Operation Beautiful

I thought this was a nice project to share:

Operation Beautiful

Women leave sticky notes on the mirrors of public restrooms to bolster confidence in each other.

There were also some other interesting topics on the site such as, "Why Fat Talk Rears It’s Ugly Head When You’re Stressed" & "What if I Stopped Comparing Myself to Others".

If you happen to have a sticky note or some other method of leaving a nice message for others in a public restroom it's probably the time to do so. We've all felt a little rough around the edges and it probably won't hurt to plant a good thought out there.

Dead Drops!

Dead Drops

Very cool social practice! People are cementing USB ports in to walls in America, the UK, and Australia for group file sharing. We may need one in Columbia! It looks like the closest is in Lawrence, Kansas. They are just so progressive for the midwest.

What is a dead drop exactly? According to wiki.

Take a looksiedo.

The Lunar Mansion 'Bike' Music Video. Hot off the press.

Thanks to everyone who helped! Enjoy!

Hey Guys! check this out!

Hey so I started a blog for my project, and will soon be getting a kickstarter account! this is a way for people to look at the project as well as stay connected with the Kickstarter account. I will be updating a lot on both the kickstarter, which has not been approved quite yet, and on the blog! so please check this out, follow as well as tell people about it! I could really use the funding! cant do this all on my own!

"NOWNESS" as interpreted by Jennifer Razor

So I got to the point in Devotional Cinema when the topic of time comes up. Nathaniel Dorsky says that there is "relative time" and "nowness". Something really hilarious came to mind, and I know it's probably way off base compared to what Dorsky is trying to say, BUT, maybe Ivan Reitman is the genius he speaks of. Dorsky defines nowness as "transcending the passage of time", also as "your presence while relative time slips under your feet".

What came to mind, God save me, is Ghostbusters 2. On World of the Psychic with Peter Venkman, he ends the show saying -

"Until then, this is Peter Venkman saying[puts a finger to his temple and sends out a thought to his viewers](laughs) See you then!"

EVERYTIME I see this, I have the exact same reaction, which is to laugh with Bill Murray as he does this. This is probably something that Dorsky would totally vom at, but I thought it was kind of hilarious that I had such a reaction.

Check out the clip at 44 seconds and ENJOY!

Social Media Project - Connect the Xs

Hello!

Here is a compilation of some "Connect the Xs" worksheets I left at Ragtag and Lakota.

Thanks for everyone's assistance and enjoy!

Jennifer

Yokono!

Recently I watched the LennoNYC on PBS while I was home on Thanksgivng and what a treat it was! It was excellently done and very interesting.
I remember talking to my dad about it afterwords, who is a huge Beatles fan, thought that Yoko was not such a horrible person that a lot of people pegged her as. I feel that Yoko is making a comeback in a big way not that she out ever in my mind.

I find her instructions quite intriguing a part of me wants to run around town and do all of these exercises and another part of me does not understand why. It is an interesting book to someone who is bored all the time they would have instructions to follow always. It also seems helpful if your uninspired to just do something unique and get out of your head a little bit and experience life.

The collecting piece

Collect sounds in your mind that you have heard throughout the week. Repeat them in different orders one afternoon.

It is hard to remember so many noises and sounds of a week. I have been listening carefully and playing things back in my head but all I seem to remember is songs that people hum one particularly is from my niece's favorite show Yo Gabba Gabba.. "Try it and you'll like it..."

Snow Piece

Take a tape of the snow falling. This should be done in the evening. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use the strings to tie gifts with. Make a gift wrapper if you wish using the same process with a phonosheet.

I love the idea of wrapping presents with the sound of snow and the person has no idea. It seems so sweet and nice. I would love to do this before christmas hopefully if we get our first snow! Which is always the best.

Playing with Yoko

So I never really thought much as far as grand thoughts for Yoko due to her failure as being able to keep up with Johns focals in some of his home recorded things. Yes, I was once a huge fan and still am, but slightly in the closet now. Yoko's musical projects were brought to my attention in the past year as being no so terrible as far as noise and just experimental which I had more of a respect for. Her book Grapefruit is wonderful, and I am really begining to like Yoko with a different attitude for her, I could see why John would like her so much. My previous piece titled "Cuddle Piece" was inspired by Yoko's "Room Piece 1 and 2", but what I am really excited and planing on trying, is the sound piece titled "Voice Piece for Soprano". I did the scream against the wind, but I want to experiment more and scream against more things and record them. It is on my list of personal experiments to do this year. Another thing that cought my eye as well as made me giggle was the "Laundry Piece", I would love to take my laundry from the day and tell people about it in my home, give them no explanation, just do it, and see their reactions, it sounds marvelous.

here is a song I was listening to by Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band while writing this.

