SESSIONS: Con Verse Sensations

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.

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Lower East Side Printshop

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.

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Metronome

Metronome No.10 (Oregon) is an instruction manual for artists who wish to live and work portably and features unusual yet vital hints for social and economic survival. It is modeled on the long-running hippie survivalist zine Dwelling Portably, edited by Bert and Holly Davis and distributed from Philomath, Oregon, USA. In March 2006, while living and working out of a temporary, mobile publishing studio located in a RV, Clémentine Deliss, Oscar Tuazon and two Future Academy participants from Edinburgh (artist, Marjorie Harlick and neuroscientist, Guy Billings) searched for the editors of Dwelling Portably covering nearly 2000 miles of logging roads, and typed over 25,000 words on manual typewriters for this latest issue. During this production period they built a ‘hill-lodge’ into the side of a south-facing slope in the woods near Philomath, digging out the mud bank and setting up tarps and poles to insulate the 3 x 2m cavity against the pouring rain and wind.

Contributors to Metronome No.10 include Ibon Aranberri, Nico Dockx, Didier Fiuza Faustino, Richard Fischbeck, Yona Friedman, Jan Mast, Christos Papoulias, Douglas Park, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Matthew Stadler, and members of Future Academy in Edinburgh, India, and Dakar .

The production was made possible through the support of Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh, and Stephanie Snyder, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon.

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Provisions Learning Project

Provisions Learning Project is a social change learning resource that amplifies compelling voices that challenge and redefine the mainstream. Its library and online services are a trusted source for alternative perspectives on a wide range of social change topics and its innovative exhibitions and public projects strongly engage the arts as a powerful means of exploring social issues.

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A Brief Account of Two Artist-Run Spaces

By Michele Faguet – There is a contradiction implicit in the idea of the alternative or artist-run space as a phenomenon specific to developed countries or contexts in which a highly organized, sophisticated cultural infrastructure is clearly not lacking. One might argue that the very modus operandi of this kind of space—rejection or critique of both the institutional structure and the art market with their respective (often overlapping) processes of legitimation, a spontaneous manner of operating based on immediate material conditions along with a desire to adapt to (and make the most of) limited resources, and perhaps most importantly the mapping out of a self-defined position or space of marginality (in the positive sense of the term)—would find its natural habitat in a “marginal” context characterized by the presence of dysfunctional institutions and the absence of a real art market. In other words, what is an alternative way of working in one context might be a necessary manner of operating in another. Yet, the history of alternative spaces in Latin America is a very short one and difficult to research because it is a history that is fragmented, largely undocumented, and too often forgotten as many of these initiatives have fallen victim to a selective amnesia resulting from territorial alliances and interests typical to cultural contexts in which there are so few opportunities. This text treats two specific cases from the 1990s: La Panadería, an artist-run space in Mexico that is often looked to as the model for alternative spaces in Latin America, and Galería Chilena, a lesser known artist-run, nomadic, commercial gallery that moved around Santiago over the course of several years, organizing exhibitions in borrowed spaces. Read More

Fillip Magazine

Turbulence Newspaper 05

In the early eighties, Swiss author p.m. – the most common initials in the Zurich telephone directory – published Bolo’Bolo, ‘a fi eld guide to organising utopias’, in the words of one reviewer. ‘Replete with maps, drawings, a new lexicon and universally recognised symbols, and “a planetary menu for subversion”, the text could be considered a political nerd’s version of one of Tolkien’s fantasies, but its references to real events and refl exive tone give the book a kind of crackpot sense of real possibility.’ A quarter-century later, p.m. is still planning.

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“Notes for an Artist Run Credit League”

Question 1
InCUBATE: In terms of fundraising and resource generation, how does your practice combine traditional organizational models with more experimental approaches?

Geraldine Juárez: (3)My practice tries to create infrastructure, actions and objects that identify and deface the dominant logic of consumption, production and interaction. To do so, I hack the traditional use or function of certain systems and resources to propose or imagine alternatives. I’m not married to the idea of totally functional alternatives, in fact sometimes I’m up for being completely dysfunctional too. But in the specific case of the Tanda Foundation, I use peer funding and open source web technology in order to put out there the possibility of a completely independent “arts foundation” that is held and run by its users who act as patrons as well as candidates.

