Rhonda Holberton
July - August 2022

Dark historic brick interior with exposed beams, doorways, and modern art installations.

SIPHON

The city of Holyoke was built in the middle of the nineteenth century around a system of canals that provided power for many industrial mills. The city itself represents a harnessing of geologic/hydro forces that in turn became an organizational force when it came to the city layout and the humans inhabiting and maintaining the mechanisms within the architectural structures.

During my residency in July/August 2022, the region was under a heat advisory warning issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Heat index values up to 102 were common throughout the region.[1]

While in residence, I continued my research focused on technology and geologic time. The history of Holyoke and the history of technology became intertwined. First through a reading of John McPhearsons, Assembling California, and then through both a historical survey of Holyoke and a very material investigation of my surroundings.

I made a site specific installation in the bowels of the building in the paper pulping pits next to the decomposing wooden supports and massive gears of the mill. The water from the canals powering the city still run under the building.

The works I made at the conclusion of the residency include

  • A 3D animation depicting a siphon in infinite loop

  • A dynamic sculptural installation across three of the paper pulping rooms:

    Room 1 contains a dehumidifier pulling water out of the air and pumping it out through a tube.
    Room 2 contains a sculpture that holds the water extracted from the air in the next room.
    Room 3 contains 3 sculptures: 1) a pigeon feather on a shelf  2) a paper sculpture formed by a dinosaur footprint in sandstone a couple miles away 3) a thermometer tracing the subterranean temperature.

Paper City

In 1849, a system of power canals was built parallel to the Connecticut River in Holyoke Massachusetts. The artist residency at lower_cavity features an exhibition space in the bowels of the Wauregan, a former paper mill built in 1897. 

Located between the upper and lower canals, water flowing through the architecture powered a massive wooden transfer system that ran the pulping operations. It was originally part of a much larger complex of mill buildings that occupied the center of what became known as the ‘Paper City’.[2]

Black-and-white 1915 photo of a worker operating machinery inside a Farr Alpaca mill.

Dawson, Devon. Holyoke, Arcadia, Charleston, SC, 2004, p. 95. (a cyborg)

On July 26, 2022 the Biden Administration through the interagency National Integrated Heat Health Information System launched Heat.gov, a website that provides information to understand and reduce the health risks of extreme heat. [3]

Historic black-and-white photograph of the Merrick Thread Company mill in Holyoke, Massachusetts, with Victorian industrial buildings, a tall smokestack, railroad tracks, and workers.

Dawson, Devon. Holyoke, Arcadia, Charleston, SC, 2004, p. 95.

Today, most of the city still receives its primary power from hydroelectric generators at the Hadley Falls Dam and the Holyoke Canal System.[4]

A brightly lit data center aisle lined with rows of black server cabinets, overhead cabling, and cooling equipment.

Interior of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center

Holyoke’s renewable and self-generated power attracted The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, an intercollegiate computing facility. Researchers from several institutions use the data center to run computationally expensive AI experiments and perform complex data models remotely.[5]

Dark brick cellar with exposed wooden beams and a lit display of minimalist glass sculptures.

Siphon, Digital Animation 00:04:00 (looping).

The animation I created is made from a hybrid of material objects and procedurally generated geometry. I made 3D scans of wooden beams from the mill within which the exhibition was housed and then created an animation of a siphon in iterating through an infinite loop. This impossible kind of frictionless production of energy has shown up before in my work.

Scanned book page titled “Assembling California,” featuring text about mining, water resources, and geology.

McPhee, John Angus. Assembling California, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999, p. 71.

Whitewashed historic interior with a hanging fluorescent light, tiled floor, barred window, exposed brick arch, and central wooden post.
Interior of an old stone building with a whitewashed wall, exposed brick arched doorway, stone floor, and weathered wooden post.
Historic black-and-white photo of an ornate Victorian building with a conical roof and tower, accompanied by text about its demolition and marble being used as landfill.

Dawson, Devon. Holyoke, Arcadia, Charleston, SC, 2004

Old arched doorway with exposed brickwork in a weathered white plaster wall
Vertical measuring scale mounted on a white rectangular base against a textured concrete wall
Close-up of a polished metal tool with a pointed tip standing on a reflective white surface
Scanned text describing a fictional dam project, lake levels, boat ramps, and a mountain lions habitat development.

McPhee, John Angus. Assembling California, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999, p. 71.

Whitewashed historic vaulted room with exposed brickwork, tiled floor, wall displays, and museum-style shelves
Close-up of a weathered gray rock surface with layered textures and small twigs

Not far from the residency, some of the first dinosaur prints ever to be scientifically described (in 1836) lay in slabs of sandstone. This area was first studied by Edward Hitchcock, the Amherst College professor who advanced the revolutionary notion that rather than being cold-blooded reptiles, dinosaurs were more like a sort of "reptilian bird." In the 1930s, a Springfield, Massachusetts newspaper poked fun at this notion by referring to the animals that left the fossilized footprints as "the Giant Turkeys of Prof. Hitchcock.

Close-up of a weathered, wrinkled blank sheet of paper on a textured concrete surface
Long brown feather displayed on a white pedestal against a textured concrete wall
Glass of water on a wooden stand in a dilapidated brick doorway
Dark historic brick interior with two rough-hewn doorways leading into adjoining rooms
Black portable air conditioner with clear drainage tubing in front of an old exposed brick and stone wall
Historic black-and-white photograph of water overflowing from the first canal into the second-level canal in Holyoke, Massachusetts, beside canal buildings and a large mill.

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[1] NOAA's National Weather Service. “Heat Advisory Issued by NWS Boston (Southeast New England).” NWS Public Alerts in XML/CAP v1.1 and ATOM Formats - NOAA's National Weather Service, 3 Mar. 2011, https://alerts.weather.gov/.

[2] Wauregan, The. “About.” THE WAUREGAN, https://waureganbuilding.com/about.

[3] “Biden Administration Launches Heat.gov with Tools for Communities Facing Extreme Heat.” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/biden-administration-launches-heatgov-with-tools-for-communities-facing-extreme-heat.

[4] “Hydroelectric Energy.” Holyoke Gas and Electric, https://www.hged.com/smart-energy/clean-energy/hydro/default.aspx.

[5] “About the MGHPCC.” MGHPCC, 4 Nov. 2021, https://www.mghpcc.org/about-the-mghpcc/.

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Rhonda Holberton (b. 1981 Falls Church, VA USA) utilizes technology as a medium to reconcile the biological body with geologic time, revealing their material and environmental impacts both on individual entities and on a planetary scale. Her subtle animations, digital interventions, sculptures and installation pieces move between the material and the immaterial, the authentic and synthetic, and pay special attention to the phenomenology of climate change in order to imagine ways we might collectively write more inclusive rules for digital platforms. Holberton has exhibited widely, including at CULT Aimee Friberg (San Francisco), RMIT Gallery (Melbourne); La Becque | Résidences d’artistes (La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland); FIFI Projects (Mexico City); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); The Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco); San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (San José); and the San Francisco Arts Commission (San Francisco). She was awarded the Fondation Ténot Fellowship in Paris and the CAMAC Artist in Residence at Marnay-sur-Seine, France. Holberton’s work is included in the permanent collections of SFMOMA and the McEvoy Foundation, as well as various private collections. She holds an MFA from Stanford University and is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Media at San José State University.

Artist’s site