WindsockCurrents, is a site-specific public art installation created by New York conceptual artist RT Livingston. The work honors the past as it looks to the future.

RT Livingston's placement of sixteen reengineered commercial airport windsocks stretches nearly 1100 feet along historic Crissy Field, symbolically reviving the most intact 1920's airfield west of the Mississippi. Livingston observes, "Crissy Field, once San Francisco's first line of strategic defense, is the ideal site for an artwork that demonstrates the potential for wind as the first line of defense against our continued dependence on fossil fuel." The Golden Gate Bridge, symbolic of San Francisco's willingness to bridge the cultural divide, is the perfect backdrop for an installation that hopes to encourage the bridging of the energy divide.

WindsockCurrents speaks to the relevant issues of the moment. The word current means belonging to the present time or a steady onward movement such as the flow of an electric charge. The installation demonstrates the real-time movement of wind as it manifests the potential for electrical current to be tapped from its energized charge.

WindsockCurrents, composed of preexisting industrial materials, makes the point that in order to harness any kind of energy source industrial apparatus must be placed in the environment. The installation's black steel vertical poles, topped by "International Orange" windsocks, plays off the red/orange span of the Golden Gate Bridge. The color orange carries far reaching global, cross-cultural significance. For example, while Buddhists ascribe a spiritual meaning to the color, we in the United States have recently come to think of it as a warning against terror. In color theory, orange visually vibrates against its blue-sky compliment.

June 4, noon to 4 P.M.

RED DIVE, the performance/choreographic company from New York, enters into an interactive collaboration with WindsockCurrents in which Maureen Brennan and Ashley Smith dressed in bright orange construction jumpsuits, guide visitors through the long expanse of the work. RED DIVE explores the physical connections between humans and nature in transforming wind energy into current, unexpected human impulses and inter-relationships.

WindsockCurrents is a project of ecoartspace created for the United Nations World Environment Day 2005, in cooperation with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.