Have fun with Yoko!

Cuddle Piece

Lay in bed facing each other.

Hold each other as if you were falling through the Earth.

Stare through each others eyes and into the Heart.

Whisper when you wake from a dream.

Repeat until the end of time.

Grapefruit Selections

Questionnaire – 1966 Spring

Name – Jen, Jenn, Jennifer, Jenny, JRay, Razor, Jenn Razor, Jennifer Lynn Razor, Jennifer

Razor, Jennifer L Razor, Razor Jennifer L, Razor Jennifer, J Razor, JLR,

Address –

Past – 1502 Hinkson Ave Columbia, MO 65201

Present – 211 Ripley Ave Columbia, MO 65201

Future – ?

Sex – Female

Colour – Splotchy peach with brown and red polka dots.

Height – 5 feet 8 and a half inches

Weight – 133 pounds

Occupation – Customer service and sales representative, film student.

Disease – Gluttony, laziness

Physical Peculiarities – There’s a bump that recently formed on the top of the lobe on my left ear,

my hands have poor circulation from smoking for years and they turn purple in the winter or when

I’m cold. I have a pinched nerve in spine C6, and herpes of the nose when my immune system

is down or I’m stressed. Acne. Plantar fasciitis in my feet. Scars from chicken pox and acne. I

can wiggle my right ear and my index toe on the right foot. Other things I care not to mention and

loathe . . . Sometimes my back kills me. I often have a lot of phlegm.

Other Comments – I need to fix my life a lot.

The sixth finger is usually not used because its existence is not physically perceivable. FALSE

There is a transparent peace tower in in New York City which casts no shadow and, therefore,

very rarely recognized. TRUE

Blood is not red unless exposed and blue when it’s imagined. TRUE

The structure of the American jury system is taken by the chance music operation by John Cage.

(The noted Judge Connolly is said to have said, “all verdicts are beautiful”). FALSE

Mt. Fuji, whose colour is blue and white from the distance and volcano red when you go near, is a

carefully planned modern Japanese project built to attract American tourists. FALSE

The East Side is not a word to define its location but was originally a name of a town “The Wise

East on the Wrong Side”. Later it was shortened to the presently known “The East Side”. FALSE

Your weight is twice mine, and height 5 inches shorter. FALSE

Grapefruit is a hybrid of lemon and orange. TRUE.

Snow is a hybrid of wish and lament. FALSE/TRUE

All fruits are related species of banana, which was the first fruit in existence. The Bible lied about

the apple because they felt mentioning the word banana too undignified. FALSE

Roaches are moving forms of flowers, though visually they seem unconnected. TRUE

Happenings were first invented by Greek gods. FALSE

The word "manila envelope" comes from a deeply-rooted racial prejudice. FALSE.

Coughing is a form of love. FALSE

All streets are invisible. The visible ones are fake ones, though some visible ones are the end

parts of the invisible ones. FALSE

Teeth and bones are solid form of cloud. FALSE

Paper is marble cut so thin that it has become soft. (Make marble out of toilet paper.) FALSE.

Plastic is a portion of the sky cut out in solid form. (Collect many pieces of plastic and look

through them to see if they look blue.) FALSE

If you wear clothes long enough it becomes part of you and you will suffer from serious physical

maladjustment when you take it off. A princess died from taking off vines that had covered her for

ten years. A prince, when his encircling vines were removed, was found to be non-existent. TRUE

When you leave things, you leave your spirit behind, too. But if you don't leave them, you age.

FALSE

Your brother is the man you killed in the past world. He was born in your family because he

wanted to be near you. FALSE!!!! AHHH!

There is a wish man in the corner of the world whose daily task is to send good-will waves to the

world to clear the air. TRUE!

Men used to walk on hands upside down, but they changed to the present form because it was

considered less obscene. FALSE.

99 percent of the world is dead bodies and tombs. We are the remaining 1 per cent...(or are we?).

TRUE.

There are one thousand suns arising every day. We only see one of them because of our fixation

on monistic thinking. TRUE

Piano keys are flower-petals turned hard. FALSE.Kind of Trueish.

People who bought Ono's "bagwear" invariably encountered fantastic good luck and fortune. -ad.

FALSE.

A cloud consists of the following substances: colour, music, smell, sleep and water. Sometimes it

rains substances other than water, but very few people notice it. TRUE.

A, B, OR C

Yellow Talk –

Youth Talk – You are still young because of other reasons – I’m not finished maturing.

Stone Talk – Stone is an

C) All colours have yellow in it.

