Final Group Project Expectations

Just to reiterate what was presented in class today:

+ Each group will have 10-15 minutes to give a visual presentation of their final event and process. This presentation can be digital or analog, the form of your presentation is up to your group and your project idea. If you need longer than that, please contact me ahead of time so I can make any necessary adjustments to the class schedule. If you plan on projecting, it's your responsibility to check out the appropriate adapter from the Media Center before class.

+Each group will hand in thorough documentation of their final project and process. This will more than likely take the form of 1) a copy of your final presentation and 2) your final mini-thesis. Please burn any digital imagery and/or media onto a CD or DVD ahead of time to turn it immediately after your presentation. 

Here's a downloadable PDF of the project brief for the Mini-Thesis I handed out in class this week.

Good luck!

See the FOUR BOXES Midwest Premiere is tonight!

Like independent film?

Like horror/thrillers?

Like the internet?

Than you'll l-o-v-e the film Four Boxes.

It's back from it's World Premiere at the SXSW film festival, and is making it's MPLS/ST.PL premiere tonight at the Minneapolis•St.Paul International Film Festival. So if you're looking to take a break from finals, head over to St. Anthony Main theatre at 7pm tonigh and check it out.

My husband Dan and I had a LOT of fun designing the opening and closing credits and the promotional posters for the film. Here's is a low resolution sneak peak at the title credits:

+++++++++++++ Hope to see you there! +++++++++++++

Group Project and Manifesto Briefs

Here are downloadable PDFs of the project briefs handed out in class so far for this project:

Group Project 

Group Manifesto

Manifestos and Mission Statements

Please read through all of these to familiarize yourself with what makes up a statement like this, and use them as base models for your group's manifesto.

Fluxus (George Maciunas manifesto, 1963)

Fluxus (Joseph Beuys manifesto, 1970)

Fluxmanifesto on Art Amusement by George Maciunas, 1965

Dogma 95 (Vow of Chastity)

Dogma 95 is an avant-garde filmmaking movement/collective founded in Copenhagen in the Spring of 1995 by directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. They consider themselves a "rescue action" for modern cinema. 

First Things First Manifesto (1968 & 2000)

"Back in 1964, a small number of British graphic designers lent their names to a quietly radical document. First Things First was a rebuke to their colleagues in the industry for having forgotten their old idealism and lost sight of the things that really matter. It had the force of a flash of truth, inspiring many ad and design people, and so, by way of remembrance, we published it again in adbusters last year." 
-Chris Dixon, art director, Adbusters

Daniel Eatock visual/object manifesto

An interesting format and method of articualting a manifesto, with images and object vs. text.

Daniel Eatock's Mini Manifesto
Begin with ideas
Eliminate superfluous elements
Subvert expectation
Believe complex ideas can produce simple objects
Trust the process
Allow concepts to determine form
Reduce material and production to their essence
Sustain the integrity of an idea
Propose honesty as a solution
Remove subjectivity
Say YES to fun & function & NO to seductive imagery & colour!

Bruce Mau's An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements exemplifying Bruce Mau’s beliefs, strategies and motivations. Collectively, they are how we approach every project in our studio.

Claus Oldenburg's Statement

Claus Oldenberg's poetic "I am for an Art...." statement. It was a reaction against the Abstract Expressionists and was originally made to be included in the catalogue of the "Environments, Situations and Spaces" exhibition in 1961.

Wikipedia link to other Art Manifestos

A great collection of notable and historic Art Manifestos. For further research, should you want it.

Wikipedia link to other notable Manifestos, not just Art related.

Good luck and have fun writing yours!

REQUIRED READING: Final Group Project resource

PUBLIC, STREET ART (influenced by the Situationist International)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Institute for Infinitely Small Things
Mouvement Art Public
Me Thinks
Social Movement Laboratory
Think Tank (Philadelphia)
Situationist International
REPRO History

FLASH MOBS, HAPPENINGS
------------------------------------------
Wikipedia entry on Flash Mobs.
Wikipedia page on Happenings.
Improv Everywhere And here's the Wikipedia entry on them.
Critical MassAnd here's the Wikipedia entry.

GENERAL COLLABORATIVE (Un-Categorizable)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Gelitin
Guerilla Girls And here's their Wikipedia entry.
Dot Dot Dot (. . .)
Mcsweeney's And here's their Wikipedia entry.
FLUXUS
fluxus debris! @ art / not art
The Fluxus Performance Workbook
Temporary Services
N55 And here's an informative article about them.
Network of Casual Art
RGB6
Superflex
Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL)
NBGNGS (New Beginnings)
MEMPHIS Group

SOCIAL CHANGE
---------------------------
The Yes Men
Bruce Mau Design
Future Farmers
Work Worth Doing
Project M
Billboard Liberation Front

New schedule for Individual Project

Here's a downloadable PDF of the Project Brief, including the revised schedule.

