on the sculpture. I'm really like just, I'm all the skull for them is really excited to see how that sensibility starts to evolve and translate into other other situations of context. And I think it's, you know, I think also what you're exploring is, is, is a language that's emerging out of culture and place based practice, growing up and having your world shaped by living on the most remote landmass in the world, I mean, the Hawaiian community and having the opportunity to be able to speak on behalf of architecture. So I'm just really excited. Thanks. Thanks. I'm glad. Thank you for mentioning 16 cube trust in lashing. At least every couple of weeks I get an email, I'm just random from like somebody I don't know like saying Oh, thank you so much for doing this culture. Right now in Honolulu, like you don't, you don't see lashing anywhere, like in, in that kind of configuration. That's not in like the traditional Halle. And so it's like really the only place in Honolulu where you can sort of see this moment happening like architecturally that doesn't exist in architecture. And so maybe in that, in that case, that's where I might consider some of the work, like trying to be radical in terms of like filling a gap. Yeah, but yeah. Yeah, are there any questions anyone has from the audience. You know, it is getting a little bit late. And I had all this coffee. I think we have a mic. So thank you. Thank you for sharing your work. I, I really appreciate the specificity and connection to place and detail and time and the way that you think and process. And the simultaneous multi scalar abstract connection to concepts that are timeless and sacred and far larger than the particular piece of work. And I guess I'm curious whether both are equally important to you or happen simultaneously, which are you thinking about. First, the way you presented, you talk about specifics, the specificity of place and detail and time. Equally the work is powerful in how it resonates with much larger timeless concepts. And so I guess I would just like to hear your thoughts on that. That's a really hard question.  Yeah, that. Yeah, they all they all kind of intersect. And the, the process itself is, is pretty iterative. So I like go through so many different options and that's sort of I think the architect behind the process there. I mean, like, I'll just keep going and going and going. I'm coming with every single iteration, which is what makes it kind of fun. But then also thinking about the narrative building and the story that is to be told, and the sort of understanding of time and history in terms of like past and future.  So there's this sort of, you know, in, like, when I think about like design theory, there's there's so much work around like trying to deal with like space and time being these like separate things. And then in the indigenous world, you like there's an example where it's like, oh, it's not separate like, like space, time, current like, there's a word that describes how they're like all connected right. And so that's like a that word is like a holographic kind of concept. And so, oftentimes, when I'm making decisions and in terms of the work. I'm working for moments in the work where I can talk about the past or the future in different in different ways. Some I have my friend, he who he learned she is a she's always on every project helping to build it. And I could never do the work without like the people in my community who like help me make it happen.  You know, like, there's some kind of there's a reason why it's oriented a certain way there's a reason why this thing is slanted this way or why this number is here or whatnot but I think that's this part of the, the sort of obsession with accountability for decision in the design process as well and trying to make sure that that there's always a chance to talk about something in a meaningful way. Yeah, accountability research and yeah. I do want to quickly mention that we have a native Hawaiian designer of the audience, Amir Miraz, who's doing his internship at DSR from Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu at University of Austin, Texas. So you're the future Amir. Thanks for coming. Is this on. Thank you, Sean. This is wonderful. I think this and many other auditoriums should be filled and will be through the hopeful dissemination of your work. And I want to also thank Mario and Dominic for sort of helping to create a community of people doing this work. I thought that the talk was really brilliant and how you began to sort of connect architectural education and pedagogy to to these concerns into your work and so I guess for me as someone who's also sort of in conversation I think with with you guys and the sort of work that you're doing and students being that we're in a school of architecture. I'd love to hear you guys, you and maybe, and maybe the three of you, we talk about a little bit more about indigeneity and pedagogy.  