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The artist group Rapid Response, founded in reaction to global warming, recently displayed parodic, corporate-style signage and fanciful alternative-fuel station designs at two galleries in New York.

Over 50 million barrels of oil are burned into the atmosphere daily. At governmental and corporate levels there is a reluctance to support a shift to energy sources that are safer for the environment. Experts say that Third World countries without embedded petroleum infrastructures should pass on fossil fuels entirely and find financially viable ways to install new technologies using zero-emissions fuels. For years, automobile manufacturers, oil companies and related businesses have been organizing to develop alternative-fuel cars, yet most of these remain in test stages. Not usually the basis for an art exhibition, such issues are crucial to the recently formed artist partnership called Rapid Response.

From December 1999 to March 2000, a light-box sign reading GLOBAL WARMING hung from the fire escape in the backyard of Nikolai Fine Art, which abuts the Exxon station at 23rd Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan. This sign had the same colors and typeface, and was approximately the same scale, as the gas station's own signage. Similarly appropriating a corporate style to send a subversive message, Rapid Response made another sign in British Petroleum's yellow and green reading GREENHOUSE EFFECT for a recent exhibition at American Fine Arts called "Rapid: Post Petroleum Gas Stations--Launching a Brand." With their proposed brand-name project Rapid, the artists anticipate the emergence of a new market for alternative-fuel stations, in accord with plans such as Ford's and Daimler-Chrysler's to mass-produce fuel-cell vehicles as early as 2003. Unlike the agitprop signs, the plan to build fuel stations puts the artists in competition with the likes of Con Edison, a bold but unrealistic maneuver.

Drawing on the work of experts in fields ranging from architecture to microbiology, Rapid Response members want to put aside art's habitual focus on individual authorship. At American Fine Arts, the Rapid logo, a five-color spiral based on a conch shell, graced a Plexiglas and vinyl sculpture of a gas pump emitting a fluorescent glow. Around the room were black wooden monoliths, each bearing a vinyl square of color in one of the logo colors (which correspond to five nonfossil fuels). These mock pumps stood in front of wall-text analyses of ethanol, methanol, hydrogen, methane and bio-kerosene. The documentation included chemistry, cost estimates for station construction, vehicle development and fuel drawbacks. A sixth monolith, boasting solar panels donated by a company in New Jersey, dealt with rechargeable electric power.

The gallery's back room contained various station designs and drawings of storage equipment, including isometric and elevation views, created using the computer program AutoCAD; sketches of a gas station with cantilevered roofs a la Mies van der Rohe; and an architect's print showing five fuel-production units. The most interesting was a hydrogen station equipped with an inflatable canopy to collect the gas. While pure hydrogen is highly explosive, researchers are trying to find safe ways to store this otherwise environmentally benign substance to power cars. Another project, presented in computer drawings and a small model, was a tank suspended in an open box frame, designed to offer a solution to the contamination problems often related to tanks buried in soil; the frames could be kept above ground behind embankments or in basements. Although meant to be functional, the model, in the gallery context, looked like a maquette for a large abstract sculpture.

Two written statements accompanied the exhibition's visual elements, one posted on the wall, the other meant for viewers to take with them. These texts were informative and full of inspiring, if untested, ideas. Rapid Response proclaims the dangers of fossil fuels and aims to further the use of 100 percent fossil-fuel-free, renewable energy sources. They discuss various natural resources that are suited to their project. Crops and crop wastes (biomass) can be processed to make methane. In an effort to avoid the environmental dilemmas associated with dams, the team prefers to determine locations where the rapid movement of water occurs naturally. Water descending mountains can be harnessed for electricity. And even industries that are notorious sources of pollution can convert their wastes into fuel using recently developed equipment. Other concepts include seeding ponds and lakes with high-energy crops such as water hyacinths and algae, and building aerial scrims over fuel refineries to trap the carbon dioxide inevitably released during processing. The collected carbon dioxide could nurture hanging fields of plants, such as ivy. At times, the statements verge on satire, as when Rapid Response proposes that large towns use their populations' waste to produce the local gas supply.

Rapid Response is a shifting coalition. For this show, with the assistance of specialists whose contributions were acknowledged in the statements, there were four artists. Christina Cobb works at freeagency.net, whose current campaign against genetically altered foods disseminates information on such topics as increasing the tomato's resistance to cold weather by inserting a flounder's gene. Peter Fend, a political artist who was involved with the defunct East Village group Colab, often works in collaboration with other artists. For example, shows called "Newsroom," which have taken place in the U.S. and Europe, function as information hot spots, where the artists process visual data such as satellite photos and maps. Ocean Earth, an architectural component corporation Fend established in 1980, has nascent projects in Serbia, Montenegro and Iceland. Julia Fischer is a sculptor whose work was last shown in New York at Barbara Greene. William Meyer cofounded several ecological organizations, in particular, a human rights' network for indigenous people of the Amazon rain forest.

The exhibition operated on many levels. The term "conceptual art activists," which one critic applied to the group members, is apt in that it suggests their focus on idea over form, as well as their underlying purpose of social change. Whether or not Rapid Response is able to build artist-designed alternative-fuel stations, the exhibition was successful in presenting an imaginative and in-depth look at concerns that affect everyone.