LaunchPad is a creative gathering place focused on the arts, community programs, technology, and anything else that captures the imagination.
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.
The Institute for Popular Education was founded in 1992 to provide tools for organizers and educators who are commited to social justice and who work to build social movements that can bring a just society into being. The Institute builds on popular education traditions developed in Latin America, particularly the work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. The program provides forums for discussion and debate of issues important to organizers and uses popular education methods in classes and workshops designed to provide activists with basic analytical tools, help them examine organizing strategies in a larger context, build leadership skills, deepen awareness of the issues affecting New Yorkers on a daily basis, and increase their involvement in the political life of the city.
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.
Malmoe Free University for Women, MFK, is an ongoing participatory art project and a feminist organization for knowledge production. We aim to raise and discuss contemporary political issues by bringing together experience and knowledge from various fields. Through experimental, radical pedagogical methods we hope to bridge theory and practice and challenge dominating norms and power structures. Our work has taken the form of readinggoups, workshops, lectures and screenings. MFK was started in 2006 with Malmoe but is now mobile. It’s run by artists Lisa Nyberg, Johanna Gustavsson and more or less temporary collaborators from various backgrounds.
Alpha One Labs hackerspace was founded in the summer of July 2009. Boasting radical inclusivity, Alpha One Labs superb design aims to provide a safe, clean space for users of all ages and interests to work on projects together.
NYC Resistor is a hacker collective with a shared space located in downtown Brooklyn. We meet regularly to share knowledge, hack on projects together, and build community.
Lower East Side Printshop, founded in 1968, is a not-for-profit studio in New York City that helps contemporary artists create new artwork and advance their careers.
Through the Printshop’s workspace residency programs, artists receive space and time to work, stipends, technical assistance, career development, and public exposure.
With its exhibitions, open studios, education, and other public programs, the Printshop serves as a junction for artists, collectors, museums, galleries, and educational institutions to access and engage in contemporary art.
