Bored?

Are you bored? (I know you are SOOOO bored). Well don't be. Look at what people can accomplish AND use to fight boredom. Let's fight boredom one step at a time (or one tap).

Olivia Robinson

Here is an artist who I thought you might find interesting... She does a lot of different kinds of projects, works in a variety of media, and engages with a diversity of issues.

http://oliviarobinson.com/site/work.html

Also, here is an animation of hers that uses a simple, but beautiful technique. (Maybe you'd like to try something like this, Chelsea?)

Here from Olivia Robinson on Vimeo.

No Shave November Goes Unisex

No Shave November Ladies Hair Club

(The blog is linked)

Beginning November 1st I want to have at least five participants to document the most radical lady body hair ever.

Rule #1 - You have to shave all body parts as of 11/1/10 (I know, it sucks right?). This will prove who is most womanly in their effort to grow the most hair, the fastest.

Rule #2 - You may not shave for the entire month.

Rule #3 - Meet once weekly to photograph leg and pit hair as a group for evidence of length and thickness.

Rule #4 - You can talk about Hair Club.

As of 11/30/10 we will have completed the journey and have photographic evidence. I would like to interview each participant weekly on their experience and post all items to a blog with the photos, and to see if anyone decides to stop shaving altogether if they were in the habit of shaving previously. There won't be a "winner", because we are all winners.

I will be using my Asahi Pentax k1000 with b&w Ilford HP5 400 ISO to document.

I would also like to make a physical display for future viewing as well.

Interested?

jennifer.l.razor@gmail.com

or

573.310.4042

Public Art

So, I have 2 swell ideas for our public art thing.

first one is a two partner.

step 1: get a group of actors/people to improv and go out into the community with a camera. Have community members shout out scenarios for the improvisers to play out while recording the actors as well as the audience. (2 cameras)

step 2: take the footage, and on another day show the footage to community members and ask them to adlib or over voice the crowd as well as improv scenarios.

my second idea is with photography. We start a blog or website/ social networking group, where anyone interested in the project can join, with this we collect their address and possibly some money for postage/ film/ development. we then compile a list of the addresses and enclose a disposable camera, along with a select number of addresses for the recipient of said package to forward two. Each person receives a camera, takes a few pictures, send the camera to someone else, when the film is used they will send it back to us, and we can develop it to a CD, make copies of the CD, attribute credits to the person that took it (meaning they record which pictures on the roll they took) and send the results of the cameras to those on the list, so they may see what theirs as well as the other peoples pictures look like. I think we could get funding for this from an arts council maybe?

Art as Social Practice

For my project, I'd like to organize a clothing exchange. In doing this, one will be able to obtain an article/articles of clothing by getting rid of an item they no longer want, and everyone would be recycling their clothes. To organize this, a group of people will be asked to wear an article/articles of clothing that they do not want and everyone will meet in one area. Once there are enough people there you can walk around and meet people/talk to people you might not have seen in a while and swap clothes with them. Does this seem like a good plan? Would any of you participate in something like this?

Social Practice Project

So this weekend I have been wracking my brain for an idea for social art.

The more I think about it the more uncertain I am about doing it. Here's an idea I came up with but I don't know if its worth doing.
I have always wondered who exactly came up with the international talk like a pirate day or any other themed days like teachers day. I was thinking I could come up with my own day by having it be international day to walk around with one shoe one and see if anyone would join in on walking around with one shoe on. I would ask people to meet at a spot and everyone takes off one of their shoes and piles it up. Maybe wonder into some stores and see if we would be kicked out?
I'm also curious if anyone would join in as we were walking around.

Any thoughts?

Study & Do 'Social Practice'

Project H Design
Project M Lab
Carnegie Mellon: Contextual Practice
CCA (California College of Art): Social Practices
PSU (Portland State University): Art and Social Practice

Getting Massive... Art & Masses

Improv Everywhere:

• Comedic performance art group based in New York City, formed in 2001 by Charlie Todd.
• Its slogan is “We Cause Scenes.”
• The group carries out “missions”, in public places. The stated goal of these missions is to cause scenes of “chaos and joy.”
• Some of the group's missions use hundreds of performers and are similar to flash mobs, while other missions utilize only a handful of performers.
• No Pants Subway Ride
• Frozen Grand Central

Flash Mobs:

• A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual act for a brief time, then disperse.
• The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.
• The term is generally not applied to events organized by public relations firms, protests, and publicity stunts.
• The first “flash mobs” were organized by Bill Wasik in NYC (though a variety of similar types of events have been organized before):
• For example, more than 100 people converged upon the ninth floor rug department of the store, gathering around an expensive rug. Anyone approached by a sales assistant was advised to say that the gatherers lived together in a warehouse on the outskirts of New York, that they were shopping for a “love rug”, and that they made all their purchase decisions as a group. Subsequently, 200 people flooded the lobby and mezzanine of the Hyatt hotel in synchronized applause for about 15 seconds, and a shoe boutique in SoHo was invaded by participants pretending to be tourists on a bus trip.

Silent disco: Another example of a well known flash mob was the April 2006 silent disco in London. At various London Underground stations, people gathered with their portable music devices, and at a set time began dancing to their music. It was reported that more than 4,000 people participated at London Victoria station. This had an impact on the regular service of the system enough for the city's police to begin crowd control and slowly clear people. Since 2006, there have been several flash mobs in the London Underground, including subsequent silent discos comparable in size.

Worldwide Pillow Fight Day: A pillow fight flash mob that took place on March 22, 2008. Over 25 cities around the globe participated in the first “international flash mob”, which was the world's largest flash mob to date. According to The Wall Street Journal, more than 5,000 participated in NYC. Word spread via social networking sites, including Facebook, Myspace, private blogs, public forums, personal websites, as well as by word of mouth, text messaging, and email.

Burning Man is an annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, The event is described by many participants as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance.

Critical Mass is a bicycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world. The ride was originally founded in 1992 in SF with the idea of drawing attention to how unfriendly the city was to cyclists.

Reclaim the Streets (RTS) is a collective with a shared ideal of community ownership of public spaces. Participants characterize the collective as a resistance movement opposed to the dominance of corporate forces in globalization, and to the car as the dominant mode of transport.