Adjective – made of stone

Noun – As a material

Verb – to stone = to kill, to make

Star Talk – The star Uranus is rainbow colour.

Line Talk – A Line is a billion lines cluttered in to a narrow space.

Daisy Talk – The weight of a daisy is three feathers.

Wink Talk – An intensity of a wink is a water droplet from a loose faucet.

Wind Talk – The age of the wind is a billion years older than the Empire State Building.

New Frontiers at Sundance

Thought you might be interested in seeing what work and which artists have been included in this year's "experimental" program at Sundance. Read here.

Nautical things

So I know I told a few of you about my swell idea to build a boat! yep I am building an arc of sorts, but I dont think this one will work too well. I applied for a permit, because that is what you are supposed to do when doing something in a park, but I was sadly denied. My mom has some connections that can help me get a better place to build my boat! but let me lay it out for you so you can imagine things better. this is what I drew on Paint of course. But the sails will be made from plastic bags that I have sewn together and the boat and mast will be made from sticks I have collected from my yard as well as others. Hopefully this will be able to be displayed by the end of the first weekend in December. Right now I am looking into Coopers landing, yha know since they deal with boats and such things.

Yoko!

So I have been reading out of the Yoko Ono book, and I am thinking that it would be cool to spend a day with her. She has a weird sort of backward nonsensical way of thinking about things, that also seem to have a deeper meaning.
The two that struck me were :
Mask Peice

Wear a blank mask.
Ask people to put in wrinkles, dimples,
eyes, mouth, etc., as you go.
1964 Spring

This entry is really great to me, I'm kind of infatuated with masks at the moment. I can't stop drawing them! It mostly just made me happy when I read this one. It would be an interesting experiment as well, to walk around with a blank mask and have people draw on it. It's kind of sad that I immediately think that someone would draw something rude on the mask, hah, but maybe they wouldn't! Who's to say. The second entry is:

Animal Piece

Take one mannerism from one kind of
animal and make it yours for a week.

Take another mannerism from another
kind of animal and make it yours
without dropping the previously
acquired mannerism.

Go on increasing manerisms by
taking them from different kinds
of animals.
1963 summer

I really love this one, it's sort of hilarious to me because have you ever seen a person and thought, wow, if they were an animal, they would be a squirrel. Or a horse. Or a bird. It's not even because they look like that animal or anything, it just has to do with their very slight mannerisms, the way they act and react to their environments. I love thinking about how humans are really just animals. Yeah, I am a fan of Yoko.

"Follow Smoke" Update

I have completed the filming of the video! I am extremely pleased about the footage. I would like to thank everyone who helped me with the process. I would not have been able to do it without them! I am very fortunate to have had a lot of help with the planning, equipment and work that went into this project. I should have a rough cut by the beginning of next week and look forward to posting it for others to see.

Music Video

I am extremely excited about this video. Thank you to all who have helped/are helping me with the project. Here are some pictures of the main location I will be using.

website art . . . devendra banhart

Okay i knooooow, Devendra Banhart, been there, dun that. BUT! He totally always has the best website! It changes with every album. I think with the last one you could dress him up in different outfits. Loads of fun. His new design is pretty cool as well. There's this kaleidoscope thing going on with the front page. Check it out!

http://www.devendrabanhart.com/

Fractal Engine!

So, although I don't usually get online to do fun stuff, it is on there. One thing that I have enjoyed doing in the past is checking out all the fractal engines that people have put online. I cannot find the one I really liked a while back, but found this downloadable engine you might have some fun with. It looks super awesome.

3D Multiprocessor Fractal Engine

Installation Creation.

I am extremely excited about my installation project. I discovered that there is a "Studio D" last week, and one of my professors let me peek inside. He is going to let me use his projector and one of the reels from the late 60s of Stephens campus and Columbia at the time. I'd also like to incorporate a lighting technique that I want for my music video involving oil, dye, and a projector. Chelsea and I recently spoke about combining our projects (her social practice) which still needs further discussion.

Halloween

Due to the fact that Halloween was on Sunday this year, I had the opportunity to wear two costumes. For Saturday, I was a pilot and wore a black and gold one piece that I accumulated through thrifting back home. I have worn it once before here for the game show last year in studio production. On the night of Halloween, my original idea was to be a circus conductor, again with the clothes I already have but could not find a hat or gloves! So instead I was just in a black cropped jacket, button up tail shirt, bright red boots, a large hairpin, fake lashes, and fake mustache. I named the costume "Harold". Jacqui has a picture of my costume for Halloween night. Although my costumes were not too extravagant this year, I worked at Maude Vintage and costumed many people for the two weeks prior to Halloween, and got to piece together examples to display.

