To the audiences and close observers, this work defied description as a work of art during the late 80's when I was performing this work . This was largely because I was stretching the definition of art way beyond the tenuous gap between art and life that was at the time, the happy valley where modern movements thought art was believed to reside.

By the time that Manatee alert was launched, I had sufficient data to visualize that the outside of the project's obvious conservation and cultural benefits the outcome would be in the form of a new measure of the power of art  focused on collective efforts regarding critical issues such as the conservation of the West Indian Manatee.

Therefore Manatee Alert was a model, a test model not just for the transformative nature of art itself but also a test for the role that art as the architect of a relationship between humanity and the world that was new to the planet.

This page will focus on a few of the several thousand pieces of documentary material obtained during and after its performance. I have selected a number of details that I think convey the general idea of this very complex and pioneering work of art.

Albert Einstein had proposed that "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

Manatee alert was a test of an approach to conservation from a different level of thinking, a level that acknowledged the innate ability of the citizen to act favorably on his/her own free will, if provided with workable tools and an attractive cultural incentive.

This was and is today of supreme importance as we are painfully realizing that the approach to conservation through legislation and enforcement is not only expensive, but also beyond the economic reach of most nations and rather futile considering its overall net results.

I designed Manatee Alert to operate simultaneously with the official conservation program as prescribed by the scientists working with the government authorities. I very much wanted to establish a comparative contrast between the two approaches. The idea was not to compete but to approach the aesthetic symmetry that would provide the most positive engagement of society for a cultural solution to conservation.

It was a popularly accepted notion that the leading cause of manatee mortality came as a result of boats colliding with unsuspecting manatees. The official  manatee recovery plan established fines and penalties for boaters in various measures, but failed to provide a tool to encourage vigilance and protection.

This was my first encounter with the limitations of public awareness, ineffective laws and missed opportunities to enlighten and engage the public to be a part of the solution. instead the boating public was barricaded as part of the problem.

Manatee Alert was conceived as a survey of just how can the effective population regarding the West Indian Manatee be engaged to participate directly in the recovery process and produce results that can be used to form a new criteria regarding conservation.

The Manatee Alert project was at its core based upon the oldest approach to animal husbandry known to humanity, namely, if you can keep an eye on the herds you can keep them away from harm.

I therefore formulated a plan to organize a collaborative of voluntary "Manatee Alert Rangers" to report manatee sightings to a telephone hotline. the reports were then relayed to newspapers, radio and television in the form of a "Manatee Alert  Report" to let boaters know where manatee sightings had been reported and alert for caution in those waterways.

I invited my close collaborator Brent Scheneman to be the official in charge of manatee alert operations and together we managed to sustain the project and to exceed all expectations.

A sample of one of the more than 1000 text works (integral to the project as documentation) that were issued daily to two television stations, two major news papers and several radio stations as a "Manatee Alert report"  follows.

It was already a triumph that the media had been persuaded to feature a daily Manatee Alert Report, but imagine that the report was a function of a work of art that successfully incorporated itself in the context of life. So seamlessly in fact, that by the time I retrieved the documentation to make the daily collage like the one above, the material in it was the reality created by the work itself in the real world. To make matters more marvelous the reality created had a utility that was redeemed with a pay-off in prevention and positive engagement of the community to the conservation of the imperiled Manatee.

Not wasting an opportunity on my part I also gathered extant  meteorological data that I knew would become usable, in future comparative studies of climate trends and fluctuation while at the same time recording a correlation between the data and the presence of manatees at  specific locations. (see the text work above)

 This was being done at a time when global warming was  a concern going around the scientific circles and communicators like the great Carl Sagan where already sounding the warnings. 

There was also a problem with scientists reaching the corpses of dead manatees while the carcasses were still viable for study and also in determining the cause of death. Manatee Alert solved that problem by locating and bringing the carcasses to a place where the scientists could retrieve the corpse within ours of the fatality.

Below one such case carried out by Voluntary Manatee Alert Ranger Captain Gerald J. Radtke in March 26, 1989.  In the image, a Fish and Wildlife Service scientist loads a carcass onto a trailer bound for the Pathobiology lab in St. Petersburg Florida.

