We met to begin our Creative Campus projects earlier this week. The graffiti project turned out to be quite different than I expected so I ended up going with a different group. The group consists of two Italian architect students, two architect students from the U.S. and myself. The project is called ‘Giú la testa!’ Loosely translated, it means something like ‘get your head down,’ or ‘prepare yourself.’ It is a sort of play on words because the main question for our project is ‘What would you do if you woke up tomorrow and the Duomo was gone?’ So it can mean ‘get your head down/get ready’ or the ‘dome/head of the city is coming down.’ A lot is still up in the air, but so far the project is going to consist in one form or another of interviews done with Italians and foreigners on the streets of Florence, an interactive map of the city (minus the Duomo) and some other interactive aspect that people can hopefully take with them to continue the conversation outside of the festival (maybe some postcards they can design of what they imagine would take the place of the Duomo had it never been built). The project is meant to inspire thought and spark conversation about the contemporaneity (or lack there of) of the Florence. We hope to bring out ideas about whether or not it is possible for Florence to preserve the historical integrity of the city, while continuing to evolve through the construction of contemporary buildings, etc.
SnapShots:
I met an amazing guy named Ray today who is a professor at Florence University of the Arts (FUA). He has immense passion for photography and is enthrawled with cheap, old cameras. He showed my roommates and I a variety of cameras, including a Brownie Kodak, and briefly explained how to use each one. He is organizing a group of students to take snapshots of Florence at night and is going to teach all willing participants how to make pinwheel cameras and develop our own film. The project will end with a show containing images taken with pinwheel cameras vs. digital cameras and a slideshow documenting our process.
Creative Campus:
Creative Campus is run by the director of Florence International Theatre Company. It gives study abroad students the opportunity to participate in the local arts community in meaningful ways and show residents that American students do more at night than drink. They are looking for artists to work on a variety of projects and I am hoping to collaborate on a web-based work dealing with the overwhelming amount of graffiti on the streets of Florence.
Norwood shared this article with me today: http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/2009/07/01/rubble-rousers/.
It is about new art phenomenae going on in Detroit. Talks with artist Jon Brumit. It mentions Tyree Guyton who started the Heidelberg Project there. I’m trying to track down some information on an even earlier project in the 80’s which was done by a woman who piled 3 houses/yards full of various material as a way of honoring the things of the world which were all products of god. She also sang and would talk with visitors. She lived in one of the houses.
One of the DeVos Foundations just gave 2.5 mil matching grant to UICA. Check out the whole story HERE on M-live.
Another thing the article mentions that is of more importance to Visual Studies is the Grant they received from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This sounds like work we’re preparing for:
“The DeVoses’ matching grant comes on the heels of a $150,000 matching grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services grant went to UICA to develop new video and internet-based media to curate and present its exhibitions, launch a permanent digital collection of contemporary arts resources, and offer new media educational programs for teachers, students and the community.”
I just heard about this new institute done by Olafur Eliasson.
http://www.raumexperimente.net/index-en.html
Add this to the list of such projects. I particularly was comfortable in the statement: http://www.raumexperimente.net/text-en.html
Here is an excerpt:
Nothing is ever the same
The Institut für Raumexperimente is in itself an experiment. To me, the experiment as a mode of inquiry is necessary if we are to insist on a constant, probing and generous interaction with reality. Or to put it differently: by engaging in experimentation, we can challenge the norms by which we live and thus produce reality. …..
Olafur Eliasson
Hannah Nester sent me links to this new technology; an Augmented Reality Browser. One more version of the Spatial Annotation or Locative Media idea. The video and article are quite informative. This idea was one of the major motivations in the development of the viget.org project. We (the development team) wanted to create a representation of our city that contributed to the data that would show on such systems before they got totally populated with shopping. Such technologies hold out many opportunities for the creation of culture. How might artists use such systems or even develop them?
http://www.good.is/post/better-choices-through-technology
I’ve been hearing a lot about this very public piece in London by Antony Gormley.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/oneandother/
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=oneandanother&search_type=
Check out this new project by Kevin Bewersdorf. Kevin studied in the GV art department before heading to RISD to finish his BFA.
Here is an Interview on Rhizome.org about his previous project Maximum Sorrow. http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/19
Here is his page on the VandA gallery site: http://www.vandanyc.com/artists/bewersdorf/bewersdorf.php
Image from NYTimes slide show http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/arts/20rece.html
Here is another article from the NY times on the impact that the economy is having on the arts. It is important that we keep abreast of such things in visual studies because we aim to encourage finding ways of supporting studio-oriented lives in new ways. When the economy shifts - so do all of the parts of society that make such things possible. Check it out and post a comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/arts/20rece.html
There is also a slide show of artists that goes with the article:
All of the chaos in the economy has me thinking about the relationship of visual culture to the economy. If you pushed me I’d tell you that I’m hoping such things get reconfigured as the economy and society go through this “adjustment”. 6 years ago I read an article by Yochai Benkler called “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm“. It laid our several concise ideas about how the way in which work (and therefore the economy) would likely shift in the next years. He used open-source software development as his model for the future organization of work. Many things about the article have stuck in my mind and influence what I pay attention to as the culture, society and the economy emerge.
Recently I did a search and found some short video bits of him talking about various ideas. Here is one called “Conflicts of Cultural Production”. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8804400681173812998
He has also done a TED talk which can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgYE75gkzkM
Check these out and help me try to figure out the ways in which what he talks about applies to visual arts and material culture.