municipalWORKSHOP

The municipalWORKSHOP is grassroots creative laboratory and a division of M12. We are dedicated to the creation and facilitation of contemporary public art projects, which cover a wide spectrum of disciplines, configurations, and locales. We work in collaboration with municipalities, community groups, and community members in hopes of creating more creative and dynamic cities and townships.

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STEALTH

STEALTH.unlimited (set up in 2000 by Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen) is a practice based between Rotterdam and Belgrade. STEALTH shape opportunities where various fields of investigation meet and where thinking about possible future(s) of the city are mobilized. We consider space both a tool and an agency, and focus on innovative aspects of sometimes hidden, temporary or unplanned urban practices that challenge ways in which to create physical aspects of the city and of its culture. In this, shifts of perspectives – from visual culture, urban research, spatial intervention, to cultural activism – are a key element. By creating devices that can take the form of a specific intervention in physical space, an occasion for exchange of knowledge, but also a piece of software, we produce test conditions to probe the shared authoring of urban space and culture.

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Mike Kelley “Educational Complex”

“To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.”
Joseph Beuys

Anthony Vidler on Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex
(Mike Kelley, Phaidon Press, 1999)

On the surface, Mike Kelley’s recent ‘architectural models’ evoking his memory of the spaces in which he lived and worked since childhood in the project Educational Complex (1995), signal a natural extension of this long tradition of mutual spatial influence between art and architecture. As artworks they seem to comment on the realm of architecture, even taking on the shape of architectural projects, produced and presented in the form of meticulously drawn and measured models. They might even be seen as dealing directly with architectural issues, seemingly concerned, for example, with the nature of housing or of institutions. This is, of course, hardly a new phenomenon in the contemporary art world; Minimalism, installation art, performance art, Land Art, have all engaged spatial concerns both metaphorically and literally. Kelley’s recent work might then be construed as a simple continuation and elaboration of these preoccupations, expecially as Kelley himself, from the 1980s on, was an active performance artist, and distributed many of his installations within highly elaborated spatial settings.

But the peculiar quality that marks these new works as different, both in characteristic and kind from earlier ’sculptural’ projects is that, in a self-conscious way, they claim, and take on the status of architecture. Which is not to say that they have fully realized themselves as works of architecture; indeed, they stop short precisely in that momentary ambiguity between the possible and the impossible, retain their critical status and their place in art…keep reading

I <3 Muf

muf art projects critically intersect at the point between desire and experience, object and idea, how we live and who we are. In each situation the creative process is the mechanism to involve and inspire the potential viewer as participant or co-author of the work.

Projects include temporary and permanent interventions in a range of media; video projections, lighting projects, interventions, bespoke street furniture and signage in urban and rural locations. muf have worked with formal and informal groups that include pensioners, refugees, youth groups and young children.

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cityLAB

cityLAB was initiated in 2006 with a generous gift to UCLA to support a series of projects concerned with contemporary urban issues, urban design, and the architecture of the city. Specifically, cityLAB was charged with exploring the challenges facing the 21 st century metropolis through research and design, expanding the possibilities for our cities to grow more livable, sustainable, and beautiful.

cityLAB aims its investigations to comprise rigorous scholarship as well as practical implication, design and theory, formal exploration of cultural and political consequence. While cityLAB begins at UCLA, it will grow outside Los Angeles and beyond the university.

Example Project: P1145 Border Wall as Infrastructure
Proposal location: US/Mexico border
Primary issues: “[T]here exists far more potential in a construction project that is estimated to cost up to $1,325.75 per linear foot.” Recognizing the high cost, limited effectiveness and unintended natural consequences of the new, multi-layered US/Mexico border wall (disruption of animal habitats, diversion of water runoff that has caused new flooding in nearby towns), this proposal names 30 alternatives (covering nearly the whole of the Mexican alphabet, literally from Aqueduct wall to Zen wall) that might better combat the energy crisis, risk of death from dehydration, disruption of animal habitat, loss of vegetation, negative labor relations, missing creative vision and lack of cross-cultural appreciation likely in the government sponsored version.
TEAM: Rael San Fratello Architects

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Urban Utopias

Urban Utopias is a lecture series and blog organized by MIT. The MIT Visual Arts Program hosts a cross-disciplinary lecture series that includes speakers from art, architecture, urbanism and technology from around the world. These speakers will start a discourse to imagine tomorrow’s urban living conditions.

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Conflux 2009

Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice. At Conflux, visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public gather for four days to explore their urban environment.

People from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures come together at the festival to re-imagine the city as a playground, a space for positive change and an opportunity for civic engagement. The Village Voice describes Conflux as a “network of maverick artists and unorthodox urban investigators… making fresh, if underground, contributions to pedestrian life in New York City, and upping the ante on today’s fight for the soul of high-density metropolises.”

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Archis

Archis is an experimental think tank devoted to the process of real-time spatial and cultural reflexivity and action.
Archis Interventions organizes international events that initiate interdisciplinary debate on spatial and cultural issues and intervenes in deadlocked situations.

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Platform21

Platform21 is a design platform aiming to positively influence the relationship between user and product.

Through our projects we question today’s society, connect amateur and professional creativity, reveal the making process, and stimulate dialogue and the sharing of creative knowledge.
We believe that showing and sharing the process of creation is a powerful way to engage a broad audience in divers aspects of design. It opens up the assumption that design is a professionals’ creative discipline only.

Since 2006 we have been using a former, round chapel in Amsterdam as our public laboratory. Here we have initiated and organised exhibitions, research projects, workshops, lectures, discussions and club nights.

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Mediamatic Travel

Looking to get away for the summer? Let Mediamatic guide you:

Mediamatic Travel is a Do It Yourself Travel Agency facilitating trips to the contemporary cultural scene worldwide. It is a collaboration between Mediamatic Foundation and Partizan Publik. Unlike a normal travel site, Mediamatic Travel is focussed on discovering, promoting and financially supporting artistic destinations.

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