Parking Meter Parties
Zombie walks
Wifipicning
Silent Disco / Mobile Clubbing
Bread & Puppet Theater

And MORE!

Gordon Matta-Clark

American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He is famous for his "building cuts," a series of works in abandoned buildings in which he variously removed sections of floors, ceilings, and walls.

Food & Art

When Meals Played Muse

Caroline Goodden, a photographer and dancer who was then Matta-Clark’s girlfriend, said the idea for Food grew partly out of a floating dinner party scene that materialized in many of the cheap lofts inhabited, legally or not, by artists and performers in Lower Manhattan, including a group of Louisiana expatriates who played with Mr. Glass and cooked Cajun feasts for their friends.

At one of her parties, organized around a flower theme — edible flowers were served to guests who came dressed as flowers — Matta-Clark half-jokingly suggested that Ms. Goodden start a restaurant. She took him up on it, sinking substantial sums of her own money into it. Taking over the lease from a failed Puerto Rican restaurant, she, Matta-Clark and another downtown artist named Tina Girouard set about gutting and rebuilding the space in June 1971 with help from other friends, creating one of the few places to eat in the neighborhood at the time, besides Fanelli’s bar.

From the beginning, the idea was to establish not only a kind of perpetual dinner party but also a food-based philanthropy that would employ and support struggling artists, the whole endeavor conceived by Matta-Clark as a living, breathing, steaming, pot-clanging artwork.

“To Gordon, I think everything in life was an art event,” said Ms. Goodden, who now lives in a small town in New Mexico. “He had cooking all through his mind as a way of assembling people, like choreography. And that, in a way, is what Food became.”
“Though we consumed food, Food consumed us,” Ms. Goodden once wrote. “It was a free enterprise which gave food away much too freely.” But, she added, with all the enthusiasm of the times: “The joy is the idea. The idea, as an idea, worked. It was a beautiful, nourishing, vital, stimulating new concept, which was a living, pulsating hub of creative energy — and piles of fresh parsley.”

Beginning in the 1960s, partly for political reasons, food began playing a more prominent role in artists’ work.
Allan Kaprow (the artist who coined the term “happenings”) frequently used food: in 1970 he built a wall of bread, with jelly for mortar, near the Berlin Wall.
In 1971 Matta-Clark cooked a whole pig under the Brooklyn Bridge and served 500 pork sandwiches as part of a performance.
In the 1990s Rirkrit Tiravanija’s performances famously turned New York galleries into kitchens, where the Thai curry was both art and dinner.

And today...
PieLab

PieLab was originally conceived during a 2009 session of Project M in Belfast, Maine. Project M is John Bielenberg’s design-for-good movement, intended to inspire young creatives that their work can have a positive and significant impact on the world. Since 2003, Project M has been bringing young people together in various places all around the globe to develop projects and initiatives that contribute to the greater good at a local level. During this 2-week M session, the group came to understand the importance of healthy and supportive communities. Free Pie was a response to this discovery. On March 14th, (Pi Day) the designers set up a pop-up pie stand on a central corner in downtown Belfast, serving over 200 slices to hungry locals. Each slice was served on a real ceramic plate and eaten with a real fork, encouraging citizens to hang around and interact with their neigh- bors while enjoying their dessert. The message was simple: Sometimes life is bad; free pie isn’t.
The success of this inaugural event encouraged the designers to develop the Free Pie Movement as a way of motivating others to offer the same simple gestures within their own community. Again, the approach was uncomplicated and direct: make a pie, choose a spot, give it away, bring people together. The idea was eventually explored in several cities across the U.S. including Atlanta, Brooklyn, Richmond, Columbus, and Washington DC. What developed not long thereafter is today called PieLab, a multifaceted approach to small business that addresses this need for united and empowered communities in a way that is self-perpetual and fun.

Temporary Services

Temporary Services is Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. We are based in Illinois and have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998. We produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us.
The best way of testing our ideas has been to do them without waiting for permission or invitation. We invent infrastructure or borrow it when necessary. We were not taught this in school. We try different approaches, inspired by others equally frustrated by the systems they inherited, who created their own methods for getting work into the public.
Temporary Services started as an experimental exhibition space in a working class neighborhood of Chicago. Our name directly reflects the desire to provide art as a service to others. It is a way for us to pay attention to the social context in which art is produced and received. Having “Temporary Services” displayed on our window helped us to blend in with the cheap restaurants, dollar stores, currency exchanges, and temporary employment agencies on our street. We were not immediately recognizable as an art space. This was partly to stave off the stereotypical role we might have played in the gentrification of our neighborhood. We weren't interested in making art for sale. Within the boundaries of “what sells,” artists often carve out tiny aesthetic niches to protect, peddle, and repeat indefinitely, rather than opening themselves up to new possibilities.
Experiencing art in the places we inhabit on a daily basis remains a critical concern for us. It helps us move art from a privileged experience to one more directly related to how we live our lives. A variety of people should decide how art is seen and interpreted, rather than continuing to strictly rely on those in power. We move in and out of officially sanctioned spaces for art, keeping one foot in the underground the other in the institution. Staying too long in one or the other isn’t healthy. We are interested in art that takes engaging and empowering forms. We collaborate amongst ourselves and with others, even though this may destabilize how people understand our work.

Against competition 

Much of the art world is structured to favor competition. Grants are competitive. Students compete for funding. Hundreds compete for a single teaching position. Artists compete with artists – stealing ideas instead of sharing them, or using copyright laws to prohibit thoughtful re-use. Artists compete for shows in a limited number of exhibition spaces instead of finding their own ways to exhibit outside of these venues. Artists conceal opportunities from their friends as a way of getting an edge up in this speculative capital-driven frenzy. Gallerists compete with other gallerists and curators compete with curators. Artists who sell their work compete for the attention of a limited number of collectors. Collectors compete with other collectors to acquire the work of artists.

Temporary Services seeks to create and participate in ethical relationships that are not competitive and are mutually beneficial. We develop strategies for harnessing the ideas and energies of people who may have never participated in an art project before, or who may feel excluded from the art community. We mobilize the generosity of many people to produce projects on a scale that none of us could achieve in isolation. We strive towards aesthetic experiences built upon trust and unlimited experimentation.
 

