Peter Fend

Africa-Arctic Flyway

Peter Fend (*1950) is an American who, in 1980, on the advice of a lawyer, founded the Ocean Earth Construction and Development Corporation (Ocean Earth) as the legal successor to an artist-run enterprise that began in 1979 and was intended to provide artistic ideas and practices for clients in the real world. The enterprise included Richard Prince, Peter Nadin, Robin Winters, Jenny Holzer, Coleen Fitzgibbon, and Fend; the latter three subsequently purchased shares in the company.
Ocean Earth is based on structural and data visualization concepts developed in collaboration with Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Sharits, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Carolee Schneemann, as well as requests for real-world initiatives from Joseph Beuys (1980) and the United Nations Environment Programme (1982, 1989, 2008). The company has collaborated with scientists from Caltech in the United States, oceanographers from Plymouth, two oceanographic centers in St. Petersburg, and naval architect Marc Lombard. In 1981, shareholders Sharits, Fend, and Fitzgibbon decided to create an exploratory journey through these sites using visual simulations of multispectral satellite data. This quickly led to authoritative monitoring for the global media of the Falklands, Beirut, Libya, the Iran-Iraq War, Nicaragua, the Amazon Basin, and Chernobyl, with historic consequences. After six years, Western governments halted this work.
Since then, drawing on the knowledge acquired by the firm, Fend has presented multidisciplinary projects at Documenta and the biennials in Beijing, Yinchuan, Osaka, Venice, Liverpool, and Sharjah—projects aimed at finding practical solutions to economic and ecological crises. Direct engagement with government officials is currently underway in Algeria, Ukraine, Norway, Italy, and New Zealand. Since 1988, various galleries have exhibited Fend’s projects, notably American Fine Arts, Esther Schipper, Essex Street, Christian Nagel, Barbara Weiss, Georg Kargl, Pinksummer, and Le Case d’Arte. Major conferences have been held at leading architecture and art schools, attended by committees of military experts, the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (resulting in an official report), the United Nations Correspondents Association (twice; sponsored by the U.S., Russian, and Turkish press), architecture festivals, and international scientific conferences. The list of confiscated or forged works is likely longer than that of existing ones; various authorities believe that art in the real world, in real terms, could threaten their professions—or, as some say, the state itself.