Michael Laundry (CA/NO 1982) is an interdisciplinary artist working with emerging technology and performance. Laundry’s work often focuses on waterscapes to interrogate hydrological precarity, masculinity in crisis and neoliberalisation. Laundry choreographs immersive installations populated with performances, textiles, and 3D-printed or CNC-machined sculptures.

50 years ago this summer, John Cheever published The Swimmer in the New Yorker. A story about pool hopping. This lecture will discuss the legacy of this story, along with how it informs a 5-year interdisciplinary project exploring performance, literature and technology to examine parallel and entangled challenges to sustainable life: water, capital and masculinity. The project employs sculptures developed in VR, water narratives, and choreography in waterscapes as artistic tools.  Methodological approaches and performance strategies for using archival material and new media are explained in the context of art as a potential tool to imagine water worlds of the past, present and future