Hello. We're artists working through collaborative social practice and creative research to understand the ways in which locality is shaped and enacted in the city.
I recently came across some documentation of a visual arts exhibit at Casino Luxembourg called, in English, “This is Not a Casino.” The show features a plethora of sculptural and installation work that seemingly plays games with the viewer/participant.
For instance, the above image is a pool table that could never be used as such. Also included in the exhibit are a trampoline with no room for a person to jump and a basketball net with an almost endless veil of a net attached to the rim.
I really enjoy work like this, work that mocks those who think that art exhibits should be superficially gratifying and easy to digest.
Using fruit as their lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. A number of their projects look at the social, political, and ecological issues surrounding local food, public food, and land use, though it all began with the process of mapping local fruit trees in LA.
From their site…
“Over time our interests have expanded from mapping public fruit to include Public Fruit Jams in which we invite the citizens to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours; Community Fruit Tree Plantings on the margins of private property and in community gardens; Public Fruit Park proposals in Hollywood, Los Feliz and downtown LA; and Neighborhood Infusions, taking the fruit found on one street and infusing it in alcohol to capture the spirit of the place.”
I really enjoy the social side of Fallen Fruit‘s work. This communal jam-making being perhaps the most interesting, as it involves a kind of process that highlights interaction and time. As well, their consideration of the legalities and local community practices seem to be very balanced with the rather “nice” focus on fruit at the centre of their questions — a tactic in which I strongly believe. How much more productive of a conversation can you have about these issues when you’re (somewhat subversively) framing it around fruit?
kanarinka is a new media artist whose research interests include the politics of digital information, feminist performance art, participatory culture and the emotional landscape of Homeland Insecurity. She is Co-Founder of the non-profit collective iKatun, a founding member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, and teaches at RISD’s Digital+Media Graduate Program and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
In Spring 2007, kanarinka ran the entire evacuation route system in Boston and measured its distance in breaths. The project is an attempt to measure our post-9/11 collective fear in the individual breaths that it takes to traverse these new geographies of insecurity.
The $827,500 Boston emergency evacuation system was installed in 2006 to demonstrate the city’s preparedness for evacuating people in snowstorms, hurricanes, infrastructure failures, fires and/or terrorist attacks.
It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston consists of a series of running performances in public space (2007), a web podcast of breaths (2007), and a gallery installation of the archive of breaths (2008). There’s also an online collection of podcasts, with audio recordings made during each running performance.
The work is being shown as a part of Experimental Geography, an exhibition that explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth. I picked up the book from this traveling exhibition a while ago and it’s an interesting read. There’s some inspiring work, but as is often the case with these kind of collection books, the introduction is far more enlightening than many of the preceding chapters.
What I like about this project is the physical translation of a kind of bureaucracy along with the gesture of exploration through so much of the city under the restrictions of urgency and evacuation. It makes me want to imagine ways for exploring bureaucracies of Windsor.
It took a while. A little over a week I guess. However, it finally clicked — FAT Labs’ latest project #000000book is starting to make sense to me in terms of how big it could be.
Part of the problem may have been just the early overview of the project that circulated the blogs: #000000book is an open repository for sharing and archiving motion captured graffiti tags. Tags are saved as digital text files known as GML (Graffiti Markup Language), which can be captured through freely available software such as Graffiti Analyisis (marker), DustTag (iPhone), EyeWriter (eye movement) and Laser Tag (laser). Graffiti writers are invited to capture and share their own tags, and computer programmers are invited to create new applications and visualizations of the resulting data.
It just seemed to me, initially, that there would be this collection of tags that had been sort of digitized through an open platform, but I kind of thought, so what? But, I knew that it had to be kind of groundbreaking. Most of the projects that involve this mix of technology and graffiti that I’ve seen come out of GRL or FAT have been very, very cool, in the way that they think about mixing tactics and tools.
#000000book is no exception, as you can see above, Golan Levin hooked up a robotic arm to read from the GML database to reproduce a tag. We are in the future.
If you haven’t already signed up for the Art&Education email list, do it now. Also, make sure you tick off at least the E-Flux list too. It’s nearly always a joy to get these in my inbox, always making me wish I had more time to read, to apply, to attend these exhibitions and schools and conferences that I see advertised on these lists.
Love in a Cemetery is just the most recent interesting thing to come from these lists, with the title taken from a quote by Allan Kaprow that goes like this, “Life in a museum is like making love in a cemetery.” With L.A.-based visual artist Andrea Bowers and curator Robert Sain, students from the Otis College of Art and Design and community organizations from throughout L.A. are participating in this exploration of aesthetics, pedagogy, and cultural politics.