RANDOM. You guys should check this out if you are bored too.

Whoop Dee Doo

Mesmerizing Art

After searching around different sites for wed art. The ones that made me curious the most were the ones that put you into a trance like watching t.v. It seems like you get lost into it for a minute. Eventually you pull yourself out because you know you should join the rest of society but for that little bit of time your involved with the art that is made. Here are a few sites that keep me entertained and curious. These three are all by the artist Larry Carlson
.

Bubble Heads

Spinners

blob

After looking through some of Polina's sites, I found some of these sites extremely interesting and interactive. I found one on Room 535. It's maybe not as flashy as these three others but it brings some interesting thoughts to mind. It's called Cityscapes and its a collective of different cities and countries that you discuss your relationship to that specific place.

Cityscapes

This other website, I found web art off is turbulence.org which features several interesting artists. I came upon Nicolas Clauss who decided to start painting again but solely using the web and making it interactive. You have to download a plug-in but its definitely worth it!

White Vibes

Scultpture Installation Artist

For my art installation project, I found inspiration from an artist, Sarah Walko.
She makes small installation sculptures out of every day objects she finds. She places them in non-traditional places like telephone booths and park benches.

I thought it would be interesting to make small everyday objects out of plaster and paint them. I was thinking of objects such as pencils, pens, cups, keys. Things that are normally ignored and passed over. I was going to place them at various places around town, inside stores, random parks and such. I like how this mixes up the traditional museum installation and is kind of a portable art that anyone can come upon and take.

Here is the website of Sarah Walko
Here is an interesting interview article

This website also features plenty of interesting artists and about their work.

kwwc reel monster rock & roll shrine

Explanation –

A reel-to-reel tape deck will be transformed to have spiral, moving eyes with feather eyelashes affixed, and a mouth, a purple lightning bolt over the face (David Bowie style), and a pink wig on top. The whole piece will be spray painted gold.

The tape deck will be set on top of a table covered with a plum colored cloth and placed in front of a wall covered in framed black and white photos of musicians. All of the frames will be spray painted purple and gold as well. The wall will be draped and candelabras will be placed on both sides of the shrine. Christmas lights will be placed around the “shrine”.

Install on Sunday 11/14/10

Materials –

Reel-to-Reel Tape Deck

Table

Plum Table Covering

Cardboard

Pink Wig

Picture Frames

Rock Star Photos

Feathers

Xmas Lights

Candelabras

Drapes

Sashes

Strobe light box for lights

Stray Paint – purple & gold

Paint – Black, purple, & gold

Equipment –

Staple gun

Paper/Cardboard to spray/paint over

Scissors

Safety Pins

Glue

Ribbon

Internet art references...

Museum of Web Art
Turbulence.org
Anti-Social Networking
Au Bord Du Fleuve/On The Riverside—by Joseph Lefèvre and Martine Koutnouyan (flash)
“today.getDate()” – by Diane Bertolo
“Data Diariezzzzz” – by Cory Arcangel
Room 535
Weather Songs (Richard Garrett)
XKCD (web comic by Randal Munroe)
Reenactment: The Salt Satyagraha Online (Joseph DeLappe)
Perte.de.Temps (flash site based on Charles Baudelaire’s l’Horloge)
Fenladia (Susan Alexis Collins)
Composite Club
Answers (by Julie T. Martin)
Truism project (Jenny Holzer)
All Systems Go (Katie Bush)
Collected Visions
Digital Landfill

And, last but not least, the site that mesmerized us all on Wednesday: Automatic Beacon

About the project as written in the press release by its makers:

At 00.00hrs on January 1st 2005 an automated beacon began broadcasting on the web at http://www.automatedbeacon.net
The beacon continuously relays selected live web searches as they are being made around the world, presenting them back in series and at regular intervals.
The beacon has been instigated to act as a silent witness: a feedback loop providing a global snapshot of ourselves to ourselves in real-time.
As resources become available, ‘Beacon’ will also begin broadcasting an audio version of this signal across the web and as a series of short wave radio broadcasts and FM local area broadcasts –time and places to be confirmed.
A physical display system is also being developed for installation in public spaces, galleries &c. Please make any enquiries to: info@automatedbeacon.net

Thomson & Craighead.
http://www.thomson-craighead.net

Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead are artists based in London who use video, sound, electronic networks and communications systems to create gallery and web-based artworks.

Ten Myths of Internet Art

First off, please read this essay - follow the link or read below.