Harrell Fletcher on art and social practice

Let me define "art" as anything that anyone calls "art". That can be a maker or viewer. By calling something "art" it doesn't make it art forever just during the time that it is being appreciated as art. Similarly, I don't think, as Beuys said, that everyone is an artist, I just think that everyone has the potential to be an artist. If anyone wants to be an artist they can be one as far as I'm concerned and that is regardless of their credentials. You definitely don't need an academic degree to be an artist. Most of my favorite artists don't have academic degrees.

I think an artist is someone who gets to do whatever they want (within whatever limits might be containing them-financial, legal, ethical, psychological.) Other professions or practices don't have this level of freedom, dentists need to do dental work, dog trainers train dogs, etc. Those could be fun or not so fun professions to have, but regardless that is what those people need to do until they decide that they want to do something else. Artists can do a project about dentistry or dogs or anything else they are interested in at any time and then can do something else right after or even during, and still remain an artist.

Social Practice in regards to art can be looked at as anything that isn't studio practice. By studio practice I mean the dominate way of making art-spending time in a studio working out personal interests into the form of paintings, or objects, or photos, or videos, or some other pretty easily commodifiable form. The often unspoken intention for this studio work is that it will go off to a desirable commercial gallery, be reproduced in art magazines, and eventually wind up in museum collections, while making the artist into a celebrity of sorts, and paying all of the bills. That is the carrot on the stick that keeps this dominate approach alive and kicking, even though very few of these studio practice artists ever get their work shown at all, and most just give up and find some other way to pay off their student loans.

I've just started up a Social Practice MFA program at Portland State University. There are currently eight students enrolled. They don't get studios like the other MFA students and instead have a shared office and a shared classroom space. Currently we are looking for a more public version of these spaces possibly in the form of an off-grid alternative energy portable building that might locate itself in different parts of the city in vacant lots and at grade schools, etc. The students take some classes with the other studio MFA students but they also spend time on projects in various collaborative groups working with the city of Portland, various non-profits, and applying for public art projects in other places, as well as doing their own individual social practice work. I'm trying to show that artists can actually have sustained and supported careers within the public in ways that aren't possible when the commercial gallery is the primary system that artists are trying to respond to. So far it is going very well.

More about Harrell Feltcher: http://www.harrellfletcher.com/

Harrell Fletcher studied art and organic farming and went on to work on a variety of small Community Supported Agriculture farms, which impacted his work as an artist. Fletcher has produced a variety of socially engaged collaborative and interdisciplinary projects since the early 1990’s. His work has been shown nationally and internationally. Fletcher is an Associate Professor of Art and Social Practice at Portland State University in Oregon.

Art as Social Practice: Notes on Artists and Projects

In Tokyo in 1964, Yoko Ono performined her “Cut Piece” at the Sogetsu Art Center. She walked onto the stage dressed, presented the audience with a pair of scissors, and instructed the audience to cut the fabric away gradually until she was naked.

More about Yoko Ono

For her photo-based project, Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say, Not Signs That Say What Other People Want You to Say (1992-93) by Gillian Wearing asked passers-by to write down the first thing that came into their minds. The resulting photographs show the people with their handwritten thoughts. Often what they chose to write was entertaining, funny, or tragic. One tattooed man holds a sign saying “I have been certified as being mildly insane.” Despite his fierce appearance, there is a vulnerability that comes through as if he were telling us a secret. Wearing makes the ultimate public art by turning the public into art.



In Games to Be Played (1998), Carsten Holler devised five games. The catalog states that “to play these games, you do not need any materials (dice, playfield, etc.), just people.” They have titles like “games to be played alone,” “games to be played with others,” “games to be played with two people,” and so on. This is perhaps as reductive you can get as an artist — unlike Wearing, Holler doesn’t even give participants a sign to write on.

Untitled (Ross) (1997) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres: A heap of candy set in one corner of the gallery. This particular kind of candy was shared by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and his lover Ross when they were in Italy together. This is Gonzalez-Torres’ sweet memorial to his friend, who died. Visitors are invited to participate in the piece by taking some candy.

Dinner Party by Judy Chicago: The Dinner Party elevates achievement by women in Western culture to a heroic scale traditionally reserved inequitably for men. A massive ceremonial banquet in multimedia art, laid on a triangular table measuring 48 feet on each side, The Dinner Party combines the glory of sacramental tradition with the intimate detail of a social gathering.

Thirty-nine guests of honor, mythical and historic women whose accomplishments were largely erased from male-dominated histories, are represented by individually symbolic, china-painted porcelain plates and intricately needleworked table runners. Each plate is essentially an independent work of art and features an image based on Chicago’s vulvar and butterfly iconography, a symbolic representation of the female core intended by the artist as an affirmation of empowered female agency. The plates reside atop elaborate runners decorated with historically significant details associated with the women honored. The first name of each woman begins with an illuminated letter magnificently incorporating a small symbol or motif that references the subject’s importance.

The table itself is set upon the enormous Heritage Floor comprised of over two thousand hand-cast, gilded and lustered tiles, inscribed with the names of 999 other women of importance. The Dinner Party dominated art headlines during its early history and, though enormously popular with the more than a million viewers who saw it in a dozen cities worldwide, it bore the brunt of hostile opposition from some quarters of the art world who saw it as an assault on modernist traditions and from the political right who felt threatened by its feminist agenda.

Perhaps emblematic of how much things have changed, today it is thought of as, in the words of renowned critic Arthur C. Danto, “one of the major artistic monuments of the second half of the 20th century.” It has influenced the lives and work of thousands of people and has become the iconic example of how art can change the world, the expanded role for the artist in society and women’s freedom of expression.

Roberta Smith in The New York Times said that it has become “almost as much a part of American culture as Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney, W.RA. murals and the AIDS quilt.” The Dinner Party was conceived by Chicago and executed by 400 artisans from around the world, working under her supervision from 1974 to 1979. She intentionally chose mediums traditionally associated with women—such as weaving, china painting, ceramics and needlework—that enhanced the impact of the installation’s powerful rejection of female marginalization and erasure.

