Course vs. Score

Last week I had the pleasure of teaching a workshop within the Artist as Educator graduate class taught by Caroline Woolard, an artist I greatly admire, at SVA (School of Visual Arts) in NYC. While walking the class through the process of designing a semester-long, college-level art class I tried to talk about how, while on the one hand, a college syllabus is a very institution-friendly document that outlines what useful and necessary information and activities the course will cover, it can also operate as a set of instructions that facilitates a generative process or kind of performance. There are many important things to consider, such as “Am I teaching from my bias and how can I counter that?,” “How can I  create an arc over a 16 week semester and break-down the material into ‘consumable chunks’?” or “What is my criteria for evaluation and how can I make it transparent to the students?,” but just as important are other questions: As teaching artists, how can we imagine our course as a laboratory? How can we design structures and assignments that are open, or balance instrumentality with a sense of serendipity, irreverence, playfulness, absurdity, intentional failure or other unquantifiable quality that may be conducive to making art? When I arrived at the class I was more than pleased to join in with their performance of a Fluxus aqueous event score, passing water around a circle with a spoon.

 

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Psychogeography Lives

StreetViewsposterThe course I teach at Hunter College in the IMA (Integrated Media Arts) MFA program called Psychogeography is very process oriented, but that doesn’t keep the amazing students from turning fully formed projects into the world. Annie Berman’s great video Street Views, “shot” entirely in Google Street View, made for class last year, just won best experimental short at the Rome Independent Film Festival and has been screening widely. Jason Fox, who also took the class last year, has programmed the latest season of Flaherty NYC screenings at Anthology Film Archive. Jason closed out the series with an awesome augmented reality film walk called Pot Luck that took viewers to sites around the East Village to see work by Catherine Chalmers, Stefani Bardin, Alan Raymond and others, intriguingly sited and triggered by local signage. We made a little bit of a spectacle of ourselves.

 

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Watching THE PASTA FACTORY CLOSES by Jacqueline Goss,
Michael Gitlin, and Ben Gitlin-Goss at 65 E 2nd Street

 

 

STREET VIEWS Trailer from Fish in the Hand Productions on Vimeo.

High School, Gold Keys and a ‘Banksy’

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Heading back to the ferry on Governors Island

This has been the week of brilliant high school students. On Thursday we held our first workshop with students at the Urban Assembly Harbor School on Governors Island. In the Oyster City themed workshops, spearheaded by my terrific collaborator Meredith Drum, we are working with students to design 3D, virtual “monuments” to mark sites on the island that we might add to the treasure hunt node of Oyster City. The super bright and engaged on-the-ground experts who come to the island every day to study ocean engineering, scientific diving, aquaculture and other projects centered around marine stewardship are a pleasure to work with. A special thanks goes to Sam Janis, who has helped us organized the after-school workshops and who is deeply involved in the Billion Oyster Project .

banksyOn Friday I was a juror for the digital art category of the Scholastic National Art and Writing Awards. Top award winners get a gold key and artists and writers like Andy Warhol and Truman Capote got their start with early accolades from Scholastic. Since we finished a little early I sat in on some of the “Future New” panel and was truly blown away by the interdisciplinary work high school students are doing. Conceptual performance video, mapping tap water sample collection in different parts of San Francisco, an algorithmic system that generates bright abstract animations, a beautiful, intricate interactive shape game inspired by oragami and realized with a 3D printer and elegant string installation in public space drawing attention to spaces where people live on the street were only a handful of the amazing projects.

Afterwards I bought a fake Banksy on the street from a vendor in Soho, just to remind myself to keep it light.

Everyone Can Be Web-Native

zeepopLast semester I taught a web projects class in Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts MFA program that, in addition to covering some CSS/HTML and web design production basics, focused on web native storytelling. The students in the program are mostly already kick-ass non-fiction media makers and so I was excited to see what they would do when confronted with a web-based platform. Two of the newest and most user friendly tools we looked at that allow for nearly instant web-native gratification are Zeega (still in alpha) and Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker (a GUI for working with their popcorn.js library). A few folks tried out Zeega. Here are just three of the great projects that came together in class (best viewed in Chrome or Safari):

Camilla: An Interactive Fairytale by Ryan Daniels
An observational, interactive story about a girl who grew up in an upper class household in Brasil and is confronted with her complex identity.

The Egg Trade by Laura Hadden
Audio interviews reflecting different perspectives on the egg donor industry.

The Haitian Situation by Tennessee Watson
A painting made as a gift is an animated interface for an interview with an American Colonel who was responsible for Haitian refugees at Guantánamo Bay in the early 90s. The non-interactive version can be seen at the Guantánamo Public Memory Project.

 

Art & Pedagogy

This semester I have been teaching a fun meta-class, Teaching Practicum, at Brooklyn College for MFA students in the PIMA program (Performance and Interactive Media Art). In addition to practical aspects of teaching and great learning sessions in which they each teach one section of their classes, we have been exploring some of the many recent projects in art and pedagogy, experimental and/or free schools run by artists and reading essays from Curating and the Pedagogical Turn and Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century, as well as some radical educational theory like Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

This week we had a visiting artist, Mary Walling Blackburn (http://welcomedoubleagent.com/), who shared some of her amazing projects exploring alternate strategies for disseminating knowledge, intimate interactions, subjective cultural resistance and a multidisciplinary mytho-socio-political excavation of space and place, among other things. These included the Feminist Read-A-Thon / Anhoek School, Radical Citizenship: The Tutorials, Dormitory in June, Iran, The Little Heavy Ones, Bad Dreams as Border Songs—a piece for Trade School in which she collected dreams from people living in Redford, Texas to disseminate in other places, as songs sung into the ears of willing participants—and her upcoming project for Bard College, Library In (the Land of Fuck). Very inspiring. Thanks Mary!