Department 21: an experimental interdisciplinary workspace at the Royal College of Art
Department 21 will be a temporary, physical space established by students as an experiment in interdisciplinary practice. In January 2010 – once Painting has moved to Howie Street – Department 21 will salvage Floor 2 of the Stevens Building. Department 21 seeks to explore whether this territory, freed by the departure of one department and the anticipation of another, can become a new kind of conceptual and social space as well as physical one.
The Floating Lab Collective is a Metropolitan Washington DC area-based group of artists. They began their activities as a collective in 2007 during Multimediale, a new media art show in Washington DC. Their first piece was titled “Protesting on Demand.” In 2007 they participated in a TRANSITiO_MX, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico, a media art festival, with a localized version of the piece “Protesting on Demand”.
Naming the Mountain: A People’s Memorial to the Mountains of Appalachia
1-A gathering of musicians, performers, and visual artists in Whitesburg, Kentucky, dedicated to memorializing the mountains affected by Mountain Top Removal
2-A quilt, memorializing the mountains affected by Mountain Top Removal
3-A video, documenting the experience of the creation of these works
Collabarts.org was established in December 2005 as a resource and platform for artists, theorists and art students setting out to offer a source of information, dissemination and discussion about collaborative art practice. The site hosts a number of commissioned essays and interviews including some important published and as yet unpublished essays on collaboration that have been generously contributed to the site by their writers. There are also a large number of links to relevant articles and artists’ websites. In addition the timeline for collaborative art practice sets out to place artistic collaboration in a historical perspective in relation to cultural and political events.
Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research group that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to reimagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario.
The processes of Broken City Lab remain grounded in the lab’s observations and concerns about Windsor, as a city, as a community, and as a network of infrastructure, and aim to do two things: first, Broken City Lab works through interventionist tactics to adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the city that we encounter; secondly, through these interventions, the lab seeks to educate, inspire, and facilitate a new way of viewing the potential for interacting with and in the city.
Broken City Lab’s creative activity is located at the intersection of social practice, performance, and activism. The lab attempts to generate a new dialogue surrounding public participation and community engagement in the creative process, with a focus on the city as both a research site and workspace. It is not about doing the work of the city’s officials, or social workers, or politicians; it is about finding new creative ways to address our concerns with the city, while recognizing that our concerns may be similar to those of other community members.
OutHistory.org is a freely accessible, community created, non-profit website on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and, yes, heterosexual history produced by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, supported by a generous grant from the Arcus Foundation, and contributions from individuals
The Mid-Coast Free School is founded on the belief that no one knows everything there is to know, and everyone deserves the opportunity to share the valuable knowledge that she or he does possess. Our aim is to foster a democratic and non-hierarchical environment of mutual education, based in an economy of gift rather than one of profit. Anyone can attend a class; anyone can teach a class; anyone can start a free school of their own.
SESSIONS: Con Verse Sensations, curated by Katerina Llanes is a feminist collaborative art project that reimagines the act of conversation as a politic for self-directed learning.
Envisioning art as play, SESSIONS: Con Verse Sensations takes the shape of a print-it-yourself book, to be released as part of the student-curated thesis exhibitions at CCS Bard. In both form and content, the book invokes the three-way theme of “Con”—pirating; “Verse”—language; and “Sensations”—touch. Participation becomes central to the project and its distribution by means of sharing resources, intimacies, and engaging in serious play.
When: Saturday April 17th from 1-4pm Where: Chashama 112 at 112 W 44th St. NY, New York What: The Experimental Inquiry Methodology Conference is a conference designed to bring out and expand the process of inquiry itself. In this conference presenters give “inquiries”- guided explorations weaving through a cycle of questions and answers. The experimental methodology comes into play as the presentations loosely adhere to 4 guidelines: experiential, collaborative, inter-disciplinary and inter-media.
Topic: Process/Product will be the topic of the Spring 2010 E.I.M. Conference. Process and Product represent two fundamental aspects of creation. Process is when we are in the moment, making, creating, building, thinking. Product is the end, the goal, the finished result. The wide linguistic usage of process/product shows the breadth of what can count as a creation. Products can be art, industrial commodities, paychecks, books, etc. Processes can relate to the activity required to attain any of the aforementioned creations. But also there are a number of ambiguous creations that seem to occupy both product and process like humans, communities, ideas, perhaps art as well.
How are we to understand the significance and nuance of these two states? How do we relate differently to products vs. processes? Does one bring us in differently than the other? Can these states of creation be divorced from each other? Can you be involved in a process without focusing on a product (i.e. without purposiveness) or can you perceive a product without being confronted with its process? And if these two parts of creation are inextricably linked and form a cycle, then how exactly does this cycle work? Furthermore, doesn’t the nature of a cycle favor process, rather than a product?
The conference will be composed of six, twenty-minute presentations. Each presentation will be focused around a specific product (examples include a product of industry, a creative product, an intellectual product of thought, etc). Presenters will explain their product and then guide us through an activity which recontextualizes their product into an environment of process/product. The product will collaboratively be worked on, thought about, acted out, drawn on, etc so that in the end we will have some new product. Somewhere in midst of this activity there will lie somethings compelling, unresolved, persistent, critical, curious. Sometime in the mix of this activity of process/product we will question, think, converse about these specific curious aspect(s) of process/product which relate to its instantiation.
Organized by Aaron Finbloom. Seating is limited please RSVP by emailing Aaron here.
Special thanks to artist Simon Draper who’s ongoing project Habitat for Artists is featured atChashama and at Workspace Harlem.
City as Living Laboratory
Mary Miss has reshaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and installation art by articulating a vision of the public sphere where it is possible for an artist to address the issues of our time. She has developed the “City as Living Lab”, a framework for making issues of sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts. Mary Miss has collaborated closely with architects, planners, engineers, ecologists, and public administrators on projects as diverse as creating a temporary memorial around the perimeter of Ground Zero, marking the predicted flood level of Boulder, Colorado, revealing the history of the Union Square Subway station in New York City or turning a sewage treatment plant into a public space. Recent projects include an installation focused on water resources in China for the Olympic Park in Beijing and a temporary installation at a seventeenth-century park in Delhi, India as part of the exhibition 49°: Public Art and Ecology.
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.
Department 21: an experimental interdisciplinary workspace at the Royal College of Art
Collabarts.org was established in December 2005 as a resource and platform for artists, theorists and art students setting out to offer a source of information, dissemination and discussion about collaborative art practice. The site hosts a number of commissioned essays and interviews including some important published and as yet unpublished essays on collaboration that have been generously contributed to the site by their writers. There are also a large number of links to relevant articles and artists’ websites. In addition the timeline for collaborative art practice sets out to place artistic collaboration in a historical perspective in relation to cultural and political events.
Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research group that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to reimagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario.
The Mid-Coast Free School is founded on the belief that no one knows everything there is to know, and everyone deserves the opportunity to share the valuable knowledge that she or he does possess. Our aim is to foster a democratic and non-hierarchical environment of mutual education, based in an economy of gift rather than one of profit. Anyone can attend a class; anyone can teach a class; anyone can start a free school of their own.
SESSIONS: Con Verse Sensations, curated by Katerina Llanes is a feminist collaborative art project that reimagines the act of conversation as a politic for self-directed learning.
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.