Have a great Spring Break everyone!

Process, Research, and Exploration as form itself.

Here's a downloadable PDF of the slideshow presented yesterday.

Francis Alys 

There's not much online about this Belgian born artist, but this brief bio and interview on postmedia.net are a fairly good introduction to this process-based artist's body of work and approach. Below the film recordings of his pieces I showed in class:

Railings
Algunas veces el hacer algo no lleva a nada (Sometimes making something leads to nothing)
Night Watch

Harrell Fletcher
Harrell is an artist based in Portland, OR who creates socially engaged interdisciplinary works. His work is almost always about other people-the collective, collaborative, the community. On his site, he offers insight into his creative process through the display of both finished projects and possible (or impossible) ideas on his website. Below are links to the two motion peices I showed in class:
Babies (NYC)
Sunglints (St. Paul MN)

Learning to Love You More
Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Yuri Ono designs and manages the web site. Participants accept an assignment, complete it by following the simple but specific instructions, send in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and see their work posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience.

Things I Have Learned in My Life

No doubt the online component of this project was influenced by LTLYM in structure and format, but the core idea of this stems from Austrian-American graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister's personal project of the same name. 

Excerpt from the project site: The idea for this site originally came out of my own list in my diary, under the very same title: Things I have learned in my life so far. Astonishingly, I have only learned twenty or so things so far. Over the last five years I did manage to publish these maxims all over the world, in spaces normally occupied by advertisements and promotions: as billboards, projections, light-boxes, magazine spreads, annual report covers, fashion brochures, and, recently, as giant inflatable monkeys. So here I extend this same question to you:
What have you learned in your life so far? What is it that you are fairly sure about? What is it that you believe in by now?
Please do write it down beautifully. Design it digitally, photograph it, draw it, scan it and upload it. Use any media that works for you, paint, sculpture, film….

The Art Guys
101 of the World's Greatest Sculpture Proposals (ongoing)
Described in the New York Times as “a cross between Dada and David Letterman, John Cage and the Smothers Brothers,” The Art Guys often use humor and everyday materials as a way to demystify art in an attempt to welcome a broad range of audiences into the discourse of contemporary art. In this way their work has been compared to medieval court jesters and fools as well as noted 20th century artists like Marcel Duchamp and Dada, Fluxus artists, Andy Warhol and William Wegman among others.
Using an open and offbeat “direct-to-the public” methodology, they have presented their work in grocery stores, movie theaters, airports, restaurants, sports arenas and many other non-traditional venues for experiencing art while also exploiting mass media and entertainment to explore contemporary society and issues. They are perhaps most well known for their numerous staged performances, public spectacles, and “behavioral” interventions in a wide array of situations that have blurred the divisions between art and life.

Obsessive Consumption
You should be familiar with this work from last week's introduction (see previous blog entry), but it's still very pertinent to this stage of the project as well. And here's a link to Kate's blog. And her Flickr page.

Iñigo Manglano Ovalle
Born in Madrid, Spain, now lives, works, and teaches in Chicago. Ovalle created a diverse body of work that comprises installation-based practices, photography, sculpture, and community-based projects. Filtering his subject matter through the lens of modernity, he explores a broad range of issues—such as representation and identity, new technologies, and structures of power. Seemingly neutral and clinical realms of science, such as climatology and genomic mapping, are problematized and engaged as form and content in his work. The assumptions of those fields and their implications in creating or reifying social hierarchies slowly and subtly emerge in his projects, He is engaged in a process of understanding how certain extraordinary forces and systems-man-made and natural-are always and already in the process of remaking the world.

Walid Raad
The Atlas Group
1989-2004–15 year long project. Making visable, the leftovers of war. Writing the history of contemporary Lebonon, thru the production of multi-media "documents" archived thru "The Atlas Group," It's a project composed of audio, visual, and literary elements dealing with the contemporary history of Lebanon, particularly the Lebanese wars from 1975 to 1991. In this project he grapples with the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions and the ways that film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence.
Using tools, constructs, methodologies, formats, and research process of Historical Archiving, such as cataloguing, documentation, interviews, preparation of dossiés, etc. along with the "players" that use these constructs and processes to produce a body of artwork.
Here's the podcast of the artist talk he did at the Walker 2 years ago. Amazing!
And a link to a few more films from the project.