Chris Burden (born 1946)

• Burden began to work in performance art in the early 70s, and made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central.
• His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters.
• Trans-Fixed (1974): Burden lay face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car. The car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the garage.
• White Light/White Heat: For this work of experiment performance and self-inflicting danger, Burden spent twenty-two days lying on a triangular platform in the corner of the gallery. He was out of sight from all viewers and he could not see them either. According to Burden, he did not eat, talk, or come down the entire time.
• Doomed: Burden lay motionless in a museum gallery under a slanted sheet of glass, with a clock running nearby. Unbeknownst to the museum owners, Chris was prepared to remain in that position until someone interfered in some way with the piece. Forty-five hours later, a museum guard placed a pitcher of water in reaching distance to Burden. Burden then smashed the glass, and took a hammer to the clock, thus ending the piece.

Martha Rosler

• Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Her work and writing have been widely influential. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally and teaches art at Rutgers University, the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland
• In 1989, in lieu of a solo exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City, Rosler organized the project "If You Lived Here...", in which over 50 artists, film and video producers, photographers, architects, planners, homeless people, squatters, activist groups, and schoolchildren addressed contested living situations, architecture, planning, and utopian visions.
• In 2009, an archive exhibition based on this project, "If You Lived Here Still," opened at e-flux's gallery in New York and then traveled (2010) to Casco Office for Art Design and Theory, in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Survival Research Labs

• SRL is a machine performance art group credited for pioneering the genre of large scale machine performance.
• SRL was founded by Mark Pauline in 1978. Since its inception, SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare.
• Since 1979, SRL has staged over 45 mechanized presentations. Each performance consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special-effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.

Althea Thauberger

• Thauberger’s artworks are often concerned with the social document and self expression, and allude to popular forms of music and drama. In addition to contemporary modes, her influences include the histories of painting and photography.
• Thauberger’s subjects are often adolescent girls in emotional states ranging from abjection to euphoria, as with the latest media work, A Memory Lasts Forever. This piece is a collaboration with Jessica Griffiths, Gemma Isaac, Kaoru Matsushita and Natalie Needham, the performers who developed their own characters, costumes, script and songs from improvised sessions. “Their teenage energy became an important part of the work,” says the artist. Here a story about confronting death is told in four different ways, expressed through the anxieties and fantasies of teenage girls. The narrative is driven by the evocative power of song, which the artist sees as “the most immediate and ultimate way of expressing yourself artistically…. singing affirms the desire for communication.” Filmed in a North Vancouver home, the piece is cinematically lit and shot as a stage production played out in real time. The contrived footage resembles soap opera, music video, slasher movies and musical theatre. Typical of her videos that feature improvised performances by amateurs, the film seems to constantly shift between a sense of fiction and documentary realism.
• Thauberger’s collaborative processes empower the performers. “The unexpected things that other people bring to the work become crucial to the content – they develop ideas in ways that I would never be able to myself.” Two new projects involve collaborations with community choirs, a devotional choir in Montreal and a choir of military spouses in San Diego who will write their own music. “For these projects, I am working not only with the musical content but in the social and spectacular aspects of performance.” In this way, she takes aesthetics into everyday life and becomes an instigator of social interaction.

Mierle Ukeles (born 1939)

• New York based artist known for work dealing with feminism, service and labor, and public/private.
• In 1969 she wrote a manifesto entitled Maintenance Art—Proposal for an Exhibition, challenging the domestic role of women and proclaiming herself a “maintenance artist.” Maintenance, for Ukeles, is the realm of human activities that keep things going, such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing and her performances in the 1970s included the cleaning of art galleries.
• One of her most well-known projects Touch Sanitation (1970-1980), involved shaking hands with more than 8,500 workers in the New York City Department of Sanitation while saying “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.”

Learning to Love You More: http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/
Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Yuri Ono designs and manages the web site.

Participants accept an assignment, complete it by following the simple but specific instructions, send in the required report (photograph, text, video, etc), and see their work posted on-line. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience.

Since Learning To Love You More is also an ever-changing series of exhibitions, screenings and radio broadcasts presented all over the world, participant's documentation is also their submission for possible inclusion in one of these presentations. Past presentations have taken place at venues that include The Whitney Museum in NYC, Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, Aurora Picture Show in Houston, TX, The Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, WA, the Wattis Institute in San Francisco CA, among others. Since LTLYM inception in 2002 over 8000 people have participated in the project.

127 Prince: Journal named after the location of artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1971 restaurant FOOD. Like FOOD, 127 Prince hopes to function as a site for conversation. The journal will present and examine ideas on the art of social practice, and the social practice of art.

Trash People by HA Schult

Art as Social Practice: Notes on Happenings

• Allan Kaprow first coined the term “Happening” in 1957 in an attempt to describe the art pieces that were being created around (and by) him. He then wrote about it in his famous “Legacy of Jackson Pollock” essay.
• “Happenings” are very difficult to describe, in part because each one is unique and completely different from one another.
• One definition comes from Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort in The New Media Reader: “The term ‘Happening’ has been used to describe many performances and events, organized by Allan Kaprow and others during the 50s and 60s, including a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally scripted and invited only limited audience interaction.”
• A “Happening” of the same performance will have different outcomes it always depends on the reactions of the audience.
• “Happenings” can be a form of participatory art, emphasizing an interaction between the performer and the audience. Breaking the distinction between “performer” and “spectator”, it replaces criticism with support. For some happenings, everyone present is included in the making of the art and even the form of the art depends on audience engagement.
• When chance determines the path the performance will follow, there is a sense that ‘failure’ is not possible in the typical sense. Kaprow writes:
• “Visitors to a Happening are now and then not sure what has taken place, when it has ended, even when things have gone 'wrong'. For when something goes 'wrong', something far more 'right,' more revelatory, has many times emerged” (New Media Reader, 86).
• An example of one of the very first Happenings is the 1952 performance of Theater Piece No. 1 by John Cage (one of Kaprow's teachers): Cage stood reading from a ladder, Charles Olson read from another ladder, Robert Rauschenberg showed some of his paintings and played scratched phonograph records, David Tudor performed on a prepared piano and Merce Cunningham danced. All these things took place at the same time, among the audience rather than on a stage.
• Happenings flourished in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Key contributors to the form included Carolee Schneemann, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Delford Brown, Lucas Samaras, and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of their work is documented in Michael Kirby's book Happenings (1966).
• Happenings emphasize the organic connection between art and its environment.
• “Happenings invite us to cast aside for a moment these proper manners and partake wholly in the real nature of the art and life. It is a rough and sudden act, where one often feels ‘dirty’, and dirt, we might begin to realize, is also organic and fertile, and everything including the visitors can grow a little into such circumstances.” – Kaprow
• Happenings have no plot or philosophy, but are improvisatory and unpredictable.
• A happening is fresh while it lasts and cannot be reproduced (Wardrip-Fruin, 86).
• “I had the sense that I knew it was something. I knew it was something because I didn't know what it was. I think that's when you're at your best point. When you're really doing something, you're doing it all out, but you don't know what it is.” – Red Grooms
• The lack of plot as well as the expected audience participation can be likened to Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, which also claims that “spectator is a bad word."
• Allan Kaprow's and other artists of the 50s and 60s that performed can be seen as having helped put “new media technology developments into context.”
• The influence of “happenings” can be seen in multimedia and mixed media work, contemporary performance, social networking projects, and public and environmental art.
• Happenings changed the rules for what is and is not art.
• Happenings were part of a movement to challenge the role of the artist, the gallery, the commodification of art, and the interactivity in art.

