DAVID VARHEGYI LIVES A LIFE ON MARS
David Varhegyi was selected in 2022 by the Mars College: an educational program, R&D lab, and off-grid residential community in the desert in California, dedicated to cultivating a low-cost, high-tech lifestyle.
“I am David Varhegyi and I study Interaction Arts at the London College of Communiation. I decided to undertake DPS and find alternative ways of learning what I need for the future. I want to tell you about an experience I undertook in January 2022 as part of my DPS year.
“I had already started thinking about a residency opportunity, that would allow me a new kind of learning. I had in the back of my head, a school rI had heard about, run as a Siemens artist residency in the desert. I investigated and found out that I could apply for January till April 2022.”
“I first heard about this educational program called Mars College back in 2019. I had seen the amazing images of the pop-up school and realised that all I had to do was respond to an open call. This was definitely a big jump for me as I had never been to America before and I knew little of the program organisers and what ban interview would involve. What would three months in the desert be like, who would I be sharing the experience with and what would I learn?
“I was delighted to be accepted and spent a week in Los Angeles staying with my friends collecting some supplies and mentally preparing for a trip to Mars. The biggest challenge was to survive in a challenging environment. I needed some basic survival knowledge and some camping gear to get ready for four months living in desert conditions. This is the kind of learning that the whole world needs with the climate emergency that we are all witnessing.
“When I arrived the first 2 weeks exclusively consisted of building the camp itself, creating a sustainable living environment for 3 months. We built four main buildings. We had two kitchens, a compost toilet and shower, and structures that served as living / working spaces: one of which was a dedicated event and bar space. I had no building experience beforehand, so it was an amazing feeling to build a whole camp for 50 people from the ground up.“
“Half the cohort were experienced builders and the other half were more like me, with other skills. We had a great system of sharing tasks and introducing one another to basics skills. I learnt so many skills just in those first 2 weeks – too many to list. After the first two "Build weeks," the next phase was entitled "Mod week". This was the phase which we started to make the whole camp more home-like. We started to decorate, after all we were going to stay in this environment for 3 months so why not make it a bit more than a basic living environment.
“During the "Mod week" my main focus was building, designing and decorating the bar/event building. I chose this because of my many years of experience as a bartender and event planning. One of my biggest achievements during this period was to build a "floating" bar top from recycled wood that I salvaged from a nearby town. Sustainability and recycling played a big role in everything we undertook at Mars College, from compost toilets to using recycled materials for building. I learnt so many ways you can live an almost, sustainable life, cheaply outside conventional society. This experience has changed me fundamentally. This notion of living “outside” society and prototyping an alternative lifestyle which challenges a capitalist urbanised way of life, was a fundamental purpose of studying at the one of the Mars College in California. I shall never consume energy or non-virgin materials in the same way again.”
***
DPS—SIP—EXPO—2022 // DPS self-initiated projects (SIPs) have been an opportunity for UAL LCC London DPS students to express themselves via their personal projects and wider creative endeavours over the course of their DPS year.