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2009 Grant Recipients
Our 2009 Grantee projects represent a truly diverse range of approaches to interactive art making. The concepts and implementation of the projects contrast greatly, employing both high and low-tech media, inviting both expressive freedom and refinement of craft, arising from both established collaborations and events and grassroots efforts, reaching both small-town and metropolitan communities. But, as always, our grantees share a common goal: to include their community in the creation of a project that exists for and belongs to the public – a project that provokes immediate actions that connects individuals with each other and with their community at large.
We’re full excitement and anticipation of these projects and will share with you their development throughout the next year. Keep an eye on our blog, at blackrockarts.blogspot.com to read about the latest progress of our Grantee and other projects.
Adaptive Architecture
Marisha Farnsworth & Jeremy Fisher
Oakland, CA
$4,000
Adaptive Architecture is a community construction project. Collaborating with high school students from the Youth Speaks we will use structural bamboo poles to create modular forms that can be connected and arranged in various configurations to form dynamic spaces.
Built at the Life is Living festival at DeFremery Park in West Oakland, Adaptive Architecture becomes the armature for canvases on which graffiti artists will use non-aerosol, non-toxic paint to create environmentally themed tags. Adaptive Architecture is designed to be easily deconstructed and transformed and conformed to different sites as it is installed in galleries and events around the Bay Area.
www.lifeisliving.org/core/life-is-living-abstract
Cardboardia (Cardboard Town Free!)
Sergej Korsakov
MOSCOW
$7,500
Cardboardia 'towns' are temporary, collaboratively built and inhabited
towns manifesting in Moscow, Russian, Finland and Germany in the summer of 2009.
Carboardia is, in essence, a role playing community, where guests can
create a new identity while contributing to the growth of the town, using cardboard as their expressive and artistic medium. Every town created under the Cardboardia title is a place where people can reinvent themselves - where, for a short time, everyone can leave behind their daily worries through new ways of self-expression.
Cardboardia brings together all people of all ages and backgrounds in a conflict free environment. All the participants have the equal significance and room for self expression.
cardboardia.info, www.myspace.com/cardboardia, www.myspace.com/badtasterus, www.flickr.com/photos/cardboardia
Discarded
Benjamin Jones and Anna Hecker
Brooklyn, NY
$1,000
Discarded is a wooden creature crafted entirely from furniture discarded on the streets of Brooklyn. The creature stands roughly 30’ long x 7’ wide x 8’ tall at its highest point. Much of the furniture used is kept, as much as possible, in its original (discarded) form, allowing participants to speculate on the origins of each element and the methodology that went into creating the piece.
While the sidewalks of New York City on trash night are a rich resource of useful items and cultural artifacts, most New Yorkers hold pre-conceived fears of tapping into this resource: practical fears of dirt and vermin, and emotional fears based on the societal perception of welcoming discarded items into our homes. The resulting obsession with new purchases saps the world of natural resources, and the ease of shopping versus crafting creates a psychic distance from our belongings that enables us to acquire and discard at will. By refocusing our communities on the process of foraging and creation, we can help transform our society into one that values originality and sustainability rather than purposeless consumption.
Through community gatherings and workshops, the piece will be a collaborative effort, culminating in exhibition at this year's FIGMENT festival. FIGMENT 2009, held in partnership with the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC), is a 3-day participatory arts event on Governors Island in New York Harbor (www.figmentnyc.org). FIGMENT is a project of Action Arts League, and is produced by a coalition of volunteers in partnership with The Pure Project.7
East Hollywood Utility Box Art Project
Karen Mack
Los Angeles, CA
$6,000
The Utility Box Art Project is a guided collaboration and mentorship program, pairing artists with youth to design and create murals on utility boxes. The team first conducts a neighborhood mapping process in which the artist and youth study neighborhood issues and gather input from residents. The youth interview a broad range of locals to further their understanding of the community and the theme. After an issue is selected, the youth and artist hold story-gathering workshops – including the new on-site component - in which community members contribute images, words and ideas to support the development of the final artwork.
Each project concludes with a community celebration that coincides with an important local event. The celebration provides the opportunity for the community to gather to support its success, to connect to each other and to acknowledge the work of the artists (youth and mentors) and community members who created the work. Audience members include visitors
from other Los Angeles neighborhoods, who come to experience the final artistic creations.
Escombros Vivos (Live Debris)
Taylor Cass Stevenson
Portland, OR and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
$5,000
Live Debris 2009 (Escombros Vivos) is a traveling series of events and interventions dedicated to sharing and establishing new reuse traditions as a means of reducing stigmas around garbage, poverty and street culture. Starting and ending in Portland, Oregon, a greening city successfully overcoming its stigmas about garbage, Live Debris 2009 travels to Rio de Janeiro as a bi-lingual, collaborative series of events networking local and international artists to reflect upon humanity’s rapidly changing relationships with our discards.
Works of reuse art, craft and design have traveled from Portland to Rio de Janeiro, where Brazilian artists have physically and philosophically elaborated upon the same works to express their more polemic and necessity-based attitudes towards humanity’s discards. After 5 months of workshops, clothing exchange parties, public interventions and exhibitions, the artwork will return to Portland, Oregon for a series of final events.