And I think that sort of position and promise there, you're kind of to me bringing up this sort of moral imperative and urgency that we have to sort of engage these practices. But I think there's also simultaneously a lot of imposter syndrome and sort of fear of appropriation of indigenous knowledge ancestral knowledge. When we sort of attempt to teach this or enroll students in doing this work so I just love to hear you guys sort of speak to that. Thanks. Thanks. I also want to acknowledge Mario and your intentions for thinking about new forms of collaboration. I think the way you put it was transcultural practices and liberation. And what does it mean to form coalition and allyship within the context of academia and practice. And so I think this experience that we've had together I think is a very valuable one. And just starting to think about new institutional shapes that need that need to be created to explore new like like pedagogies. There's a lot of folks working in a lot of different capacities. Now that's super inspiring. And I think a lot of just being in the GSAP community of last few years is really, I think, opened up a lot of possibilities and how we can move forward as educators and practitioners. I think in the context of this studio about Hawaii and, you know, myself being part of the diaspora. I personally don't feel like I should speak on behalf of like indigeneity because even though I have ancestral lineage to Hawaii and family there and et cetera, culturally in a lot of ways like I grew up on the mainland. So I always try to be as respectful as possible to know that I, even though I'm connected, I'm still on the outside. And that is why our collaboration has been so important because in a lot of ways, there has been this like amazing reciprocity of an exchange. And that's that's been enabled by Sean being from the from the community in the community and how important it is to have an invitation to like think with for and by by community that's you're not from. And I think that's a really important lesson so I mean when I think about indigeneity I'm like I it's in the history of colonization it's it's so important just to have an invitation to to invite that kind of exchange to happen. Sometimes that is challenging in the context of academia and there are, you know, when the two of us Smith outlines the history of how damaging research court research has been to indigenous communities under the kind of history of anthropology and sociology that's a sort of like ghost in the room when we engage in these sort of kind of collaborations with with, you know, coming from from an academic point of view or even, you know, an athlete point of view. So there's inherent conundrums to the work but I mean I've learned so much from Sean about how to respect protocol and be aware of protocol and, you know, honestly just like listen first before you. Yeah, and I would just say that, you know, that I'm a student as well with with my students and what I've learned from Sean and Dominic has been transformative in a lot of ways, and I absolutely agree it's important to have that invitation but it's also important to build trust and for me personally I guess I'll speak personally it's, it's not enough to think about liberation relative to what I think my personal history was now I think it's a little bit different or it's more than what I thought it was, but it's also it's important to to find that allyship to find those those connections, because as, as we know, identity is very complex, and things will surprise you. Just to add, add to this, you know, because I'm also working through the urgency of working in these ways. And, you know, I don't know if that looks like we're covering our own indigeneity I think that once somebody sort of put that out but I think the scale of the problem is so large that it's clear it's even beyond these very important concerns of what it means to work with indigenous communities. It's what it means to reorient our practices and our building practices and discipline. So, they're connected, but in a way I'm just asking like, how do we teach this how do we get to 2028 to a point where we're able to do this work and reconcile that with the sort of problematics or questions around identity and, and who does this work and teach ability scalability, etc. Yeah, that's a that's a tough one, because it's ultimately a question of systems change and changing institutions, like, yeah, endowed visiting professorships for indigenous people to like have access to those kind of opportunities, supporting in indigenous designers with resources to, but then there's also then the other then there's also the issue of like actual building codes. And so I think, well in Hawaii there is a building code for indigenous architecture. But that was probably not published until 2008 I would say it was specifically outlines, like even everything in the code is even hand sketch outlines like really specifically for the zoning permit reviewer to be able to stamp a traditional holiday that a practitioner might make. You know and so. Yeah, it's a it's it's definitely complex and gets into that whole issue of really deep systems change. Yeah, but I think the young generation has sort of demanded. Yeah, maybe we'll leave it there will continue. Thank you so much. Well it's been a pleasure and thank you all. I'm so humbled and yeah good luck to everybody.


