The Minneapolis Convention Center (MCC), Meet Minneapolis Convention & Visitors Association, and the City of Minneapolis announce a new, $50,000 “Creative City Challenge” to create and install a temporary, interactive, site-specific, eco-focused “portal” to the City of Minneapolis on the Plaza of the Minneapolis Convention Center beginning summer 2013. This challenge is intended to encourage exciting proposals and thoughtful discussion about how to make our downtown more vital, dynamic, livable, walkable and environmentally friendly. Moe information.
Donate to Play
Want to check out David Byrne’s Playing the Building installation at Aria at the Jeune Lune? A $50 donation to Northern Lights.mn on Give to the Max Day (you can schedule it now, btw), scores you a free ticket, thanks to our friends at First & First.
Your Support
Northern Lights.mn takes art to the streets.
Northern Spark is one of our best known programs. It is a multidisciplinary Minnesota festival–a free, dusk to dawn participatory public art event throughout Minneapolis* from the Greenway to the Mississippi. In 2012, 40,000 people experienced 118 works by over 200 artists in more than 28 venues in collaboration with 52 cultural partners.
In 2013, we’ll be returning to Saint Paul! Your contribution makes this metrowide community event possible.
Northern Lights.mn supports emerging artists.
Art(ists) On the Verge is an intensive, mentor-based fellowship program for 5 Minnesota-based, emerging artists or artist groups working experimentally at the intersection of art, technology, and digital culture with a focus on network-based practices that are interactive and/or participatory. Now in its fourth year, AOV is generously supported by the Jerome Foundation.
Northern Lights.mn supports artists who rock our world.
Northern Lights has commissioned, co-commissioned and co-presented many extraordinary artists, including Futurefarmers, Mona El-Khafif, Sharon Hayes, ligorano + reese, Wing Young Huie, David Goldes, Monica Haller, Andrea Stanislav, Jim Campbell, Chris Larson, Mark Shepard, Marisa Jahn, Shih Chieh Huang, Zach Lieberman, Angelo Vermeulen, The Living, SOFTlab, Daily Tous Les Jours, Piotr Szyhalski, and many others. If you have experienced the Giant Sing Along at the Minnesota State Fair, you have seen Northern Lights.mn at work.
Northern Lights.mn supports new ideas.
This spring, Northern Lights presented in collaboration with the Walker Art Center, our 2nd biannual symposium: Discourse and Discord: Architecture of Agonism from the Kitchen Table to the City Street. “In an era of cultural conservatives and the liberal elite, Occupiers and Tea Partiers, civil uprisings and government crackdowns, perhaps the one point of agreement today is there’s no shortage of disagreement. But if that’s true, then why isn’t there more debate—not online flame wars, not the televised jockeying of political candidates, but live, in-person dialogue?”
Northern Lights.mn supports collaboration.
The very first Northern Lights initiated and produced was the UnConvention, a multi-partner, multi-venue program about the intersection of participatory politics and participatory media during the 2008 Republication National Convention. We have worked with dozens of organizations locally and nationally. Our goal is the best way to support innovative artists, spark important ideas, and build supportive audiences. As often as not this is best done in collaboration.
We are dedicated to the least amount of infrastructure that is necessary to support the most innovative artists with the greatest impact. This means more bang for your buck.
Your support makes Northern Lights.mn possible.
Thank you.
Steve Dietz
President and Artistic Director
For a $50 donation, receive a free ticket to David Byrne's "Playing" the Piano at Aria, in collaboration with First & First.
Give to the Max Day – Thursday
Just when you thought it was safe to watch TV and open your email now that the U.S. elections are over, many of us will recieve multiple pitches for donations to our favorite Minnesota non-profit for Give to the Max Day, Thursday, November 15.
Including from Northern Lights.mn.
We have had an extraordinary year, and we are looking forward to another year of exciting projects. Over the next few days, I’d like to highlight Northern Light’s commitment to artists, audiences, ideas, and collaboration.
We are three years old and trying to do this with the least infrastructure possible, so that your support will go the furthest possible.
Support Northern Lights.mn this Thursday on Give to the Max Day.
Playing the Building
Playing the Building at Aria, Nov. 5 - Dec. 4. Photo: Jake Armour
I first saw David Byrne’s Playing the Building at Battery Maritime Building in New York City in 2008. It was after hours, and I was the only person there besides the attendant. It was a magical moment, and the building, under renovation before reopening as the summer ferry terminal to Governor’s Island, seemed to sigh and wheeze and pound its history as I prodded the organ keys. In my mind’s eye, it was late afternoon, and the light was slanting through the grimed windows like a Francis Frith cathedral.