Some artists who are associated with "Happenings"

• US artists in the 60’s: Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Daniel Spoerri
• The Yellow House Artist Collective (Sydney, Australia) housed 24-hour happenings throughout the early 1970s.
• Orange Alternative: a student-based happening movement founded by Major Waldemar Fydrych became known for its much attended happenings (10, 000+ participants at one time!) aimed against the military regime led by General Jaruzelski and the imposition of Martial Law in 1981.
  

Art as Social Practice: Notes on Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986)

• German performance artist, sculptor, installation artists, graphic artist, art theorist, and teacher
• His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy, and anthroposophy; it culminates in his “extended definition of art” and the idea of ‘social sculpture’ as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics.
• His career was characterized by passionate, even acrimonious public debate, but he is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

In 1964, as part of a festival of new art coinciding with the 20th anniversary of an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, Beuys created a performance or Aktion. The performance was interrupted by a group of students, one of whom attacked Beuys, punching him in the face. A photograph of the artist, nose bloodied and arm raised, was circulated in the media.
Beuys produced an idiosyncratic CV, which he titled Lebenslauf/Werklauf (Life Course/Work Course). The document was a self-consciously fictionalized account of the artist’s life, in which historical events mingle with metaphorical and mythical speech (he refers to his birth as the Exhibition of a Wound, and he claims his Ulysses Extension to have been carried out “at James Joyce’s request” (impossible, given that the writer was by 1961 long-dead). This document marks a blurring of fact and fiction that was to be characteristic of Beuys' self-created persona, as well as the source of much controversy.
Beuys enacted his political and philosophical ideas by abolishing entry requirements to his class in Düsseldorf. Throughout the late 1960s this renegade policy caused great institutional friction, which came to a head in October 1972 when Beuys was dismissed from his post. The dismissal, which Beuys refused to accept, produced a wave of protests from students, artists and critics.
Beuys continued an intense schedule of public lectures and discussions, as well as becoming increasingly active in German politics. Despite this dismissal, the walkway on the academy's side of the Rhine bears Beuys as its namesake.

Beuys did not only write, talk, and act upon his political beliefs, he found ways to enter mainstream politics in Germany and internationally.

Amongst other things, Beuys founded (or co-founded) the following political organizations: German Student Party (1967), Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum (1971), Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (1974), and German Green Party (1980).
Beuys became a pacifist, was a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons and campaigned strenuously for environmental causes.
He was elected Green Party candidate for the European Parliament.

It was during the 1960s that Beuys formulated his central theoretical concepts concerning the social, cultural and political function and potential of art. Beuys was motivated by a utopian belief in the power of universal human creativity and the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change. This translated into Beuys’s concept of ‘social sculpture’ in which society as a whole was to be regarded as one great work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) to which each person can contribute creatively.

In 1973, Beuys wrote:
“Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build ‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’… EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand – learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”

Photodocumentation of...

"How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" (performance, 1965)



"I Like America and America Likes Me" (performance, 1974)



7,000 Oaks Project:

“My point with these seven thousand trees was that each would be a monument, consisting of a living part, the live tree, changing all the time, and a crystalline mass, maintaining its shape, size, and weight. This stone can be transformed only by taking from it, when a piece splinters off, say, never by growing. By placing these two objects side by side, the proportionality of the monument's two parts will never be the same.” – Beuys



Beuys became a famous iconoclast by turning political fights into art. His exhibitions frequently included documentation of his environmental activism, and he often involved his students in his work.

Beuys developed a fundamental message from his art practice: Everyone is an artist.

But he wasn’t the only one making what he called “social sculpture,” social interventions as art…
The 1960’s and 70’s brought ‘Be-Ins’, ‘Love-Ins’ and ‘Happenings’. Though associated with the hippie movement, these were really social phenomena that were interchangeable with the art practices of people like Beuys and others… Jim Dine, Yoko Ono, Daniel Spoerri, Alan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and many others.

Special Visitor: Olivia Wyatt

Get ready for Olivia to stop by Columbia next week to show her film, STARING INTO THE SUN (Below is a trailer). October 26 at 9:00pm @ Ragtag Cinema.
She will also stop by our class to talk about her work and process.

Staring into the Sun from olivia wyatt on Vimeo.

Staring into the Sun is the latest ethno-folk cinema classic from Sublime Frequencies. Ethiopia is known to be one of the oldest areas inhabited by humans and presently has over 80 diverse ethnic groups. Photographer/filmmaker Olivia Wyatt explores 13 different tribes throughout Ethiopia in this visually stunning film. Traveling from the northern highlands to the lower Omo Valley, Wyatt brings together the worlds of Zar spirit possession; Hamer tribal wedding ceremonies; Borena water well polyphonic singing; wild hyena feedings; and bizarre Ethiopian TV segments; presenting an enchanting look at these ethereal images, landscapes and sounds from the horn of Africa. The tribes featured in this film are captured with an unflinching sense of realism and poetic admiration resulting in a visual and aural feast of the senses.

The Thing

THE THING Quarterly is a periodical in the form of an object. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create a useful object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped at a wrapping party and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers with the help of the United States Postal Service. THE THING’s current year of subscriptions (issues 12-15) will begin with an issue by the clothing design collaborative DOO.RI, and end with an issue by Shannon Ebner.