I really didn’t have time or money to open a legal institution. I started realizing that there are actually very functional models on the fringe of the system that could be used to peer-fund a model where people could apply without too much hassle to fund their creative projects. One such model is the tanda—an organization, mostly used by immigrants in the US to save money. I merged it with the logic of the prolific 501c3 institutions. We have patrons. We have candidates. We take donations. We select projects. We vote. We do it in a collective, public and autonomous way.

Tanda Foundation is an unofficial foundation in the sense that we do not have any tax status and are not able to deduct donations. We are invisible to the conventional arts funding system. We do not depend on them to exist, or on the profit of corporations that usually donate money for tax deductions. (Read More!)

Tangential University

The truth-value of fiction, particularly when wielded with humour, can be powerful indeed. But in the end, the point is to incite people to look at the real – and to do something about it. Mapping information, power and influence networks, producing flowcharts that link the often invisible, overlapping interests of technological, bureaucratic and economic power – in short, the component parts of biocracy in the era of the post-national state – has been the project of the art collective, bureau d’études over the past eight or so years. The Paris-based group has produced a dozen or so cognitive maps in an attempt to foster autonomous knowledge – autonomous, that is, from the monopoly held by the information-production regime of contemporary capitalist society.
While many of the maps are denunciatory, revealing the collusion between pharmaceutical, biotech, telecommunications, media and resource-extraction interests, others contribute to solidarity by drawing attention to networks of alternative knowledge and power (social centres, alternative media coops, squats, etc.). Typically, the group produces hand-out maps (60 × 84 cm), which are distributed in contexts where such autonomizing cartographic information may be empowering – in demonstrations or social forums, for instance. What is significant is that nothing whatsoever indicates that the maps have anything to do with art: of course, if one thinks about the extraordinary intricacy – and no less remarkable legibility – of the maps’ design, one might well conclude that they are informed by art-related, graphic-design skills. Yet, situated outside the legitimating frame of the artworld, from which they have freed themselves financially and ideologically, they lay no claim to artistic status, and as such are diametrically opposed to Kant’s “purposeless purpose” of aesthetic delectation: their objective purpose is clearly the production of autonomous knowledge.

Chew on This (CUP Project)

Check out an article about another great Center for Urban Pedagogy Project by Amanda Matles.

Where in the world does the food we eat actually come from? How does its journey to our plates affect the environment and our quality of life? These two questions were my point of departure for an investigation into the global flows of food conducted as a Teaching Artist in collaboration with high school students of four Environmental Science classes at The Heritage School in East Harlem, New York City through The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). The project was originally conducted in the spring of 2006.

CUP is a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization that investigates the built environment by facilitating collaborations among advocates, architects, artists, city workers, educators, policy makers, residents and students. Investigations begin with questions about how communities work: How are prisons designed? Where does garbage go? Where does our food come from? Why are there abandoned buildings? Project participants use a research-based, design-driven process to develop inventive tools for spreading knowledge and facilitating change. CUP projects take many forms: architectural proposals, board games, comic books, exhibitions, films and videos, maps, models, posters, walking tours, and workshops. CUP’s work grows from a belief that the power of imagination is central to the practice of democracy, and that the work of governing must engage the dreams and visions of citizens. CUP believes in the legibility of the world around us. By learning how to investigate, we train ourselves to change what we see.(1) Keep Reading

Chew on This Zine

Reflections and Connections

Reflections and Connections: On the relationship between creative production and academic research
This anthology broadly follows the discussions at The Art of Research, an international seminar held at the University of Art and Design Helsinki from 1 to 3 October 2007.

The aim of this seminar was to provide an arena for discussing and contributing to growth in both the methodology and content of the practice-based research approach. This seminar attempted to seek ways in which artistic or design practices and research practices can converge, a convergence where the professional creative practices of art and design play an instrumental role in the conduct and dissemination of research.

The intention of this anthology is to discuss further the issue of the relationship between creative production and academic research in order to contribute to the methodological and content development of this approach. The authors of the seven articles featured in this volume were all participants in The Art of Research.

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