Ten Myths of Internet Art by Jon Ippolito

By the time the mainstream art world awakened to the telecommunications revolution of the 1990s, a new landscape of exploration and experimentation had already dawned outside its window. Art on this electronic frontier-known variously as Internet art, online art, or Net art-matured at the same breakneck pace with which digital technology itself has expanded. Less than a decade after the introduction of the first image-capable browser for the World Wide Web, online art has become a major movement with a global audience. It took twenty years after the introduction of television for video artists such as Nam June Paik to access the technology required to produce art for broadcast television. Online artists, by comparison, were already exchanging text-based projects and criticism before the Internet became a visual medium with the introduction of the Mosaic browser in 1993. By 1995, eight percent of all Web sites were produced by artists, giving them an unprecedented opportunity to shape a new medium at its very inception. Since that time, art on the Internet has spawned countless critical discussions on e-mail-based communities such as the Thing, Nettime, 7-11, and Rhizome.org. Encouraged by a growing excitement over the Internet as a social and economic phenomenon, proliferating news articles and museum exhibitions have brought online art to the forefront of the discussion on art's future in the 21st century.

One of the reasons for the difficulty of adapting a museum to networked culture is that numerous misconceptions persist about that culture-even those who are savvy about art or the Internet do not often understand what it means to make art for the Internet. The following are ten myths about Internet art worth dispelling.

Myth Number 1: The Internet is a medium for delivering miniature forms of other art mediums.

Though you might never know it from browsing many of the forty million Web sites listed in an online search for the word "art," the Internet is more than a newfangled outlet for selling paintings. Granted, searching Yahoo for "Visual Art" is just as likely to turn up alt.airbrush.art as äda'web, but that's because Internet art tends to make its cultural waves outside of art-world enclaves, surfacing on media venues like CNN and the Wall Street Journal as well as on museum Web sites. More importantly, this art exploits the inherent capabilities of the Internet, making both more participatory, connective, or dynamic. Online renditions of paintings or films are limited not only by the fact that most people cannot afford the bandwidth required to view these works at their original resolution, but also because painting and cinema do not benefit from the Internet's inherent strengths: You would expect more art made for television than a still image. So when surfing the Web, why settle for a scanned-in Picasso or a 150-by-200 pixel Gone with the Wind? Successful online works can offer diverse paths to navigate, recombine images from different servers on the same Web page, or create unique forms of community consisting of people scattered across the globe.

Myth Number 2: Internet art is appreciated only by an arcane subculture.

Museum curators are sometimes surprised to discover that more people surf prominent Internet art sites than attend their own brick-and-mortar museums. To be sure, the online art community has developed almost entirely outside the purview of galleries, auction houses, and printed art magazines. Ironically, however, online art's disconnect from the mainstream art world has actually contributed to its broad appeal and international following. The absence of a gallery shingle, a museum lintel, or even a "dot-art" domain suffix that flags art Web sites means that many people who would never set foot in a gallery stumble across works of Internet art by following a fortuitous link. Without a Duchampian frame to fall back on, most online artworks look outside of inbred references to art history or institutions for their meaning. For these reasons, the Guggenheim's acquisition of online works into its collection is less a radical experiment in evaluating a new medium than a recognition of the importance of this decade-old movement.

Myth Number 3: To make Internet art requires expensive equipment and special training.

One of the reasons network culture spreads so quickly is that advances don't come exclusively from Big Science or Big Industry. Individual artists and programmers can make a difference just by finding the right cultural need and fulfilling it through the philosophy of "DIY: Do It Yourself." In the right hands, homespun html can be just as powerful as elaborate vrml environments. And thanks to View Source-the browser feature that allows surfers to see how a Web page is built and reappropriate the code for their own means-online artists do not need residencies in research universities or high technological firms to acquire the necessary skills. The requirement that online artworks must squeeze through the 14.4 kb/s modems of dairy farmers and den mothers forces online artists to forgo the sensory immersion of IMAX or the processing power of Silicon Graphics. However, constraints on bandwidth and processor speed can actually work to the advantage of Internet artists, encouraging them to strive for distributed content rather than linear narrative, and to seek conceptual elegance rather than theatrical overkill. Making successful art for the Internet is not just a matter of learning the right tools, but also of learning the right attitude.

Myth Number 4: Internet art contributes to the "digital divide."

The widening gap between digital haves and have-nots is a serious concern in many public spheres, from education to employment. But this bias is reversed for art. While it is true that artists in Ljubljana or Seoul have to invest in a computer and Internet access, finding tubes of cadmium red or a bronze foundry in those locales is even more challenging and much more expensive. Even in Manhattan, an artist can buy an iMac for less than the oils and large stretcher bars needed to make a single "New York-sized" painting. And when it comes to distributing finished works, there is no comparison between the democratizing contact made possible by the Internet and the geographic exclusivity of the analog art world. Only an extreme combination of luck and persistence will grant an artist entrance to gallery openings and cocktail parties that can make or break careers in the New York art world. But artists in Slovenia and Korea-outside of what are considered the mainstream geographic channels of the art world-have had notable success in making art for the Internet, where anyone who signs up for a free e-mail account can debate Internet aesthetics with curators on Nettime or take advantage of free Web hosting and post art for all to see.