What do you think of Brody Condon's work?

I'm curious to hear what you think of Brody Condon's work. Unlike other artists we've recently looked at, I don't think his work is as utopian or social justice oriented. I think he is more interested in public performance and identity in a collective context. Thoughts?
Here is his website.
And below is an excerpt of one of his latest works.

Level 5 Documentation from Brody Condon on Vimeo.

Bodies in Urban Spaces (thanks, Chelsea)

Do check it out (here).

More on Marina...

Somewhat related to Chelsea's question, "What does your soul look like?"... Check out the trailer below. I always fantasize about being part of some sort of workshop like the one presented here... Maybe this is what our class should have been like?!
http://marinafilm.com/view-trailer

What does your soul look like?

There is an idea that I have had in my head for most of my life, thanks to the book Walk Two Moons, which I read when I was in elementary school. In the story, the kids' teacher makes them sit down on the floor with a piece of paper and a pencil and tells them they have 30 seconds to do what he is about to tell them. He gets ready to start the timer and says: Draw your soul. He presses the button.

I have always been so curious what people would draw. I want to perform this experiment, by asking several people to do this exact experiment. I think I would give them a minute though. I think I want to do about 50 people, if possible, to see all the differences, and maybe stranger- the similarities.

What do you guys think?

Here is something that I think is very cool, and relates to what we have been talking about it class:

http://www.fecalface.com/SF/index.php/good-stuff/2255-bodies-in-urban-spaces

What a great use of bodies.

City Repairs - Portland, Oregon

Jen's post about Broken City Lab made me think of City Repair - here is more about them as described on their website:

City Repair is an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live. City Repair facilitates artistic and ecologically-oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world. The many projects of City Repair have been accomplished by a mostly volunteer staff and thousands of volunteer citizen activists.

City Repair began in Portland, Oregon with the idea that localization - of culture, of economy, of decision-making - is a necessary foundation of sustainability. By reclaiming urban spaces to create community-oriented places, we plant the seeds for greater neighborhood communication, empower our communities and nurture our local culture.

Our projects include the annual Village Building Convergence, where people gather at neighborhood sites throughout Portland to engage in intersection repair, natural building, and other forms of placemaking. We also host Earth Day, the Village Planting Convergence (also known as City Riparian), and operate a mobile tea house called the T-Horse.

Throughout the year we educate the community with workshops on all forms of sustainability and offer the invaluable placemaking guidebook and one-on-one consulting for those who want to repair their own neighborhood. If you are interested in helping our efforts please visit our volunteer page.

As an almost entirely volunteer-driven nonprofit organization, we rely solely on the support of our community. Please consider donating to help ensure our vision becomes a reality.

Al Jarnow's Animations

Thought you might be as excited about his work as I am. Jarnow did a lot of animations for children's television (mostly public TV) in the 70's and 80s'... We can thank him for the scores of children raised on psychedelic animations on Sesame Street where young minds were bent, invited to time-travel, and explore the world in new ways!

Here are some videos...

Animation that allows for time travel...


This one does a great job demystifying the actual process of animation and reveals how this very film was made. Makes me want to try making cubes like that too. Here is "Cubits":


Here is a trailer for a recently released DVD of his work - looks pretty darn exciting!

SOCIAL PRACTICE ART!!!!!!!

The topic this week is very interesting to me, its actually quite wide open even going down to the definition of social practice.
I have been researching all over the great wide world of the internet and have found some interesting social practice art and how it can be done in a huge collaborative community of artists or just one artist trying to have an effect on society.

One really interesting Social Practice groups is called Broken City Lab. It is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research group that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to re-imagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario.

http://www.brokencitylab.org/about/

One of their more recent projects is Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation.

For 30 days, this project will call on over 25 different artists, writers, designers, restauranteurs, musicians, architects, archivists, and other interested parties to occupy a space in downtown Windsor for up to one month in June and July 2010 to attempt to intervene with the everyday realities of skyrocketing vacancy rates, failing economic strategies, and a place in need of new imagination. This project was made possible by the generous support from the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Windsor: Cultural Affairs Office, the Arts Council Windsor and Region, and Windsor Pride.

The other artist I found is Stephanie Diamond. She does a wide range of various social practices. One of her projects is...

It Would Look Like... (Project Row Houses), 2009
projectrowhouses.org

With It Would Look Like... I anonymously ask questions about photographs to a selected community. I use the responses to these questions as a guide to select images from my extensive personal archive of 200,000 photos.

Prior to arriving to Project Row Houses, I asked the mothers in the Young Mothers Residential Program three questions:

If you could have only one image hanging on the wall of your home at Project Row Houses, what would it look like?

If you could have had one image to welcome you when you first arrived at your home at Project Row Houses, what would it look like?

If you could choose an image for an incoming mother when she arrives at her home at Project Row Houses, what would it look like?

Based on the mother's responses to these questions, I chose a few of my photographs. Upon my arrival to Project Row Houses, I shared these images with the mothers, and invited each of them to select one image to hang on the wall of their home. This photograph currently hangs in their home; it is theirs to keep. It can be taken with them when they finish the program, and an additional print of the image will remain in the house for future resident mothers.

I wish I could post some neat images with this post but blogger is up for some maintenance! :(

art & social practice, CJFF, and music vidya update

ART & SOCIAL PRACTICE

Hmmmm, well the more I think about this the stranger the ideas get. There is something I have always wanted to do, but I think it would take a nice group of folks, but would be a blast. I really don't see any point or benefit other than entertainment value, however.

Late some evening when all the bars are getting out it has always occurred to me that a hilarious faux zombie invasion would be hilarious, complete with some sort of anti-zombie brigade to take them down and be totally victorious. People would love it! Instead of zombies, we would remind everyone maybe to get a rabies vaccine if they have been bitten by a suspicious animal. Now that's practical! And something to be concerned about. Rabies is the TRUE zombie invasion. I heard this episode of This American Life that involved rabies. I think it was a Halloween episode. Tis the season! I'm finding it for this one time only special Experimental Halloween Blog. SCAAAARY! !!!!


thisamericanlife rabies!!!!!


That aside I would like to do something a bit more relevant for this assignment it's just hard to say what exactly. I really like this idea, though.

