Have a great Spring Break everyone!
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
New schedule for Individual Project
Here's a downloadable PDF of the Project Brief, including the revised schedule.
Process, Research, and Exploration as form itself.
Here's a downloadable PDF of the slideshow presented yesterday.
Francis Alys
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
!!!We're attending the Artist Lecture at 1pm today!!!
We'll meet back in the classroom after the lecture!
Steven Siegel
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?
Monday, March 16
MCAD Auditorium 1501:00pm
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?
Monday, March 9, 2009
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.
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"
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.
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