Myth Number 5: Internet art = Web art.

The World Wide Web is only one of the media that make up the Internet. Internet artists have exploited plenty of other online protocols, including e-mail, peer-to-peer instant messaging, videoconference software, MP3 audio files, and text-only environments like MUDs and MOOs. It's tempting to segregate these practices according to traditional categories, such as calling e-mail art and other ephemeral formats "performance art." Yet the interchangeability of these formats defies categorization, as when, for example, the transcript of improvisational theater conducted via a chat interface ends up on someone's Web page as a static text file. Internet mediums tend to be technologically promiscuous: Video can be streamed from within a Web page, Web pages can be sent via e-mail, and it's possible to rearrange and re-present images and text from several different sites on a new Web page. These artist-made mutations are not just stunts performed by mischievous hackers; they serve as vivid reminders that the Internet has evolved far beyond the print metaphors of its youth.

Myth Number 6: Internet art is a form of Web design.

It may be fashionable to view artists as "experienced designers," but there is more to art than design. The distinction between the two does not lie in differences in subject matter or context as much as in the fact that design serves recognized objectives, while art creates its objectives in the act of accomplishing them. The online portfolios of Web design firms may contain dazzling graphics, splashy Flash movies, and other attractions, but to qualify as art such projects must go beyond just visual appeal. Design creates a matrix of expectations into which the artist throws monkey wrenches. Just as a painter plays off pictorial design, a Net artist may play off software design. Design is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for art.

Myth Number 7: Internet art is a form of technological innovation.

Internet artists spend much of their time innovating: custom writing Java applets or experimenting with new plug-ins. But innovation in and of itself is not art. Plenty of nonartists discover unique or novel ways to use technology. What sets art apart from other technological endeavors is not the innovative use of technology, but a creative misuse of it. To use a tool as it was intended, whether a screwdriver or spreadsheet, is simply to fulfill its potential. By misusing that tool-that is, by peeling off its ideological wrapper and applying it to a purpose or effect that was not its maker's intention-artists can exploit a technology's hidden potential in an intelligent and revelatory way. And so when Nam June Paik lugs a magnet onto a television, he violates not only the printed instructions that came with the set, but also the assumption that networks control the broadcast signal. Today's technological innovation may be tomorrow's cliché, but the creative misuse of technology still feels fresh even if the medium might be stale. The combined megahertz deployed by George Lucas in his digitally composited Star Wars series only makes more impressive-and equally surprising-the effects Charlie Chaplin achieved simply by cranking film backwards through his camera. In a similar vein, the online artists JODI.org exploited a bug in Netscape 1.1 that allows an "improper" form of animation that predated Flash technology by half a decade.

Myth Number 8: Internet art is impossible to collect.

Although the "outside the mainstream" stance taken by many online artists contributes to this impression, the most daunting obstacle in collecting Internet art is the ferocious pace of Internet evolution. Online art is far more vulnerable to technological obsolescence than its precedents of film or video: In one example, works created for Netscape 1.1 became unreadable when Netscape 2 was released in the mid-1990s. Yet the Guggenheim is bringing a particularly long-term vision to collecting online art, acquiring commissions directly into its permanent collection alongside painting and sculpture rather than into ancillary special Internet art collections as other museums have done. The logic behind the Guggenheim's approach, known as the "Variable Media Initiative," is to prepare for the obsolescence of ephemeral technology by encouraging artists to envision the possible acceptable forms their work might take in the future. It may seem risky to commit to preserving art based on such evanescent technologies, but the Guggenheim has faced similar issues with other contemporary acquisitions, such as Meg Webster's spirals made of leafy branches, Dan Flavin's installations of fluorescent light fixtures, and Robert Morris's temporary plywood structures that are built from blueprints. Preserving those works requires more than simply storing them in crates-so too immortalizing online art demands more than archiving Web files on a server or CD-ROM. Along with the digital files corresponding to each piece, the Guggenheim compiles data for each artist on how the artwork is to be translated into new mediums once its original hardware and software are obsolete. To prepare for such future re-creations, the Guggenheim has started a variable media endowment, where work of interest is earmarked for future data migration, emulation, and reprogramming costs.

Myth Number 9: Internet art will never be important because you can't sell a Web site.

