mechaproject 0809
- presentation includes
- discuss reading (that we've already read prior to the presentation)
- present work
- show something in progress
November 3rd - Lindsay
November 10th - Miki
November 17th - Rupa
Rock Paper Scissors Proposal Site
Finalish RPS Proposal?
For proposal, have a 1 page proposal, roughly translating into:
- 1st p concept
- 2nd p description/visualization of project
3rd p
- practical issues,
- materials list,
- budget,
- tech needs,
- space/physical needs
To work it into a group proposal, we need to come up with a name for us as a group, and how everything works together as a show. Perhaps, a craft theme, or craft + technology.
We should have a CathexiSpin element.
Potential Names for Our Group Show
Miki's Project
Lindsay's Project
Rupa's Project
Things to do before submitting the proposal
- schedule of the performances
- be more specific about how the work is going to be laid out in the space
- include photographs (from this work or prior work) 3-4 images
- CV
Rock Paper Scissors Proposal Draft
Title: Invisible Ingredient: synesthesia, eating and revolutionary craft
Artists:
Rupa Dhillon
Miki Foster
Lindsay Kelley (cv)
with Elizabeth Travelsight and Nick Lally
Preferred Months: January, February, or March 2009
Three intersecting Projects: Craft_Work (1 word, not 2), Still Living and Feminist Craft Corner
Rupa, Lindsay and Miki came together to create a three part project which explores the intersections of DIY technology, performativity, and sensory encounters.
Rupa Dhillon: Craft_Work is an audio-visual exploration of the relationship between sound and image. The live performance and installation will feature video recordings of different crafting activities, such as sewing, cutting, and pottery making set to a soundtrack of electronic music and found sound. The audio and video will reveal the oftentimes overlooked rhythmic and musical nature of these activities while also exploring the sometimes violent relationship between the crafter and her or his chosen materials through the juxtaposition of sound and image.
Craft_Work will consist of a series of live musical performances featuring crafting activities where the purpose is to create rhythm and sound rather than a finished physical product. Additional layers of sound will be added via a DJ-VJ performance in which videos of crafting are separated from their source sounds and are given new electronic or found sounds, such as the harsh tones of a synthesizer or the audio from a surgical procedure. The installation will consist of a crafting music video where what you see is not necessarily what you hear.
Tech Requirements: For the PERFORMANCE - computer with Max/MSP (can bring my own), pair of speakers, 2 microphones, audio interface (I can provide my own if necessary), XLR and 1/4" jack cables, sewing machine (I can provide), other crafting stuff that makes noise plus human labor for noisemaking, projector, and a wall or screen to project onto. For the INSTALLATION - either a computer with Max/MSP and a screen, or a computer with my video file on it and a screen or projector and a pair of speakers.
Miki Foster: Feminist Craft Corner is a multimedia digicraft collective and public access show. Feminist Craft Corner's installation will feature midi-triggering crafting devices, video, and a live performance.
Lindsay Kelley: Invested in spaces of biological and cultural contact along the US-Mexico border, Still Living turns to bioart practices to work through questions of inter-species relations, human and plant transplantation, and cultural/ecological crisis. Allowing plant behaviors to translate into human responses, I will present performances that explore the process of naming within spaces of conquest, asking how colonial narratives collapse plants and people.
Tech Requirements: I will install the plants and performances in the space, which requires electricity and a 4 by 6 square footprint. I will also require some wall space for possible projection. I will be taping a cooking show as well as offering the results of the show to visitors.
Elizabeth Travelslight: I am in the process of developing a digital/material sculpture called an Anarchive. It is a continuation and elaboration upon the intertwining of “text” and “textile” within the art of storytelling and the history of technology. Anarchive attempts to take the inquiry further to re-conceptualize the archive beyond a holding place of power, memory, and community authority, but as a site of only momentary meaning –unknowledge– of the fleeting concrescences and dissolutions that serve as the present and then makes way for a future to come.
The piece begins with an internet call for contributions. The e-mail serves as a kind of community echolocation and collective generation of content. The content is cut and reassembled to form an intricate weaving that plays upon the limits of literacy and the communication possibilities of texture, color, and pattern. The weaving is periodically scanned as a high resolution JPEG, then dated and uploaded to the Anarchive website as a searchable html document invisibly describing the weavings contents and contributors. Contributors are notified of their works new iteration and location. As the digital weavings are found by web browsers, the accumulated hits contribute toward a programmed half-life deterioration of the file. The anarchive is designed to forget, to deteriorate under the repeated touches of digital handling. Included in the piece are the poem loom and thin spools of paper generated by the call for contributions as well as the paper weavings themselves.
Nick Lally: This is radical craft's attempt to realize the ultimate dream of technology: the creation of new life forms. This is a creature created from everyday consumer electronics and art supplies, but which lives, learns and yearns to be held. In its current form, This is an unproductive life that only senses light, movement and touch to which it responds with unintelligible sounds and shaking. But This holds the promise of the future: the promise of the democratization of the ability to understand and create new life forms that may be used in the service of humanity. The only requirement for this creature is a power supply for nourishment and a small pedestal to sit atop. While This is an ongoing experiment, I don't envision This growing or learning so much that it would require more space/mobility during its stay at RPS.