!!!We're attending the Artist Lecture at 1pm today!!!

We'll meet back in the classroom after the lecture!

Steven Siegel

Monday, March 16

MCAD Auditorium 150
1:00pm

Connecting art making and environmental processes, Steven Siegel builds impressive trash sculptures that reflect the essential cycles of deposit and decay that underlie the making of the land. Large boulders of compressed cans, plastic bottles, and multilayered newspaper ridges call attention to the waste of consumer society, yet stand on their own as sculptural forms in the landscape. These forms reflect the ecological mysteries he perceives: What's behind these natural processes of accumulation and decay, tension and compression? What do they mean in and of themselves? And what do they mean for people, how we live?

Excerpt via MCAD intranet post

Individual Project-launch

Here's a downloadable PDF of the project brief.

Mind map making guidelines
These are in no way meant to be restrictive, use these tips as you see fit. You should find a process of making mind maps that works as a tool for you to organize your thoughts and exploration, that YOU understand.

1. Start in the center of a page with an image representing your theme/topic, use at least 3 colors.
2. Use images, symbols, and scale throughout your mind map.
3. Select a few key words and position them radially outside of your initial theme image.
4. Each subsequent word/image/thought appears alone in it's own area, radiating outward in order of importance.
5. Consider using lines as organizational elements to literally connect your thoughts.
6. Use color throughout– develop your own symbolic code/system of colors used in your map.
7. Keep the mind map clear by using radial hierarchy, numerical order or outlines to embrace your branches.

Mapping!

Maps from Memory Flickr Group
This Flickr group includes many examples of how we make images to explain space and experience. See Nad's photo set.

Get Lost
A collective portrait of downtown New York. Twenty-one international artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw a map of downtown New York, uncovering a territory that is both real and imaginary.
It brings together fictional landscapes, utopian visions, private memories, and obsessive instructions to explore Manhattan, its past, present, and future.
An exercise in emotional geography, GET LOST sketches the coordinates for an endless drift across the streets and myths of downtown New York.

Obsessive Consumption
Obsessive Consumption started in 2002 when Kate Bingaman-Burt decided to photograph all of her purchases and in turn create a brand out of the process to package and promote. She is currently hand drawing all of her credit card statements until they are paid off, drawing something she purchases each day and continuing to make piles of work (zines! pillows! photographs! buttons! more drawings!) that all fits into this brand she's built which mocks her own relationship with her purchases. And here's a link to her blog.

We Feel Fine, by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar
"We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling".
The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties ? color, size, shape, opacity ? indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains.
At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds."

Morgan O'Hara: LIVE TRANSMISSION
Attention and drawing as time-based performance. O'Hara tracks the movement of the hands of people engaged in life activity. Essential vitality is caught and rendered visible on the page.

LIVE TRANSMISSIONS are drawn with both hands and with two or more pencils: people talking, working, dancing, reciting poetry, playing music, giving birth, repairing shoes, practicing martial arts. Other signs of life are also registered: movement of leaves on a tree, reflections of light on water, the tail of a pony, the flies on a cow, the movement of the incoming tide, the beating of a human heart. It is a body of work which grows as an international organism, a process of thinking about human life as diversified vitality.

Antonio Scarponi's Conceptual Devices
Antonio Scarponi is an architect who develops interdisciplinary research projects using cognitive tools and practices from architecture, visual culture and design to develop innovative devices with the aim to investigate and relate to social practices and behaviours in everyday life. His works operates through a shift of symbolic values due to the social utility and social responsibility of arts and design in contemporary visual culture.

Conceptual Devices are the result of interdisciplinary research projects, involving design, architecture and visual culture, with the aim to engage practises and social behaviour in everyday life. A conceptual device transforms information into a visual knowledge that produce a shift in symbolic values.

Fleshmap: Studies of Desire project
"Fleshmap is an inquiry into human desire, its collective shape and individual expressions. In a series of studies, we explore the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation."

This American Life: episode #110, "Mapping"

Five ways to map the world. Five stories: one about people who who map the world the traditional way, by drawing maps of things you can see. The other stories are about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world, re-drawn, by the five senses.

And here's a downloadable PDF of the mapping slideshow from class today.

Holy Crap

Top email.
I'm so excited I can barely type.
Details soon.

I would encourage everyone in this class to try and contact someone in their field they admire. Shoot for the ones you don't think will answer.



Here it is! /pre-teen girl concert scream

Week 5 happs

Here's a recap of this week's work...