It is true that the same market that so insouciantly banged gavels for artworks comprised of pickled sharks and other unexpected materials has yet to figure out how to squeeze out more than the cost of dinner for two from the sale of an artist's Web site. The reason artists' Web sites have not made it to the auction block is not their substance or lack thereof, but their very origin (equally immaterial forms of art have been sold via certificates of authenticity since the 1970s). The Internet of the early 1990s, and the art made for it, was nourished not by venture capital or gallery advances but by the free circulation of ideas. Exploiting network protocols subsidized by the US government, academics e-mailed research and programmers ftp'd code into the communal ether, expecting no immediate reward but taking advantage nevertheless of the wealth of information this shared ethic placed at their fingertips. Online artists followed suit, posting art and criticism with no promise of reward but the opportunity to contribute to a new artmaking paradigm. Indeed, many artists who made the leap to cyberspace claimed to do so in reaction to the exclusivity and greed of the art market. It's not clear whether online art can retain its youthful allegiance to this gift economy in the profit-driven world. It is possible, however, to hypothesize a Web site's putative value independent of its price tag in an exchange economy. That value would be the sum total of money a museum would be willing to spend over time to reprogram the site to ward off obsolescence (see Myth Number 8).

Myth Number 10: Looking at Internet art is a solitary experience.

The Internet may be a valuable tool for individual use, but it is far more important as a social mechanism. Beyond the numerous online communities and listservs dedicated to discussing art, many of the best Internet artists reckon success not by the number of technical innovations, but by the number of people plugged in. The hacktivist clearinghouse ®™ark, for example, connects sponsors who donate money or resources for anticorporate protest with activists who promote those agendas. In online art, works as visually dissimilar as Mark Napier's net.flag and John F. Simon, Jr.'s Unfolding Object capture the traces of many viewers' interactions and integrate them into their respective interfaces. In some cases, viewers can see the effects of other participants reflected in the artwork in real-time. In most online art, however, as in most online communication, viewers' interactions are asynchronous-as though an empty gallery could somehow preserve the footprints of previous visitors, their words still ringing in the air.


Jon Ippolito is an artists and the Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. His collaboration Fair e-Tales can be found at http://www.three.org. The Edge of Art, a book on creativity and the Internet revolution is forthcoming from Thames & Hudson.

Installation Art Proposal.

As far as installation are pieces we look at go, I am particularly interested in video installation art. I think the interesting thing about them is that it resembles a sort of god like presence, I guess I feel that way because it's a shining light beaming down onto a surface, and you can't always see where it's coming from. That is something that I am particularly interested in. So anyway, back on topic, I know that I am choosing to do the social practice project over the installation project so when I was thinking of ideas for the installation proj. I was sort of thinking really big scale, in a utopian sort of, if time and money and copyright was no issue, what would I do? The installation idea that I had was to show the animation that I posted on the blog a couple days ago in a tent that was painted to look like at old fashioned school house. It could be a tent like the ones that kids play in when they are little, but maybe a little bigger so that adults could fit inside. There would be one little screen with headphones that the person could sit and watch. I think that this animation on the way that the education system is set up today is so great, and it's an idea I have often thought about. It's hard to think of how to change such a deep problem, and it seems like everyone is realizing what a crisis it is, which makes me think of the movie Waiting for Superman, which is playing in theaters now on the same topic. I would want to play this animation in several places around town. The moving school house. I would like to show it on all of the college campuses in town, as well as public places that are non education related, because part of the idea that I am interested in spreading is the idea that people who are brilliant, think they aren't because the education system has failed them. So I think playing it in places like public parks or in front of public places that people have to go every day, like grocery stores or a gas station... somewhere a person might see this little tent, go inside and be inspired and go out and want to be educated, self motivated and a better person in general. It could change the world!!!!....okay, well, at least watch it and think about it. Thinking about it would be good enough I think. Because that is the first step. So this is my idea.....what do you guys think?

Notes on installation...

How do we begin to define 'installation art'? Here are some starting points...

• Usually 3D works designed to transform a space (or the perception of a space).
• Usually applied to interior spaces
• Exterior interventions are often called “land art” or “environmental art”
• Can be temporary or permanent
• Installation can incorporate a very broad range of materials and media (video, sound, performance, VR, internet, etc)
• Many installations are site-specific in that they are designed to exist only in the space for which they were created

Installation as a term for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently (1969). It was coined in this context in reference to a form of art that had arguably existed since prehistory but was not regarded as a discrete category until the mid-twentieth century. Installation art has often challenged the line between "art" and "life"... Remember Beuys’s “Social Sculpture” and the idea of the "Gesamtkunstwerk" (an all-encompassing work of art that draws upon all of the major art forms: painting, writing, music, etc. in order to achieve a state of total artistic immersion).