Other questions, less directly related to our current tax bill, but which learning income tax law can help us to understand and answer include, how should we judge our government? What is the purpose of government? What should government do? These are questions that we may and I would argue have an obligation to understand as citizens and acting citizens of a democratic republic. And you might be saying, hey, look, those kind of questions, the tax code is just like a small component of those kinds of questions. But I would argue that you can do far worse in understanding a civilization than to understand the tax code. In other words, whether you're talking about our current civilization, other civilizations within our current time or those in the past, understanding the tax code can tell you a whole lot about the values of that civilization. So when we're applying it to ourselves, where we are at at this place in time, questions such as how big should our government be? Should it be growing or should we be retracting the government and what's going to be the difference or how can we delineate the power possibly between a federal government and the state and local governments? What should the government be spending the money on? What kind of things are better served, better done by the government? What kind of things are better served and better done by the market? So these are types of questions that, of course, the tax code is very intimately related to. You also have questions such as justice and what is fair because when we talk about the tax code, we're talking in part about the distribution of economic resources. What kind of economic system do we have here? We have a market-based economic system or a redistributory-based economic system. When you have these kind of arguments, oftentimes politicians will use very vague language such as we want a tax code that is fair. We want a tax code that is just. When you hear politicians saying that, it's often because they're being quite misleading with those terms because the words fair and just are doing all the work. There is nobody that will argue to have an unjust tax system. No one's going to disagree with a just tax system or a fair tax system. People will disagree and have arguments on legitimate debate about what the term just and fair means when applied to tax law. And so those are some ideas or things that we might want to keep in mind when we're thinking about tax preparation because it makes things a little bit more interesting. And it again helps us to do kind of our civic duty type of stuff as well.


This weekend, we welcome Bob Murphy, economist, consultant, and longtime friend and scholar of the Mises Institute to address the vital topic of Fed interference in financial markets. Is the global equity and bond market charade, mostly engineered by Fiat monetary expansion, about to collapse like a house of cards? Is the investing game basically rigged? How can Janet Yellen and financial elites keep markets from crashing without endless new rounds of quantitative easing? Why is knowledge of Austrian economics necessary but not sufficient for individual investors? And would stock markets play a social function in a truly free society? Anyone interested in investing, personal finance, Austrian economics, and the wit and wisdom of Bob Murphy will enjoy this weekend's show. Stay tuned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. I'm your host, Jeff Deist. And as promised, we are joined this weekend by our friend and longtime Mises Institute scholar, Bob Murphy. Bob, how are you today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Always fun to work with the Mises Institute. Well, I love this topic, the topic of Fed interference in the financial markets. Just about a week ago, Alan Greenspan was speaking before the Council of Foreign Relations, one of our favorite organizations. And he basically said, I'm paraphrasing, that quantitative easing, i.e., bond buying by the Fed, didn't do much for the economy in general, so so much for demand side Keynesian monetary policy, so to speak. But he did mention that QE has done a tremendous job in boosting asset prices. So I was wondering if you could comment on this apparent dichotomy between Wall Street and Main Street. Well, sure. And also, there's a dichotomy as I tweeted out when I saw that story. I said, Alan Greenspan, once he leaves office, goes back to being a good economist. Because of course, as I'm sure most of your listeners know, that he was, when he was a fan of Ayn Rand Greenspan wrote a very famous essay, Touting the Virtues of Gold as Money. And but then of course, as Federal Reserve Chairman, that doesn't seem to be what was on his agenda. So I think he's exactly right now that, again, that he can perhaps speak a little bit more freely about what he thinks is going on. There's no denying that with the various rounds of QE in the United States that asset prices have skyrocketed. But the question is, you know, is that really good for the economy? And I just don't see how anybody with a straight face can say that the creation of trillions of dollars of new money that gets injected into the banking sector is conducive to real economic growth will actually allow the US to use its natural resources, labor power and capital goods in order to raise the standard of living of people. I don't see why you would need constant injections of money to do that. In fact, I think we're in the midst of a bubble and that as the central banks, if they do just turn off the faucet, you're going to see the system come down. Well, also about a week ago, Janet Yellenfett announced the end of QE3, at least for now. Now, quantitative easing in the sense that the central bank buys vast sums of bonds from banks and credits those banks with new reserves. So by definition, this increases the monetary base. How does Janet Yellen keep the whole thing going without quantitative easing, which has been described as sort of life support for a dying patient? Well, sure. That's a great question. Just to