NO SHAVE NOVEMBER

So a lot of guys have this big shenanigan of not shaving their faces for the month of November. Check the link above for evidence. This should be a great month for ladies if I don't say so myself. . . Sure, some people might think it's cliche of women to express themselves in such a way, but you never know. If we get enough girls on board they might peer pressure each other out of shaving their legs. It takes no effort really. We could then make an excellent site, just like these hairy faced men did regarding our non-shaving escapades. There's another link within that site HERE about all the reasons why you should grow a beard. I think it would be awesome to prove to women, especially young, beautiful women that they still are very attractive and can get male attention without shaving. God knows its true.

I particularly like REASON #1 - It instantly turns any man in to a badass. This could be true for women. I think so. Anyhoo. . . I won't regurgitate the whole thing back on to this blog. Take a looksie for yoself.

I would like to get some posters going on at Stephens and ask girls to send an email to sign up and document their experience with photos or blog posts like we have here to see exactly how they feel about it and what they decide to do at the end of the month.



CJFF
Free food and drink = bye bye raw food. I do not miss you. Two weeks of October is good enough for me.


Interesting Folks

Julia Reichart - Growing Up Female included a lot of other great shorts along with it. I hope she comes back to share more in the future. Trying to talk Jen Erickson into finagling her back asap. She said what we did at Ragtag was like, week one of her class in Ohio. We need subsequent weeks at future festivals. Her film was an amazing, honest look at what people really thought about women in the 1970s and it was incredibly shocking. I feel so grateful for the women that came before us and helped change these awful, repressive roles that women like us were once twisted in to.

Fergus - the awesome art design guy for our film fests and he was saying that one of his most recent assignments he gave his students was a simple paper listing ten things that you do at least once per week, every week. He even gave his students the option of writing breakfast, lunch, and dinner and many of them couldn't come up with ten things that they do ritually each and every week. It was really interesting to think about, and kind of sad, that there isn't something all of us really MUST do creatively once per week, every week. I want to start attempting to apply this.

MUSIC VIDYA UPDATE
A few changes . . . aside from the rock and roll dimension taking over some poor schmuck's jumpy frame removed life it only gets worse! We're adding creepy old dolls to his Martha Stewartesque room and a meat locker where he works as a janitor! Why? Because we can, and we're shooting on Halloween. . . . Which also means creepo costumes on all of our extras. Still looking for an assistant for lighting and camera if anyone wants to help out.

Test Group

An improv group put together an opportunity for many people in many cities to experience the same activities at once. By allowing people to download an MP3, they are able to all listen to a series of commands at the same time. Each member of the group was not allowed to listen until a certain time, then followed the directions simultaneously. This was done in very public areas and those who were not listening to the MP3 or who did not have any idea what was going on were incorporated to participate unknowingly either by watching or by actually being placed into a set of commands. Here is a video below. There are many other videos you can watch on youtube as well.

There are also other projects they have worked on that you can check out here.

"They Cause Scenes"

PieLab

PieLab from PieLab on Vimeo.

Radical Friend

Radical Friend is the collaboration of LA based artists/filmmakers Kirby McClure and Julia Grigorian. The duo has created surreal music videos and web based interactive worlds that are garnering massive amounts of attention from outlets like Boards, Shots, and Wired as well as Art/Fashion magazines like Dazed and Confused, Tokion and Vice. Their epic "Yeasayer-Ambling Alp" video premiered at the Hammer Museum (as part of the Flux screening) and Spin Magazine listed the video as one of the "Best Videos of 2009".

Below are two of their music videos(both for Yeasayer).
Here is their personal website (click on a rock and get a surprise!)
Here is the website of the company that represents them (more videos and art)

Yeasayer "Ambling Alp" by: Radical Friend from ODDBLOOD on Vimeo.

Yeasayer "ONE" By: Radical Friend from ODDBLOOD on Vimeo.

New Song, New Video, Same Band

(This picture was taken at Hairhole on Orr Street the last time DOTS were in town if any of you recognize it.)

I am very pleased to have worked everything out with Daughters of the Sun, but am slightly disappointed that I will no longer be doing a song from their new album. I am excited to use their song "Follow Smoke" though. You can listen to the song on their myspace page. Here's the link.

I was able to secure a location for the video this weekend. One of my friends is letting me use their super cool 70's house and fifteen acres of land. My concept is that the subject of the song will be following smoke throughout the property and I need to look into being able to shoot at the Devil's Icebox. A lot of lighting will be incorporated into the shoot as well, and I will be hanging sheets over trees around the area to project on. The majority of the filming will take place at night.

Also, side-note, Grace Jones. Have you guys seen this video? So good.

My concept is set, but I am leaving room for spontaneous ides that may pop up, and am talking to the owner of the location tonight for better dates that work for him.

CJFF...

What did you see at the fest? What did you think? What was inspiring? I want to hear your reactions!!!

Moving Still

Our class presents its work at the 2010 Citizen Jane Film Festival (October 15-17 in Columbia, Missouri). Poster above and more info about the show and artists below.

If we look at cinema's roots in still photography, we can remember that it is our unique optical physiology that creates the phenomenon of persistence of vision which allows us to see “moving pictures.” This show, specially curated for the Citizen Jane Film Festival, asks us to look at what happens when we slow down the moving image, and focus on its disintegrating, impossible stillness. Using a variety of media, tactics, and locations, the work in this show – featuring three unique video installations by local artists – uses time-based media to create a space for contemplation and introspection. The show features Hollowed (Cherie Sampson, 2006-8, video), AWAY SEEING AS IT MAYBE NEVER WAS BUT COULD BE WHY NOT (Jennifer Razor, Chelsea Turner, Jacqueline Joyce, Erika Adair, Wynde Noel, and Lydia Lane, 2010, video), and CHINA, Portraits: Xi'an, Chenglu, Shanghai, Beijing, Jingdezhen (The Archaeology of the Recent Future Association, 2007-8, 16mm).

Hollowed is a series of short videos and photographic performances taking place over a three-year period of time at a rural site near the Mississippi River in Missouri. Setting up a station (with a permanent tripod in place) video and photo works were shot periodically as the seasons and environment changed. Photographs read as film stills with sequential frames; however, the reliability of the sequence is often aborted to introduce a new moment in time, abruptly breaking the expected continuum. Changes in seasons, weather and daylight are dramatic. The log carved out by decay and the figure within it are subtle in their constancy. The figure itself is at once human, animal and vegetative, with the performances reflecting upon patterns of movement in nature and the stirring and stilling of time. (Technical assistance: Lisa Wigoda).