Live Debris is an annual project which started last year in Beirut, Lebanon. This year’s project, called ‘Escombros Vivos’ in Portuguese, works in collaboration with over 50 artists of diverse backgrounds and disciplines. From fashion designers, graffiti writers, street artisans and activists to clowns, dancers and poets, Live Debris aims to develop lasting relationships between people who are dedicated to reintegrating garbage, public space and marginalized communities.
HONK! Festival
Trudi Cohen
Cambridge, MA
$3,000
The 4th
annual HONK! Festival of activist street bands, Oct. 9-11, 2009, is a
musical and theatrical reclamation of public space. Community
participants join with 350+ musicians from around the neighborhood and
around the world to play, perform, and parade in Davis Square
(Somerville, MA) and surrounding underserved neighborhoods of Boston.
Participants represent a great diversity of ages, musical
backgrounds and abilities and share a commitment to music as a tool for
social action. The HONK! Festival serves both to create a cultural
exchange between bands and to present the groups’ populist music-making
to the public at large. The divisions between performer and audience,
public space and private space, and music and non-music are actively
challenged.
Mice'Pace Maze
David Petersen
Burbank, CA
$6,000
Mice’Pace Maze is a project that employs the mouse maze concept. Originally, Mice’Pace Maze was a class project that utilized this concept, relying on a custom computer program to create a human mouse maze but with no walls. By mounting a camera above a marked off space this camera transmits the images of players wearing originally designed mouse heads to our program in Max/MSP and processes that information. Secondly, the data gets sent back to the players headphones and lets them know if they are maneuvering correctly or hitting a ‘wall’ through acoustic guidance. Players are given the audio information through the use of wireless headphones thus creating a maze challenging players’ abilities to move through a space with only what they hear. The players’ objective is to maneuver through this maze without getting trapped by the hazards of a normal mouse. Our ‘walls’ are represented by hissing cats and snapping mouse traps. The less the players hear of these noises the more points the players earn. If the players are able maneuver through the maze to the end they will have reached the cheese bar and then the computer will calculate their score and record it for our records. We have been rewarding players with high scores by giving them custom made T-shirts and burned discs of the game music.
www.mpginteractivearts.com, www.micepacemaze.com
Pollinator Appreciation Day Community Project
Jessica Levine
Lewisburg, WV
$2,000
Wide-spectrum community participation will be invited in the process of making this interactive, kinetic bicycle sculpture. This sculpture will be made by mechanically combining a bicycle with an umbrella-style outdoor clothes dryer. Recycled/ repurposed materials (that are light in weight) will be used to make artistic models of pollinators – butterflies, birds, moths, beetles, bees, and more. As the bicycle is ridden, the clothes dryer will rotate, and the ‘pollinators’ will move in space. . The sculpture will be unveiled as part of the opening of The Rev. Carl Renick Memorial Butterfly Garden.
The Tiny House Project
Leslie Pritchett
Traveling Exhibit, based in California
$5,000
A traveling exhibition, these houses will be arrayed in a diminutive neighborhood, a contained community situated around a small road too narrow for cars. The exhibition will have a very human scale, and visitors will be invited to participate directly with the intimately crafted spaces that the neighborhood and the tiny structures create. For the initial phase of the exhibition, the houses will be occupied for approximately one month. The stories of that experiment in tiny living will then be woven into the remainder of the exhibition as the neighborhood travels to seven varied California contexts; from a Bay Area museum, to the edge of Modesto, and urban settings in Sacramento (for example) and downtown Los Angeles. Participants will be invited into the spaces for a brief, immersive encounter with the vision of the houses’ creators. An audio tour (accessible by cell phone) will be produced for each of the houses, and for the neighborhood as a whole, exploring the themes being considered.
The Work Office (TWO)
Katarina Jerinic and Naomi Miller
Brooklyn, NY
$5,500
The Work Office (TWO) is a multidisciplinary art project disguised as an employment agency. Informed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the Great Depression in the 1930s, TWO is a gesture to "make work" for visual and performing artists, writers, and others by giving them simple, idea-based assignments to explore, document, or improve daily life in New York. From a temporary central office, TWO's administrators—Katarina Jerinic and Naomi Miller—interview, register, and hire employees; assign, collect, and exhibit work; and distribute Depression-era wages to employees during weekly Payday Parties.
Prospective employees submit an application online through the project’s website and, once hired, choose an assignment such as documenting a need for repairs, making a regional travel guide for their block or neighborhood, reinterpreting a newspaper photograph, or giving a concert for a houseplant. Employees have a week to turn in their assignment, for which they will be paid $23.50, the weekly wage for an artist in the Federal One Project (the arts division of the WPA).
Payday Parties are held at the end of each work week. At these events, employees collect their wages and the public is invited to view the week’s works and learn about the project. The Payday Parties are inspired by the socializing that occurred between artists as they waited in line to collect their wages at their local WPA office. They also provide a forum for TWO artists and the general public to interact.
TWO is based on the idea of “making work” (WPA terminology) for artists to “make work” (artist terminology). With the current economic recession in mind, TWO revisits the approach the 1930s federal government took to alleviate the effects of the Depression on daily life. Artists were employed to make art—alongside infrastructure and other projects to rebuild the country—and were seen as a valuable labor force. TWO is a wry contemporary realization of this model.