solidify that point, it's not just that we're deferring to Eileen Greenspan's opinion. I mean, there's several examples in the last few years of when the stock market was either sliding or just was lackluster and Federal Reserve officials explicitly said because of that and other considerations, we're going to continue our expansion. The most recent one is in mid-October, October 15th, as of that point, the S&P was down about 7% just over the last month. And then the next day, that Thursday, James Bullard comes forward and says, you know, maybe we should think about pausing the taper and all of a sudden the markets start railing, they're up 1% the next day. So you can really see that. And now you're right, Jeff, with the Fed sort of sticking to its guns and saying, we're winding this thing down, QE3, we're not going to buy any net assets. But then the very next day, the Bank of Japan comes out and says, you know, with a surprise to markets that they're going to ramp up their stimulus program. So to me, I think they were, they're trying to have it both ways. They know they got to eventually stop inflating at some point, but yet they're trying to get the timing right. When do they want this just to come down the asset markets? I would suggest if you go back and look at the turnover of the Fed chairmanship the last three times, within a relatively short period, when Volcker came into power, there was the awful early 80s recessions fairly soon. When Greenspan himself came in, that was in August of 87. And then just two months later, you had October 19th 1987, the biggest one day drop in the Dow, in percentage terms. So you can see, and then of course, when Bernanke came in in February of 06, it wasn't soon after that that we had what we now call the great recession. So I think the pattern here using Austrian business cycle theory is that a Fed chair comes into power, inherits a big bubble that the previous guy blew up, it crashes early on in his term, and then he blows up his own bubble and then hands it off to the next guy or Gail now as the case may be with Janet Yellen. So my guess is that she's going to have to let asset markets correct pretty hard fairly early in her time in office. Bob, right now the Dow is at about 17,000 or roughly triple. It's low of 6,500 back in March 2009. But in the same time period, the monetary base has also roughly tripled. So are nominal Dow numbers important or should investors care about the monetary base as well? Well, the way I would look at it, I think I'm agreeing with you, but the angle I take with it is I've just gone to the St. Louis Fed's website, you know, the Fed database that allows you to chart stuff pretty easily, and I just put total Federal Reserve assets as one of the variables and the other one is the S&P 500 index. And you can see that prior to the financial crisis, there really wasn't much of a correlation between the two. The monetary base or the Fed assets was just kind of gently rising upward and the S&P was bouncing all over the place depending on what was driving the markets those days. But then since QE1 really kicked in in early 2009, it is really astonishing to see just the overlay and how the S&P 500 moves in lockstep with the Fed's balance sheet. And again, it's not just a mere coincidence that we know in real time from various Fed officials that why the Fed would start signaling one thing or the other with its policy was often because they were monitoring the markets as a sort of barometer of how good is the economy doing. So I think it's, I mean, it's undeniable even proponents of QE say the stock market rose because of the various rounds and that when the Fed officials come out and are more willing or more dovish, let's say, the accurate they use, that you see asset markets respond. So their only explanation is to say because investors realize the economy is going to be better because of more monetary stimulus and therefore they bid up stock prices rationally. Of course, I would argue that, well, no, it's the other way around that it's the monetary stimulus is blowing up asset bubbles because it doesn't reflect the underlying fundamentals. You don't make the economy grow more in the long run in real terms just by printing up more money or electronically creating more money. So that's, I definitely agree with you that the recent highs in the stock market are not a sign of optimism and this isn't the permanent prosperity is here now. Bob, why does the Fed's monetary expansion not flow uniformly through asset classes? Why has the Dow risen faster than, for example, consumer prices? Okay, now this is an area, again, I just want to acknowledge humility here. I am surprised by how slow it has been to show up in the standard CPI. Now, having said that, I mean, I go to the grocery store and the little packets of meat that I used to buy now, I swear they have half as much meat in them as they used to and the price is the same. All right, so there's, you can see even like the cereal boxes, the cardboard that they use is much thinner now than it used to be. All right, so the little things like that are the toilet paper you buy is not as high quality as it used to be several years ago. So what's happening is clearly the production costs are going up and retailers know that people are still petty pinching and aren't able to raise retail prices and so they're cutting costs other ways. Or just look at, again, I love the grocery store example. Now when I go there, I'm lucky if I can find an employee, right? I even bag my own stuff and check myself out, right? So there's various things that retail outlets have done so that they don't have to pass along large explicit price hikes. So there's that element as well. But more generally, I think what it is, and this is something that Austrians have known about, Mises and Hayek talked about it in the 1920s is the fact that just because consumer prices are relatively tame, you should not therefore think that the central bank is engaging in a neutral monetary policy. Prices are different. Mises and his work stress the fact that don't think of it as a price level because that's a misleading metaphor that prices are individual things and there's differences. So I guess from a 30,000 foot view, Jeff, the way I picture it is, look at the various rounds of QE. It wasn't like the Fed was literally going around with a helicopter and depositing cash into the pockets of regular Americans, letting them go to the mall and spend it because that would have raised consumer prices if they had done it that way. Instead, they were buying treasuries and mortgage-backed securities and doing other things behind the scenes to make loans to large investment banks. And so if those are the people that were receiving that money, what are they going to do with it? They're going to go invest it.  