LOGBOOK:

a) swapees met and discussed each other's progress and methods of scratching for one another.

b) HW for next week: Collect 20 more specimens, but this week take a more research based approach. Find the "experts" on your topic in another discipline besides your own and scratch there. I encourage you to look to the Science fields for experts. You'll probably need to visit the Public Library. ALSO, employ two of the Oblique Strategies to your scratching process this week.

RESEARCH HW and classwork:
+ Continue with the "Chaos Machines" exercise, do at least one more using your Logbook content as a starting point.

+ Daily Ritual: document a personal daily ritual or routine. See PDF of project sheet for details.

Can't wait to see how your Daily Ritual documentation turns out!

Have a great week!

Chaos Machine resources

++++ Random Word Generator ++++

Oblique Strategies Widget

Here's that widget implementation of the Oblique Strategies card decks that Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt invented: Oblique Strategies-One hundred worthwhile dilemmas (Right click on the link to download a zipped file of it to your desktop, then follow the installation directions once you double click on it to un-stuff it)
It features the complete sets of the Original (1975), the Second (1978) and Third (1979) Editions, as well as the elusive, commercially not-available Fourth set (1996) by Brian Eno and Peter Norton. Selection of the Editions is user-controllable via a preferences panel. The timing for the Auto-Flipback feature is accessible via the preferences panel as well.

Each card contains a phrase or cryptic remark which can be used to break a deadlock or dilemma situation. From the introduction to the 2001 edition: These cards evolved from our separate observations on the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated. They can be used as a pack (a set of possibilities being continuously reviewed in the mind) or by drawing a single card from the shuffled pack when a dilemma occurs in a working situation. In this case,the card is trusted even if its appropriateness is quite unclear. They are not final, as new ideas will present themselves, and others will become self-evident.

Here's a couple more info on the Oblique Strategies...

An unofficial, yet thorough website complete with an online version of the deck in case you don't want to load the widget onto your machine.

A simpler online version of the strategies.

Week 4 happs

Good to see most of you in the Auditorium for Jay Coogan's forum, and SO awesome of those of you asked questions! 

Power to the people!

Here's  a recap of what's assigned this week:

The lives of others HW from last week–hang on to it, we'll be tackling that exercise in the future.

LOGBOOK: 

a) swap with a peer

b) interview that peer to get a full grasp on exactly what their topic is, why they're interested in that topic, how they've been observing and collecting so far, etc.

c) collect 20 observations for your peer's LB–do each other's scratching!

d) you may still choose to continue to scratch for your own topic, you'll just need to collect and document in another form to be later transferred to your LB next week.

RESEARCH HW and classwork: 

+ Watch at least three Art: 21 short films (available on DVD in the library, they are on reserve for this class so you'll need to ask for them at the front counter). At least ONE of these three should be of an artist that you've never heard of before. You can visit the website first to watch excerpts of the films to decide which season of the DVD's you'll want to check out. 

+ For each of your 3 screenings, do your best to generate responses to the following questions. Please print out your responses to turn in next week. 

1. Identify 3 insights into your own creative practice from each film/artist. 
   
2. What are the recurring themes in the artists work? Any insight as to "why" these themes reoccur for the artist?
   
3. As best you can from what is covered in the film, map out each artist's creative process. (How do their ideas arrive for them? Do they work more consciously or more intuitively? Etc.) 
4. Any similarities/differences to your current creative process?
   

Questions? Post them here, or email me directly and I'll respond w/in 48 hours.

Have fun!

On The Subject of Random Information Generation

Here is a website that will allow you to submit a sketch anonymously and receive one in return from anywhere in the world. Check out this result for my meager doodle, I would have no contact with this person otherwise. Something to think about and addicting nonetheless.

www.sketchswap.com

Tai-Pog-Raw-Fee

An awesome resource for people who have wanted to toy with the idea of type creation. This web-based program allows the creation of modular typefaces, which can be saved and downloaded as fully functional. Hot damn.

Fontstruct

My first quick attempt!
Experimental

Try it. You know you want to.

Launched!

Welcome welcome WELCOME to our class resource blog.
This basic template should suit our needs just fine, but please stay in communication about what's working/not working.

There's just bit of starter content for now, but we'll be populating the blog with our research and observations throughout the semester. Feel free to explore and use the comments area under the posts to ask any questions. And if you know the answer to a peer's question, feel free to answer it yourself if I haven't already gotten to it!

And in case you lose it and need it, here's a downloadable PDF of the syllabus.
And here's a downloadable PDF of the Logbook project brief.

Hearts!