We are already nearing the end of our priming process for our letters after only beginning last week! While we got to painting the rest of the letters on Friday, I prepared a few things earlier in the week for our next step, painting the letters in a fabulous bright red.
Continue reading “Finishing Phase Three and Experimenting with Colour”
We’re on to priming the letters now, in anticipation of the bright red coat we’ll be giving them in the coming weeks. Things are moving ahead at a good pace, and hopefully will continue to, as we’d love to not be working with these finished letters in snow.
While we do get together every week, it’s usually only for a couple hours. As I’ve noted before, trying to find a common time between so many schedules is hard, when what we’re doing collectively is really above and beyond the responsibilities everyone has, so we’re thrilled with the progress… but a Saturday afternoon painting party might be in order.
Continue reading “Primer: Another Friday Night’s Worth of Collectively Making Things Happen”
We did it. With a lot of help, we plowed through the remaining eight letters, finishing the papier maché part of the process towards completing our ongoing large-cardboard letters project. On Friday night, we had ten people around the table, including our dear Cristina for a short while, and it was great!!!
Next on the to-do list — get some test paint on some cardboard and start planning how to finish the construction phase of the project.
I’m starting a new project in creating a series of iPhone applications for Surviving Windsor. Some of these applications will be absurd, some useful, but all will be focused primarily on the specific conditions and realities found here in South Detroit.
This suite of applications takes the city as its conceptual backing, generating a set of small technologies and tools that can help citizens of Windsor and visitors investigate and understand their surroundings through critique, humour, and imagination.
Why use the iPhone? Well, I’m already familiar with it for starters — I haven’t even touched an Android phone — but I’m also interested in looking at what the potentials are in the iOS world for creative intervention, and for becoming another tool of sorts to examine and understand the peculiarities of locality.
So, what are these apps going to do? I have a few ideas, and I’m in the process of thinking through a few more, but after having skimmed through some basics on iOS development, I think it’s time to start unfolding some of these on paper. And, of course, one of these apps will be based on psychogeographic / algorithmic movements in space.
This project is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council, Media Artists Section.
On Friday night we played with some new things that Rosina brought over — retroreflective glass beads to be exact. We also made it through another three letters doing papier maché! And, we selected a colour for the letters, again thanks to Rosina doing some recon on paint chips.
Continue reading “Retroreflective Glass Beads Have Arrived, Weeks of Work Ahead!”
Mailed off our Multi-Arts Project Grant yesterday afternoon to support our (hopefully) upcoming residency and conference on collaboration and social practice, titled HOMEWORK: Infrastructures and Collaboration in Social Practices. It’s not until August 2011, but we should know if it’s a go or not by March, at which point we’ll be asking you to join us.
There’s a lot to say about the Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice 2, though I’m not really sure where to start. You should start by visiting the Creative Time Summit site and watching the presentations for yourself, then you should read the excellent recap essay by Gregory Sholette and the somewhat brief, but engaged, corresponding conversation that includes some powerful ideas by Stephen Wright (whose presentation we unfortunately missed).
And, perhaps Sholette’s essay is the best starting place to articulate how I felt about the Summit, as it offers a level of complication that seemed to be missing from the Summit’s presentations and panel discussions. For all the effort to create a dynamic structure, something seemed to stall the questions and discussion that I had hoped to hear. 8-minutes presentations have the potential to create a rapid fire overview and starting place for dialogue, but it didn’t often work out that way. Some ideas and arguments needed more time to unfold, but the types of frustrations (productive or not) that came out of last year’s summit were provoked under similar circumstances, and yet Danielle and I left with no more questions than what we arrived with — and that was dissapointing.
We looked at this as an occasion to disrupt the things that we’ve come to take for granted in the type of practice in which we’re engaged, we wanted to hear tough questions that would make us fundamentally take stock in how we think about things like social practice. It could be though that we are just frustrated with the foundational location of these discussions that revolve around an art world — one that we haven’t really experience nor do we have any interest in experiencing in the sense of an art market or even really gallery exhibitions that really admit to being in a gallery.
I suppose we were hoping to have a conversation that could start with something like,
“Ok, let’s assume that there is something possible in art beyond being either inside or outside of a gallery context, and let’s assume that there are models of production that can understand capitalism but at the same time leave the critiques thereof at the door; now about this whole social practice thing…”
That is to say, certainly there is value in those discussions, but if we could just reorient these conversations about social practice and public practice and political art and art made politically to occur around different types of contexts and complications (even just briefly), what might come out of that?
Maybe, though, everyone is just at that same mental point — exhaustion and insatiability at the same time. Certainly, we didn’t help the situation; we went looking for questions that we didn’t know how to ask ourselves, and maybe everyone else in the audience did the same thing. Maybe we were all there, having been the choir that’s been preached to for so long that we’re more confused that ever in wondering about what’s at stake in all of this socially-engaged art.
This isn’t to say, of course, that there weren’t questions asked. To the contrary, compelling dialogue cropped up around a number of the session, and in particular, those on on Schools and on Geographies, but at other times old arguments were rehashed and panel members danced around questions or quietly refused to answer at all.
The highlights were — and I mean to say this with as little cynicism as possible — the opening remarks and curatorial statement by Nato Thompson and the closing essay by Sholette. The concerns articulated in both instances got very close to the issues I had hoped to hear about for two days straight. Questions about ethics, efficacy, and aesthetics start to complicate this way of working in a very useful way for me.
Perhaps it was because we went to Open Engagement and heard some of the same conversations there that we felt a level of rigour was missing or maybe I’m just overestimating what is possible in an 8-minute presentation * 4 + 30-minute discussion format, but I really, really wanted the summit to inspire and challenge me more than it did.
So, all of that aside, I can safely say that we walked away with at least two things: We can’t wait for an opportunity to see Nato Thompson speak again, and we anxiously anticipate Gregory Sholette’s new book, Dark Matter. And, we’ll be excited to see what comes up Creative Time Summit 3.
From way away in Toronto, Cristina sends edits through the magic of Tracking Changes after some good old fashioned hand-written editing. I did the same while waiting for the flight back to Detroit.
We’re getting so excited about this project, we’ll have to figure out a way to pull it off … funding or no funding.
Before I get to any recap on the Creative Time Summit, I thought I’d post this — a Wordle assembled from the grant we’re working through right now for another residency/conference in August 2011.
This might be helpful in finalizing a title. Due date is Friday, but it’s moving along.
We had another great Friday night meeting, even though Josh was sick, and even though we underestimated two things. First, we struggled again thinking through this second residency/conference idea, and the letters took way longer than anticipated to papier mâché.
At any rate, with the autumn weather firmly setting in, it’s looking like we’ll be heading out with these letters with toques and mittens!!!
Continue reading “Getting Closer Every Week: Big Letters and New Titles”