And they're going to go and put it into assets and commodities. And those are the things that you saw rise in response to the various rounds of QE. So I guess ex post, you can certainly realize why things happened in the pattern they did. But I do admit I am surprised by how tame the official CPI hikes have been. Well, when you talk about prices, David Stockman made a comment recently to the effect that there's no honest pricing anywhere in the world because of the distorting effects of central banks. So how enormous is this problem? I mean, it goes into every input of production, like you mentioned, the cardboard box of your serial comes in. Do we really understand how big this distortion is? I don't think so. I mean, just because, again, you see those figures. Here's what I think happened is the average person, because I was doing this in 2009. I was going around giving talks to the general public. People who are not ideological, that they were just regular working people, taking their kids to soccer practice and whatever, but they knew something was really screwed up. And when I walked through my PowerPoints and then show them that graph of the monetary base and how it was rising, and then all of a sudden it just had that vertical strip there at the end that started in late 2008. And people, I mean, their jaws would drop. They couldn't believe it. They thought it was a misprint or something. And so that got people's attention because they knew that that was crazy. The fact that Bernanke in a short period of time had basically inflated more than all previous Fed shares combined. And then as you mentioned, Jeff, he's done more since then. And Janet Yellen was continuing the trend. But then several years have passed now. That was back in 2009 when I was first showing people that. And so I think they get lulled into complacency and say, well, maybe that isn't such a big deal. I mean, people like Krugman are telling us not to worry and they keep making fun of all the chicken littles who are warning about currency debasement. So I guess pumping in that much money doesn't make a big difference. So I think, Jeff, part of it is this literally has never been tried on such a magnitude with so many banks around the world, central banks around the world, coordinating their efforts. And so in that respect, it's uncharted waters. But let me, my main point is there's no way they can get out of this and go back to a period of normal central bank balance sheets without major pain. And so I have been surprised by how long they've been able to keep us sort of in this sluggish, calm period or equilibrium where they just keep limping along with a bloated balance sheet. But the idea that they're just going to gently grow out of that and just let all their assets unwind gradually I think is pretty far-fetched. But it seems like this time around, there are some dissenting voices, right? I mean, there are famous people in the financial world, people like Peter Schiff, Jimmy Rogers, Mark Spitznagel are examples of well-known financial figures who openly profess or discuss Austrian economics at least to some degree. Do you think that there's a place for Austrian economics or a movement surrounding Austrian economics in the financial world? Oh, definitely. And that's where I've been focusing a lot of my work. I'm a consultant and so a lot of my clients come from the financial sector because yes, they definitely, especially people who work in the markets or they are advisors and talk to regular people about their money, they need to have a general idea of what's going on and what's coming, what's in store. And so those people are very receptive to Austrian economics, much more so in my experience than academia, at least the higher levels because there's a sort of snootiness and a folkens sophistication where it's no, yeah, you peons, you see the Fed's monetary base tripling and you freak out, but I'm sophisticated enough to know in the right hands, we can handle this problem. We can definitely maneuver and do just the right amount of stimulus and then unwind it what we need to and thread that needle, whereas more practical people realize that that's a very dangerous thing to be doing. So I think you're right that people in the financial sector definitely respond when you explain Austrian business cycle theory. When I get up in front of a regular crowd of people, many of whom are from the financial sector and I just explain the Austrian view on why, in a depression, the last thing you want is the government to run huge deficits that you wanna return savings to the private sector and boost private investment. I mean, they get that, they understand that, they understand that if the reason we're in this mess is because there was a leveraged housing boom with people taking on too much debt and interest rates being pushed artificially low, well, then they get, okay, the solution to that cannot be the government running huge, unprecedented deficits and the central bank pushing interest rates to unprecedented low levels, right, they get that, that makes no sense. So I think there is that sort of hope that people in the financial markets do understand the wisdom of Austrian economics. Bob, I'm sure you've heard the old adage, never invest according to