In the installation, AWAY SEEING AS IT MAYBE NEVER WAS BUT COULD BE WHY NOT, a group of women were each given a copy of a black and white photograph. Without context or history, each woman was given the task of creating a story that could explain the frozen moment in time in their hands. The photographs are all from the work of famed photographer Helen Levitt whose birthday, 97 years ago, coincides with the date that the project began. Levitt passed away in March of last year. The images appeared first in herbook, "A Way of Seeing" (1965). This project pays homage to Levitt's life and work, but also creates an interesting space for a new generation of image-makers to create wild, poignant, silly, and meditative alternative histories and readings. While it is an old cliché that "a picture is worth a thousand words", these short videos try to unlock the secret, silent stillness of Levitt's powerful photographs and take us on a journey into strange, fun parallel universes.

Shot over the course of a month's travel in Eastern China, CHINA, Portraits: Xi'an, Chenglu, Shanghai, Beijing, Jingdezhen presents a series of portraits – poignant, funny, confusing, and charming – of people in rapidly changing neighborhoods and villages. On the eve of the 2008 Olympics, buildings, neighborhoods, communities, and entire ways of life are disappearing and transforming. Almost all of the people who appear in this film now no longer live in their former homes or even in their old neighborhoods. Not quite a travelogue, and far from an ethnography, this quiet testament to the power of portraiture asks us to consider the pleasures, discomforts, and dangers of looking. The film pays tribute to the ancient Chinese art of 'face reading' (similar to Western plamistry), while also trying to reconsider the destructive Orientalist, colonialist obsession with portraiture. Recalling the documentary traditions of early cinema, the film asks viewers to examine the faces of strangers and consider what a passing acquaintanceship can inspire and what a portrait might reveal.

About the artists.

Cherie Sampson is an artist working in environmental installation, performance and video art, creating projects in wilderness and rural settings in the U.S. and abroad. She often integrates her body into the landscape in performances for the camera and live audiences. She received her MFA in Intermedia and Video Art from the University of Iowa in 1997. Cherie has exhibited nationally and internationally in live performances, art-in-nature symposia, video screenings and installations. Cherie resides in Columbia, Missouri, and is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Missouri. She is represented by Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis, Missouri and is a member of Artists in Nature International Network (AiNIN).

Jennifer Razor was raised throughout the Midwest. Her affinity for film and radio was sparked when a hard case of teenage angst set in while going to high school in small-town Mexico, Missouri. She hopes to continue creating documentary, art, and media projects to educate and entertain.

Jacqueline Joyce is a sophomore at Stephens College in the Film and Media Department. Her current work ranges from narrative shorts to experimental work in different mediums.

Chelsea Turner is a junior at Stephens College in the Film and Media Department. Her current work includes short films, animation, and fine art. She grew up in Columbia, and fell into the film world during high school, where it became clear that this would be her career path.

Erika Adair is a sophomore at Stephens College from Kansas City, Missouri. She is majoring in film and hopes to make narrative films and music videos when she graduates.

Wynde Noel has been interested in film from an early age. She started out as a photographer and then turned to film in college. She enjoys documentaries as well as experimental film, and hopes to explore the world of independent film. She also enjoys cooking and making her own recipes.

Lydia Lane is a senior at Stephens College and is currently filming her thesis project film, a short narrative set in Columbia. She hopes to move on to direct feature films and after graduation, she plans to return to LA where she recently completed an internship at a film production company.

The Archaeology of the Recent Future Association is a moniker for many projects and loves, created individually and/or collaboratively: film/video works, community projects, zines, drawing, printmaking, installation, sculpture, music, curatorial work, and writing. Through the diversity of media, the goal is always to make and support work that inspires vision, hope, and action for a better world, and to present such projects (whether they be objects, images, or experiences) in as loving a way as possible.

Start thinking about submitting your work to fests...

Here's one for your animations: http://animatedobjects.ca/caos/
Sign up for WITHOUTABOX now and start looking for others...

See what other students are making...

Here are a few examples from 2 animation assignments at Darmouth College (click on the Vimeo videos on the left and check out the different animation cycles - i.e. "loops" - that students have made).

Experimental Animation Fest in Chicago!

Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation

Eyeworks is a new film festival featuring abstract animation and unconventional character animation. Festival programs showcase outstanding experimental animation of all sorts: classic films, new works, overlooked masterpieces, and quirky footnotes of history.

The Eyeworks programs showcase a range of animation techniques, including paper cutouts, stop-motion, 3D computer animation, and a wide variety of hand-drawn methods. The content of the films is even more varied, and includes cosmic abstraction, psychedelic characters, geometric patterning, gestural figuration, and surrealistic narratives.

Eyeworks celebrates animated moving images that express unusual vision, unusual approaches, and unusual style.

Saturday, November 6, 2010
DePaul University School of Cinema & Interactive Media
CDM Theater, Lytton building, 247 S. State Street, basement level
Jackson stop, Red Line
Chicago, USA

Looping Queen

performance

I found some really interesting artist when I was learning about performance in my art history class last semester, I think you should check them out too!

Orlan is neat, she is French and did plastic surgery on herself to change her image and filmed them as the performance.

as well as her comment on all of her art and feminism!

ok, so I figured it out. When we were talking about Marina Ambrovic I said something about Shamanism as well as two artists breathing one breath together. Well it was Marina and her partner at the time Ulay! The piece was called "Death Self". Also a piece that they did together that had a video was pretty neat.

Conversations at the Edge

A good website/project to use as a reference... and to visit when you are heading to Chicago. Conversations at the Edge (At the School of Art Institute in Chicago in the Gene Siskel Film Center)

Some things to watch...

A few more references relating to the Performance/Character project that might inspire you...

Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece":






Joan Jonas on feminism, women, and video:


Marina Abramovic on performance art:


Lady Gaga going on about Marina Abramovic:


Jonas Mekas's film of John Lennon and Yoko Ono famous "Bed-In For Peace" event (May 1969):

Pimp Yo Fish

Sorry about the quality. I'll have to reload this in the future.