Chip Lord

Chip Lord
Lord in San Francisco, CA, February, 2010
Nationality	American
Education	Tulane University 1968 BFA
Known for	Digital Art, New Media Art Film
Notable work	Cadillac Ranch, Media Burn, The Eternal Frame
Awards	National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Artist Fellowship from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowships
Patron(s)	R. Buckminster Fuller

Chip Lord is an American media artist and Professor Emeritus, UC Santa Cruz and residing in the Bay Area. He is best known for his work with the alternative architecture and media collective known as Ant Farm, which he co-founded with Doug Michels in 1968. His work generally takes a satirical look at American myths and legends, they are often "nostalgic, but edged with an ironic detachment."

Born in 1944, Lord graduated from Tulane University, New Orleans where he received his M.Arch. at The Tulane University School of Architecture in 1968. Lord entered college five years earlier, choosing New Orleans's Tulane because he wanted to major in architecture, the result of a boyhood passion for exploring houses under construction. Lord decided not to go the traditional route after graduation by joining an architecture firm for four years before being able to start his own firm. Doug Michels, who graduated from Yale University in 1967, met Lord while on a college lecture tour during the previous year. Together, they founded the alternative architecture practice Ant Farm, which was later expanded to include Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier.

Lord attributes his education in architecture as a strong foundation for his art making. The training in developing ideas, planning, placing them into action are all skills Lord places into his work, a way of organized thinking. Their inspiration drew upon specifically the events of the year 1968 and focused on the function of the generation and counter culture as a way to reinvent the society created by the generation before them.

After graduation, Doug Michels was invited to teach at the University of Houston. The year before Michels visited the University on his lecture tour and helped to incite a student rebellion at the School Of Architecture where they effectively ran the dean out of the school. One of the demands was that they bring Michels back to the school to lecture. Michels brought Lord along where they were able to work for a year.

After the University of Houston, the pair moved back to the Bay Area where they set up their alternative practice in a warehouse space in Sausalito.

The purpose of the Ant Farm was to propose a restructuring of architecture education and become more involved with a community opposed to a very rigid traditional method. The group was a self-described "art agency that promotes ideas that have no commercial potential, but which we think are important vehicles of cultural introspection."

This early period was marked by performance pieces and nomadic inflatable structures. Their work interfaced with the prospering environmental movement and mirrored the work of other projects like The Whole Earth Catalog.