your ideology and I'd like to get your thoughts on whether Austro-libertarian investors fall prey to this. In other words, it's almost akin to emotionally betting on your favorite sports team we're so invested in Austrian economics that maybe it clouds or impairs at least our short-term investment decisions. Well, yeah, that's probably a good advice always for people to watch out for. And certainly, I know a lot of people in the Austro-libertarian community are very big fans of gold and I certainly think people should have a stockpile of that several months worth of their basic expenses at least in terms of having that much physical gold but does that mean I'm sure gold is a great investment and that it's gonna go up in the next three months? No, I don't know that. So there is a distinction between academic economists doing their thing and charting courses for the macro economy and giving big picture trends about, hey, if the Federal Reserve does this, this is gonna happen. We can't really get the timing right because we don't know when they're gonna pull the trigger on something. So there's certainly a division of labor there and certain financial investment advisors but they should know Austro-economics. So let me put it to you this way. Mises apparently said one time that he studies money in financial markets but he was never gonna be rich off of it and so I think knowledge of Austrian economics is necessary but not sufficient to be a successful investor. Well, do you think the stock market, the equities markets are essentially rigged against the little guy, the individual investor? Well, I certainly think that the decisions that are being made by top Federal Reserve officials and other powerful people are not done with the interest of the little guy or Main Street in mind, I certainly agree with that. I think there are some trends though. I mean, the market still is working where the little guy can get access to equity markets more so than 30 years ago. However, I don't know that that's necessarily a good thing because this is sort of perverse idea that's come up in America. I was certainly raised with this to think you are saving for your retirement by plunking away money in a well-diversified mutual fund where well-diversified means, oh, it's like the whole S&P 500, it's not just a few tech stocks, right? And that's a different mentality from what it was a century ago, let's say. I mean, you can read in human action where Mies has just matter of factly talks about people buying bonds and having savings accounts and buying permanent life insurance policies and that was the way the average household saved whereas now people think about saving as getting access to a bunch of stocks and I think that that's a perversion that partly explains why the households right now are so vulnerable and why if the market does crash it's such a social calamity because so many people have their, quote, retirement locked up in equity markets. Bob, it's almost time to wrap this discussion up but I wanted to ask you one final question. If we could do away with the Fed and regulatory capture by so many businesses and industries, how would stock markets operate in an Austrian universe? In other words, would they be noble but imperfect clearinghouses that allocate capital to its best and highest use as opposed to sort of the cronious casino they are today? Yeah, I think the difficulty with this stuff is I actually, I've written stuff for Mies's.org in the past, if people wanna look up it's the social function of the stock market and the social function of futures contracts I think those are the titles where things like the equity markets, capital markets in general and even derivatives markets in a free society where there was no government backstop to those things and no special privileges, I think they would allow people to channel risk around the people who were risk loving would be able to take that on and people who really wanted to have relative safety would be able to hedge that away. So there is a definite social function there and yes, I think the stock price does convey meaningful information, right? So that's, I mean, part of the whole Austrian message is that prices convey real information about the economy to everybody so that they can coordinate their plans and the same is true for stock prices that let me just to give you a silly example, if the stock price were far too low then that allows somebody to come in and buy up a controlling interest in the company who probably shouldn't have that ability, right? You want the stock price to be high to signal the relative importance of that company and the value of its assets to make sure only really qualified people are able to make executive decisions about how that company uses its assets. Just like Mises says, you know, the high price on a natural resource is a signal to other entrepreneurs, use this with care, right? The consumers really like how this is being channeled into a few operations right now and so that's what the social function of having high resource prices is. So I think it's the same thing with the stock market. Yes, there would still be mass psychology and there would be following a crowd and I'm sure there would be bubbles but they would be much tamer because you wouldn't have this huge central bank apparatus fueling them and you wouldn't have people believing in such things as like the green span put where they thought, wow, we can go ahead and party while times are good and not worry about if we're taking on excessive risk because if the whole system did start crashing surely the authorities would step in and prop it up. So you wouldn't have that backstop. So I think people would be much more cautious during the upswing. Cautious indeed. Dr. Robert Murphy, thank you so much for a fascinating interview. Bob blogs at consultingbyrpm.com that's consultingbyrpm.com. Also go to mesis.org type in Bob Murphy or Robert Murphy and you will find dozens of his articles on our website. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.