Ok, sounds pretty good, definitely something that we’d generally be interested in, but here’s the really good part…
The project features a unique take on art as examination, as investigation into the future of cultural organizations, including art schools and community-based activist groups in the same learning circle as the better known museums of L.A.
And…
Sain considers the opportunity and obligation for arts organizations to be socially responsibleand responsive in an age of diminished resources and uncertainty.
18th Street itself has recently shifted from running a standard gallery program to an entirely different model for using the space — making it active by curating artists involved in process-based work continually. It’s still art, it’s still curated art, but it’s committing to thinking about what art can do or what art can be today.
It’s exciting to read this stuff. You should be excited. It’s exciting because this is part of what we try to do and it’s nice to know that other people like doing this as well.
It’s a pretty quick read and helpful to contextualize what we do here at Broken City Lab, as we locate ourselves as a part of this lineage. I’m always wanting to spend more time thinking about the context in which we place ourselves … we’ve had the opportunity to do this in small bursts on a number of occasions (one of my favourites being our trek to New York back in September), but I also think this is where the talk around generating some kind of larger text (dare I say, self-published book) keeps hanging around in the back of my mind.
Ultimately for the sake of thinking through the larger discussion that we continually have around our practice and to counter the limits that this blog format seems to present, I’d love to say that we’ll write a book this year, but don’t hold us to that.
[image of the architecture collective, Ant Farm's Media Burn from Make]
At any one time there are around 6000 lightning storms happening across the world, amounting to some 16 million storms each year. Such dizzying statistics are useful to hold in mind while experiencing Streetlight Storm, a new artwork by Katie Paterson.
Paterson’s work often deals with the translation of experiences of nature to representations of nature. I quite enjoy projects like this that visualize the complexities of data from the natural world in quiet, simple ways, as previously noted.
Be warned, the music kind of destroys this video. At any rate, for one month on Deal Pier in Kent, during the hours of darkness, the pier lamps will flicker in time with lightning strikes happening live in different parts of the world.
Inspired by the Hudson River, The River That Flows Both Ways is a project by Spencer Finch that documents a 700-minute (11 hours, 40 minutes) journey on the river in a single day.
On June 12, 2008, from a tugboat drifting on Manhattan’s west side and past the High Line, Finch photographed the river’s surface once every minute. The color of each pane of glass was based on a single pixel point in each photograph and arranged chronologically in the tunnel’s existing steel mullions. Time is translated into a grid, reading from left to right and top to bottom, capturing the varied reflective and translucent conditions of the water’s surface.
Much of Finch’s work relies on scientific, or at least methodological process, to re-present natural occurrences or phenomenon. I really enjoy the processes involved in his work and his continuing translation of information and data, or at times, the failure thereof.
Installed by medical students from Wayne State University at Detroit’s Heidelberg Project, The Detroit Medical Art Project seeks to highlight the lack of healthcare for many of Detroit’s residents.
Asking questions like, “How do you take care of your patients when the community is falling apart all around you?”, the students created the project from scavenged materials and donated equipment to depict a medical clinic that is so desperately needed in the area.
There’s a video in the Detroit Free Press article that features some quick, but good, interviews with the medical students who created the project, and shows some of the installation process. It’s interesting to know that type of discussion goes on in the classroom for medical training, and quite inspiring to see the kind of dialogue being generated through an installation.
Organized by The Public Access Collective in collaboration with L.O.T. : Experiments in Urban Research (Collective), The Leona Drive Project took six vacant bungalows set for demolition by HYATT HOMES, a developer in Willowdale, Ontario, and turned them into temporary sites for art interventions.
The project is already over, it was up for just the last week of October, but it looks like it was a huge amount of fun, and obviously drew parallels to our own Indian Road. From their site, “While the curators anticipate several sub-themes emerging from the individual artists, the overall problematic for the exhibition is the remarkable shift from the suburbs of old to the suburbs of contemporary Canada, namely the neighborhoods and precincts of the multicultural, but nonetheless parsed state. As such, the project will interrogate what has been lost in terms of the older identities and utopias, domestic, regional and national, and the concomitant transformations around issues of gender, race, class and what was broadly proclaimed as the good life.”
Late last spring, there was some discussion about putting together a proposal for The Leona Drive Project along with some other Windsor artists / thinkers, but we just couldn’t pull our idea into the right context for the project. Our idea involved working in some capacity with the houses on Indian Road. That idea, along with some other recent discussions about the potentials for other installations to occur on a series of vacant lots or the like, might just lead to something doable. Really, there are so many places around the city that could be the centre of an excellent conversation, we need to start addressing them, so be on the look out, or help us track down some landlords (landlords other than the Ambassador Bridge).