The signal mimicked the shape of a manatee tail as the mammal dives under the water. the boater would make the signal and point to the area where manatees were seen. simple and sweet, model Julie Clarke demonstrated the signal for the media in 1991.

Luckily we were able to maintain the pace and new and marvelous elements were added to the program.

Manatee alert in 1990 became a not for profit entity registered with the state of Florida. This was a needed step for a number of reasons most prominent among was the opportunity to obtain materials that were out of reach financially but quite essential to round up the project.

 Manatee alert recruited over 3,000 volunteer manatee Alert Rangers, a fleet of six Jet-sky patrol boats with an attachment of voluntary pilots and mission sponsors over a three county area. The local sundowner aerial patrol was flying observation missions to count and locate herds moving through their range.

The fleet performed what I called "Environmental theater" shows engaging the audience into participatory conservation games and activities. Captain Planet piloted one of the Jet-sky's at the premier of the theater program.

Singer/songwriter Andy Goldberg wrote and composed the Manatee Alert Song which was choreographed by the talented Jean Bochette for the children class who performed the dance at the famed Edison Children Parade to the delight of thousands of viewers.

The patrols were extended thanks to our own plane and injured or death manatee missions were flown as needed.

Towards the end of the project Manatee alert was pretty much a state wide project with its news and bulletins reaching several million viewers nightly.

I fully intended for Manatee Alert to become a project that could be easily replicated by others in a host of different applications and environments. Sadly as it is still the case, this project was happening way before its time. someone suggested to me that Manatee Alert was a piece of 21st century conservation that fell by accident in the 20th century.

The amount of documentation on this project is overwhelming and I hope it becomes the subject of documentary. for now this sample of the project was presented to illustrate the breath of art in the context of life and the resulting phenomena which as I said before is not just new to art but to the planet.

"Light in the River" acrylic on canvas Tiité 1996 

Gift from the artist to the Lee Memorial Children's Hospital

The key to the success of Manatee Alert was the implementation of a new mechanism (Sufficiency) by which a dimension of conservation is added to the cultural fabric of the critical populations linked directly to the problem.

That breakthrough was and is of great significance today twenty years later for several reasons, amongst them are:

1. The fact that initiatives that ran parallel to Manatee Alert and that today still pursue advocacy, awareness and official mandate to enforce their conservation measures, have failed to deliver a culture of conservation and have all but lost the genuine interest of the people.
2. The costs related to conservation by force grow exponentially with the human population growth, the further decline of the environment and many other factors. Sadly, the survival of the entities in charge of the conservation measures are─ obliged to focus on their own survival and actual conservation of the species, remains marginal  by their own standards and no where near by the standards set by Manatee Alert two decades ago.
3. The Manatee Alert model clearly demonstrated that people can embrace conservation initiatives wholeheartedly if they are given the tools, the direction, the encouragement and the recognition for their efforts through communal celebration and pageantry. the results obtained by the model remain unsurpassed to this date.
4. Last, and perhaps the most important reason is that we (humanity) in the 21st century have entered an era outlined by an undeniable worldwide climate of crisis and opportunity for either transformation or gradual collapse. the trouble is that transformation is expensive and collapse inevitable without a delivery mechanism for cultural transformation. The Manatee Alert model tested the worthiness of the mechanism and the effects of cultural transformation at a fraction of the cost of other initiatives, making thereby the process accessible to all of the nations of the world.

It was difficult to categorize Manatee Alert as a work of art back then in 1987 when I launched the project. To have said then, that the project was a "four-dimensional work of performance art" would have sounded as ludicrous as it possibly sounds to you now.

Yet the reconciliation between art and life, requires a seamlessness between them that cannot be expressed any other way. The reason is that life is a four-dimensional event which also explains why the reconciliation was not possible before. The extra dimension was needed just as it was needed by physics to make the dynamical world of particle physics work.

Manatee Alert is a complex project that I do not entirely understand myself, in fact, I spent from 1992 to 1999 reviewing the data just so I could be sure that the model and the central ideas could be replicated and adapted to other initiatives by other artists as you would use a recipe.