The thing about Playing the Building, however, is that it is intentionally a secular experience. It is not about star power. In the technical rider for the project, it states several times words to the effect: DAVID BYRNE WILL NOT PLAY PLAYING THE BUILDING. Do not ask. This is not a not a blue M&M’s clause. It is out of respect for the intent of the project, which is all about exploration and play, not awe. By exploring the re-programmed keys of the organ, you are drawn to explore the recesses of the building. Where did that sound come from? What made that sound? Why does it sound that way? By hacking the organ, you are encouraged to think about how to hack the building. This building. Any building. Any thing.
I saw Beatrix*Jar at the recent opening of Playing the Building at Aria, the old Jeune Lune theater, and I wanted to ask them what they thought about the relationship of circuit bending to playing around with buildings, but we didn’t get the chance. Maybe we would have discussed Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts. Usman Haque’s Evoke, “a massive animated projection that lights up the facade of York Minster in response to the public, who use their own voices to “evoke” colourful light patterns that emerge at the building’s foundations and soar up towards the sky, giving the surface a magical feeling as it melts with colour” might have come up. What’s interesting about Playing the Building is the way it deconstructs the organ and building, stripping them both of harmony and ornament. It’s not really about making music. It’s more about making. And listening. The organ is an amplifier for the solitude of an empty building.
Theater de la Jeune Lune was a fabled theater company. Playing the building, their building, one can’t help but hear Cyrano in the wings or Juliet on the balcony or perhaps urgent late night whisperings pouring over the books in a back room. It’s a magnificent building. Playing the Building does it full justice and First&First is to be congratulated for bringing this exciting event to the Twin Cities and bringing excitement back to the building of Theater de la Jeune Lune.
Travels in Associative Reality
I look at this nearly every day.
I arrived at The Soap Factory’s $99 Sale late in 2011. Most of the work had already been claimed, but it didn’t matter to me. What I had eyes for, only, was Landscape Simulation : Fargo / Former PetSmart, Westgate Shoping Center, Macon, GA, 2011. At least that’s what is written on the back of the drawing. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time.
I wouldn’t say that it “spoke to me,” but there was something deeply satisfying and nourishing looking at it.
I feel like I squint whenever I look at the drawing. There’s something indistinct about it, but it’s also like scanning the horizon in a Western. Like you’re wearing that battered, square leather cowboy hat that Clint Eastwood wears in The Good The Bad and the Ugly, shading his eyes as he holds binoculars up to them like a submarine captain, elbows akimbo. Maybe I’m misremembering the binoculars. Does he even use binoculars or just wear that poncho and chomp on a cheroot? And where did the submarine come from? But it’s like that.
I scan this drawing nearly every day, but I’m a lake person, not a plains person. What do I know? What is the attraction? How could something so desolate be “nourishing?” Especially with no water, no weather to eye.
According to its title, the structure is a PetSmart at a Westgate Shopping Center in Macon, GA. Isn’t Eleanor Savage from Macon? When I had my second 50th birthday party, it was about 95 degrees and sweltering. Everyone was sweating like, well, like a pig. I’ve gone to the State Fair for tons of years, but I don’t actually know how or even if pigs sweat. I’ll have to ask the 4H girls about that next year. I still remember that Eleanor said it was just getting comfortable. Like back home. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of Macon. In 2010, I commissioned Chris Baker’s offscript for Santana Row shopping center in San Jose as part of the 01SJ Biennial. I remember it was across from a Westgate shopping center. We would have done it there, if they had sponsored us. We asked them first. I also curated Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s Big Box (2007) for FeedForward at LABoral. Big Box is all about the “former” part. Nature takes over. Like New York City in I Am Legend.
I attended a great conversation by artist Pamela Valfer and critic Christina Schmid tonight. It was thoughtful and open, and even though there was a lot of talk about Baudrillard, it was everything a public conversation should be but often is not. Thank you! Christina and Pamela. Nevertheless, by the end, I still hadn’t figured out exactly why me and the PetSmart in Fargo had hit it off so well. When I got home, I looked at Valfer’s website, and it turns out she had “renamed” the work on my wall: Landscape Simulation: Fargo (movie)/Vacant Pet Smart, Macon, GA. Not only had the Pet Smart (PetSmart?) changed from “former” to “vacant” but turns out the landscape is from the movie Fargo.
This was necessary, the copying from movies part, Valfer averred during the conversation, because until a recent residency in rural Ireland, she had never really been in nature. While I cannot claim the same, it is impossible to deny that it is nearly impossible to look at nature, especially representations of nature, without a kind of virtual overlay and infinite reflection of representation upon representation. I suppose you could say, a la Baudrillard, welcome to the hyperreal, but Christina said something else that was interesting. She mentioned that in some study, people who looked at representations of nature did not have the same visceral, emotional reaction as people who looked at nature. I’m paraphrasing her paraphrase here, but the point she wanted to make is that the body knows. In some sense you cannot lie to the body and there is a difference between representation and the real.
