Black and white portrait of the head and shoulders of Mary Ellen Carroll

Mary Ellen Carroll

Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize
February 14–July 22, 2022
Profession
Principal, MEC, studios, New York
Project title
PUBBLICA UTILITÀ DUE (Designing and Architecting the Invisible—Radio Frequency in the Twenty-First Century)
Project description

PUBBLICA UTILITÀ DUE will focus on radio frequency and its potential as a material and space that is intentionally architected and programmed as a twenty-first-century form of land art, albeit for spectrum. It will build upon the iteration in New Orleans, PUBLIC UTILITY 2.0, with additional unlicensed bandwidth in Italy and the European Union. Since the beginning of the last century, Italy has been foundational in the design and architecting of radio frequency for wireless communication. The Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi pioneered wireless communication by designing antennas and transmitters that would connect the world and included the first radio broadcasts from the Vatican. Coltano was the site that first utilized and deployed the designs for the transmission of radio signals that became the model to transmit across the Atlantic for radio and then TV. Research and design will be conducted in Rome and also with ICTP - The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste and the Polytechnic University of Turin.

The photograph of Mary Ellen Carroll was taken by Roy Beeson.