Bios:
Elizabeth Travelslight: Transnationally made and Bay Area born, Elizabeth Travelslight is a writer, experimental philosopher, and artist. She enjoys orchestrating beautiful collisions between digital and material media, refining the explorations of her philosophy through conceptual art, curious objects, craft, and conversations.
Her efforts are part of a continuing interrogation of diaspora, materialism, mathematics, space, and possibility that draws primarily upon family, literature, histories of science, and the speculative fictions of an intensely private language becoming communicable. They are digital releases, bottled messages tossed into electrical currents. Meant to be found rather than shown– they no longer belong to her. They are frenetic, symbolic emissions, codes amidst codes, intended to interest and interpolate those already willing and able to receive and return their call.
She is an M.A. candidate with the Media and Communications division of the European Graduate School and a first year graduate student with the Digital Arts/New Media M.F.A program at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Nick Lally: Nick Lally is an artist, designer and educator pursuing an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from UC Santa Cruz. He is interested in creating work that is participatory, collaborative, dialogical and interactive. In his work, he hopes to explore the contradictions contained within new technologies while creating work that test the boundaries of new media. He is a founding member of the Artclash Collective and the Thunderwhip Design Collective.
Lindsay Kelley:
Lindsay Kelley is a Ph.D candidate in the History of Consciousness program and an MFA candidate in the Digital Art & New Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current research is on representations of people and plants in conquistador narratives, focusing on moments of violence toward vegetation. Lindsay's work incorporates a wide variety of media, including live plants, performance actions, and video. Inspired by her family's unsettling desire to claim conquistador Pánfilo de Narvaes as their ancestor, this work examines continuities between early and more recent mass media representations of conquistador encounters (De Bry's Great Voyages, The Road to El Dorado, The Fountain). Lindsay created performances and online spaces devoted to the problem of claiming the conqueror while she was an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University.
Her dissertation is about food, biotechnology and contemporary art, focusing on artists who use biological processes or "wet ware" (the Critical Art Ensemble, the Tissue Culture and Art Project, and Christine Chin, among others). She has presented material from her dissertation in several of her own courses, including "Writing About Food," "An Introduction to Visual Culture," "Contemporary Art and Biotechnology," and as a guest lecturer in Donna Haraway's "Science as Culture and Practice." She has given talks at several conferences, and her most recent publication is "Recipe Art: Corporate Kitchens and Biotech Encounters" in The Journal of Arts in Society. In addition to her dissertation and thesis, she recently coordinated a large performance festival at UCSC. "Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice" combined panels, interventionist art actions, performances, and exhibitions in three Bay Area art spaces.
Lindsay's proposal:
Proposal for Invisible Ingredient at Rock, Paper Scissors
Please edit as you see fit.
I propose an installation and performance series interrogating the intersections between taxonomy, cultivation, and family history. The term "still living" simultaneously produces images of the still life, the quiet pulsing growth of plants, and the figure of the adapted survivor. Invested in spaces of biological and cultural contact along the US-Mexico border, my thesis project for DA/NM will turn to bioart practices to work through questions of inter-species relations, human and plant transplantation, and cultural/ecological crisis. How do plants define humanity? How do human and non-human animals interface as more and more species cohabit in urban contexts? How do environmental factors change human and plant genetic expression? How might conversations and collaborations between artists, scientists, and food activists impact visual production across disciplines?
My participation in Invisible Ingredient will involve three intersecting parts: a workshop and a meal, an evolving installation documented with time-lapse photography, and a cookbook available to read in the gallery or order online. In Still Living, the invisible ingredients are the connections that bind history, taste, and ecology; the growth and consumption of desert trees and plants; the fixing of food as recipes; and in the gestures and techniques of cooking.
During the course of my installation at Rock Paper Scissors, I plan several performances and publications. I will have a cookbook available throughout the installation, to be read in the gallery, purchased, or downloaded. Making use of the recipes and histories told in the cookbook, I will host a workshop dedicated to growing, storing and cooking desert plants in California. The workshop will culminate in sharing food prepared during the installation. Visitors will be able to walk away with a taste of desert plants and preserves to be eaten later. During the installation I will be cultivating edible desert plants, including prickly pear cacti, chile peppers, piñon trees, and pecan trees. These plants will be both sources for the food I prepare in the workshop and examples of concrete and hypothetical genetic shifts. History and environment affect both plant and human lives; I will be using my workshop and cookbook to work through how environmental factors influence genetic shifts in plants and people.
My installation will involve a large table (4' x 6') to be used as both a drawing surface and a space for preparing food. I will mount a digital camera above the table to document changes in its surface. I will also set up a smaller table or bookshelf to display cookbooks and other written material. Wall space alongside these two areas will be useful, as I will be posting text, calendars, title, and statement.