The gallery at San Antonio Central Library has been transformed into a book garden, a home to oversized southwestern lizards, busts of Renaissance men, Zen rocks, and other sculptures all created by Taiwanese-born artist Lung Bin Chen. As the exhibit opened, we talked to Lung Bin Chen about how his work has evolved and what ideas and materials are under the surface of these carvings. The lizards were made especially for this installation, but the other pieces go back as much as 20 years and have appeared in very different exhibits from Los Angeles to Charleston, South Carolina, Atlanta, Rome, and Hong Kong. Lung Bin Chen's sculptures are much, much more than first meets the eye. Most times, for the fun part, most people, we think this wood carving, or marble, or stone carving, then turn around, then they will find some image, or some part that can show our kind of book of this material fun part. So the inspiration for the shape comes from the book? Yeah, yeah. So, and all the objects, all the sculptures, sometimes we relate to the title of the book and we involve with another issue. The shape was not only meaning from the foam and the meaning of the figure, and also relate to the inside, inside of the book, of the book. Lung Bin Chen said he was influenced by Marshall McLuhan, who authored the pioneering and influential theory that the medium is the message. In a book published in 1964, the year Lung Bin Chen was born, McLuhan wrote that the characteristics of the medium have more of an effect on society than the content it carries. Looking at his own work, Lung Bin Chen said, the medium transforms the subject and becomes the message. So, in the beginning, I used a lot of phone books, because at one phone book a day, we contain about 1,000 names, company, and people's telephone number. It means a small sculpture can contain a small society. And it's a big, big, very surprise for me and for people. One sculpture, they become a small society inside. You can find some small stone I was carving 20 years ago. This one was made from the phone book. So, because phone book was from the recycling paper, so the quality is not so good and then very easy to turn yellow. But it's already 20 years ago, you still can see the picture. I believe it's a white page. And then the color becomes brown, turns to yellow. Yeah, and think about some small stone and inside have 1,000 telephone number inside. One small society inside. So, it's exciting to me. For many years, I was finding the material on the street, because in New York, it's very easy to find a book. And almost every week, they have two days for people to throw away recycling paper. Then I collect the paper from the street. And also the phone book that we update every year, two times, even sometimes three times. So, during the change of recycling day, I can pick up so many new phone books. So, almost the material was free. Then later, I find out I can travel because every city also have a recycling system. So, I do a lot of residency in different cities, different countries, because the machine is the same. I can find the same machine, set up my studio workshop very easy. So, I think since 2000, I begin to do a lot of residency from New York to LA to Atlanta and then to Roma to India to Hong Kong. Because people was excited, it's a new way to carving book become artwork. And I developed this kind of technique. And a lot of people were very excited. So, some gallery owner or some institution director, they were interested in inviting me to do a residency. And find a local material, turn to the art show. So, I almost do a residency more than 10 years from the city to the city from different countries. So, tell me about the technique. You said you could use telephone books. You said you used other kinds of books. So, you put them together and then you cover them? Yeah.  And actually inside of book is not anything. So, you still can open. But look like a stone carving. Actually, it was soft because my artwork you can open. It seems like open a book. So, every page was separate. Then later become, because I need make a big sculpture or big object, then I put school, nail, now I put some coating. So, from the soft sculpture turn to the heart. Then turn to from single object, single sculpture become installation. And so Longbin Chen's work evolved from soft sculptures that open like books, to larger objects held together by screws and nails, with a coating, a hard stone like carvable surface. Longbin Chen's work went from a single piece of art to a collection arranged in an installation, like the book garden he created in the gallery of the San Antonio Central Library.