Adam DelMarcelle
Adam is an artist and educator who uses design activism to engage directly with communities to address societal issues. His work addressing the overdose crisis has received international recognition and continues to make a-large scale impact. DelMarcelle’s work is in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress, the Cushing Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, Syracuse University, and several others across the United States. Currently he is a Professor of Design at Wilson College, and lives in PA with his partner Missy and their son Joey.
Heather Snyder Quinn
Heather is usually where she “isn’t supposed to be.” You will find her playing in unexpected places, physical or virtual, and collaborating with people from an array of backgrounds. Her work uses design fiction to empower communities to imagine possible futures and understand technology’s impact on human freedoms. Her work has been featured by Yale Law School, The World Economic Forum, MIT Press, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, and NASA. She is an Assistant Professor of Design Futures at Washington University in Saint Louis, Director of the Parallel Futures Lab, and mother of two daughters.
Mariah
Mariah is an augmented reality experience that narrates stories of historical injustice through the backdrop of significant cultural institutions and connections to corrupt funding that has allowed them to exist.
Named for Mariah Lotti, who lost her life to an overdose at 19 years old, the app enables viewers to “legally trespass” in the metaverse at significant cultural locations across the globe. Unfortunately, these locations have turned a blind eye to the root of the financial support—one made with a promise of lifeblood. The benefactor’s request?—never ask how the money was made, and never look behind the velvet curtain of priceless artifacts, but carve our name into stone as an immortal marker of our generosity.
The Sackler’s are one such family whose name has been carved into marble. Their market is pharmaceuticals, and their treasure is Oxycontin, a medication responsible for 500,000 deaths to date. Because of their lasting legacy, one person in America dies every 5 minutes to overdose. The curtain that hides these facts takes the form of Asian antiquities, arts funding, medical school donations, and countless financial supports to much smaller organizations that are willing to set aside their moral compass for funds that will keep their businesses running.
The AR application originally transformed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Sackler wing that houses the Temple of Dendur into a virtual memorial for Mariah Lotti and others who have lost their lives to the overdose epidemic in America. Exploring AR’s potential to revise historical narratives and its ethical implications, the app augments Sackler family-donated art and artifacts with “virtual memorials”—audio and video of the lives of overdose victims. Mariah becomes the witness and an actor of ever-present protest and resistance.
“Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets - what glory may get be yours if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, and the rude ore of commerce into sculptured marble, and railroad and mining stocks - things that will perish without the using, and which in the next financial panic shall surely shrivel like parched scrolls into the glorified canvas of the world’s masters, that shall adorn these walls for centuries. The race of Wall Street is to hunt the philosopher’s stone, to convert all baser things into gold.”
—Joseph Coates, 1890, part of a speech given to the original benefactors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Exploring a more global reach in 2021, Mariah expanded to The Pyramid du Louvre in Paris, France (also Sackler funded) with a geolocated installation. Titled “Funded by Loss: Death in Real-Time,” the installation is a large-scale, 3-dimensional number that increases every 5 minutes to represent real-time overdose fatalities. This number will be placed at all locations that decide to take the Sackler name down in the face of political pressure and misguided activist influence. The Sackler family attempted to art-wash the public with their donations of priceless cultural artifacts. The scraping away of the name by activists will whitewash the same walls in the hope that the silence of a blank wall will give comfort. Unfortunately, in this seemingly noble endeavor, the taking down of the name serves only to add to the collective amnesia of our past actions. Until the individuals that have received funding from the Sackler family replace the name with the names of those lost to overdose, the Sackler name must stay. Until then, Mariah will augment the narrative to educate the public.