Let's think specifically about installations that are "interactive"...

• These will often involve the audience acting on it or the piece responding to the user’s activity.
• Web-based installations, gallery based installations, digital based installations, electronic based installations, etc.
• New technology has informed a variety of new installations that allow for diversity of interactivity.
• For example, the work may involve sensors, which plays on the reaction to the audiences’ movement when looking at the installations; Artists have also explored VR which can be deeply immersive; video, film, and web-based technology are also commonly used.

Here are some institutions that collect and support installation art and where you can see/experience it:

The Mattress Factory
DIA – Beacon
The Medicine Factory
Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe
Electronic Language International Festival (FILE)

Here are some installations to look at and artists that may be inspiring:



“Spiral Jetty” (1970) Robert Smithson
Built entirely of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah,
The Spiral Jetty forms a 1,500-foot-long, 15-foot-wide counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake which is only visible when the level of the Great Salt Lake falls below an elevation of 4,197.8 feet.
Though many would file this under "land art" or "environmental art", I think it is interesting to think about "installation" in as broad of terms as possible.





“Give if you can - Take if you have to” by Jacek Tylicki (Arambol, Goa, India) is an example of a simple, poetic installation which allows visitors to choose how (and if) to interact with it while also arguably serving an important social function.

Most of Tylicki's projects work to raise social and environmental issues, Beginning in 1973, Tylicki put sheets of canvas or paper into the wind, the rivers or the forests, and left them out for long periods of time so that the natural environment could "create art" on/out of the materials.

He also founded a periodical called "Anonymous Artists" where artists presented their artworks without revealing their own names. In 1985, he created an installation called Chicken Art. For the piece, Tylicki transformed a gallery into a chicken house where live chickens lived, watching the realistic paintings of chickens, chicks and roosters hanging on the gallery walls. Asked about the show, he declared: "For the chicken, the most beautiful is chicken." Another installation was "Free Art", where well known, invited artists, like gave away their artworks to the public for free.

“Test Site 2006” by Carsten Höller (Tate Modern, London) is a series of slides where visitors can experience both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the "inner spectacle" of the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety as they have a go descending in the slides. The piece asks viewers to rethink how they experience a museum and how they use their bodies. The slides in the installation wove through several floors of the museum, allowing visitors to slide through as many as 5 stories. (BTW - Has anyone been to the City Museum in St. Louis?)

For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a 'voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind'. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don't have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the 'inner spectacle' experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

To date Höller has installed six smaller slides in other galleries and museums, but the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall offers a unique setting in which to extend his vision. Yet, as the title implies, he sees it as a prototype for an even larger enterprise, in which slides could be introduced across London, or indeed, in any city. How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?

Höller has undertaken many projects that invite visitor interaction, such as Flying Machine (1996) that hoists the user through the air, Upside-Down Goggles (1994/2001) that modify vision, and Frisbee House (2000), a room full of Frisbees. The slides, like these earlier works, question human behaviour, perception and logic, offering the possibility for self-exploration in the process.

Best known for the politically charged images he has projected onto buildings and monuments - images of rockets projected onto triumphal arches, the image of handcuffed wrists projected onto a courthouse facade, images of homeless people in bandages and wheelchairs projected onto statues in a park from which they had been evicted, Krzysztof Wodiczko has helped to make public space a place where marginalized people can speak, establish their presence, and assert their rights.

Wodiczko gives participants the opportunity to speak about their traumatic experiences, creating spaces for individual therapy and public reflection. In the Tijuana Projection (image below), the aim was to give voice and visibility to the women who work in Tijuana's "maquiladora" industry. The women's testimonies focused on a variety of issues including work-related abuse, sexual abuse, family disintegration, alcoholism and domestic violence. A headset with a camera and a microphone was connected to two projectors and loudspeakers that transmitted the testimonies live.









Graffiti Research Lab does a lot of interesting projects. Here are just two examples - check out their website to learn and see more:
Interactive Architecture
Night Writer









Shirin Neshat is an interesting photo and video artist (who has recently released her first 'traditional' feature narrative film, Women Without Men). Her work deals primarily with the history, mythology, and struggles of women, usually women in the Muslim world. You can read one review of her installation show here.

The Story of Stuff: another nice use of animation as lecture illustration

Go to this website to see any one of multiple exciting and informative "animated lectures": http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Here is one clip, embedded.

Check This Out PLZ

This is a really great/smart/awesome animation, I hope you guys watch it!! :)

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.