Pamela Valfer, Landscape Simulation: Fargo (movie)/Vacant Pet Smart, Macon, GA 2011 Graphite on paper 8" x 10"
While I do believe this in my bones – nature is different than its representation – the nourishment of Valfer’s bleak Fargo landscape with its vacant Pet Smart may just be its embedded, rich, complex, seductive, vital history of unnatural associations.
ReGeneration – Exhibition Installation in Progress
![Ben Garthus talking to NYSCI "Explainers" about Biomodd [NYC4]](http://northern.lights.mn/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_5352-1024x768.jpg "Ben Garthus talking to NYSCI \"Explainers\" about Biomodd [NYC4]")
![Biomodd [NYC4]](http://northern.lights.mn/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_5326-1024x768.jpg "Biomodd [NYC4]")
![Biomodd [NYC4]](http://northern.lights.mn/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/IMG_5327-768x1024.jpg "Biomodd [NYC4]")
ReGeneration opens tonight at the New York Hall of Science! Almost there. It’s looking great.
Biomodd, Biomodd [NYC4]; Futurefarmers, Ethnobotanical Station; Shih Chieh Huang, 99plus; Marisa Jahn and Stephanie Rothenberg, World’s Fair 2.0; Scott Kildall, 2049; Zach Lieberman, Face By Face; Carl Skelton, Tomorrow 2.0; The Living and SOFTlab, Common Weathers; Nick Yulman, New York Immigration Song; Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, A Geography of Being : Una Geographia de Ser
Project Director: Eric Siegel
Project Manager: Michael Cosaboom
Curator: Steve Dietz
Assistant Curator: Amanda Parkes
Presented at the New York Hall of Science by the New York Hall of Science and Northern Lights.mn
Support from The Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, The Lambent Foundation, and The MetLife Foundation
ReGen install – end of week 1
World’s Fair 2.0
World’s Fair 2.0
Lead Artists: Marisa Jahn and Stephanie Rothenberg
Produced by REV-
Support from Mozilla Hive Learning Network NYC, Robert Bowne Foundation, MOUSE, New York Hall of Science
World’s Fair 2.0 is an interactive scavenger hunt that bridges Queens’ history past and present with the question: how did the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs shape the region’s geography and its collectively imagined future? What are the continuities between utopian visions from the past and today’s vision for Queens’ future?
For their installation for ReGeneration at the New York Hall of Science, Jahn and Rothenberg created a augmented reality tour accessible through cellphone and Ipads that invites visitors to envision these questions.
In addition, Jahn and Rothenberg facilitated a workshop with 14 teens who created their own interactive, mobile scavenger hunt where zombies thwart players in their time-traveling quest to explore the history of the future.
Through its installation and new media tours, World’s Fair 2.0 stages interventions into the past and future, regenerating conceptual tools to interact with the present.
ReGeneration is presented by the New York Hall of Science and Northern Lights.mn
Creative City Challenge at the Minneapolis Convention Center
How would you remake your City?
Be a part of the revitalization of the beautiful convention center plaza as it is transformed into an activity center and gateway to Minneapolis.
The Minneapolis Convention Center and the Mayor of Minneapolis are pleased to announce a new Creative City Challenge to create and install a temporary, interactive, site-specific, eco-focused “portal” to the City of Minneapolis on the Plaza of the Minneapolis Convention Center beginning summer 2013. This challenge is intended to encourage exciting proposals and thoughtful discussion about how to make our downtown more vital, dynamic, livable, walkable and environmentally friendly.
The competition is open to Minnesota residents only, and it will be in two phases. In the first phase, the public will vote on all proposals, and the top 5 viable projects will each receive a stipend to produce a final proposal, which will be reviewed by a national jury of prominent architects and urbanists. The selected proposal will receive a $50,000 commission to produce a summer-long project on the Convention Center Plaza in 2013.
Initial responses are due by 4:30 pm CDT Monday, December 3, 2012.
For further details online, click here. For a pdf of the full call click here. Email conventioncenterplaza@northern.lights.mn with questions.
Installing ReGeneration: Tuesday
Today we continued to install ReGeneration at the New York Hall of Science. Everyone is thrilled with SOFTlab’s and The Living’s “cloud” design for the exhibition called Common Weathers. There are still some issues to resolve, but it provides a beautiful focus for the work in a pretty chaotic installation venue.
biomodd [nyc4]’s installation of BIOMODD has been going like gangbusters for a couple of weeks already. It’s a dynamic installation that builds a community as it is built.
Futurefarmers have built a remarkable mobile research station, Ethnobotanical New York, out of the commonest of materials, and it is stunning. It also rewards investigation, from the seats that double as plant presses to the “rolodex” of images to the provocative library.
Shih Chieh Huang installed 99plus. At first we wondered about it being “hidden” in its funnel cloud, but there are some great views from around the exhibition floor, and having to work for these views adds to a certain mystery of peering into the ocean depths.
We also reviewed Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga’s delightful video game, which is at the heart of A Geography of Being: Una Geografia de ser, which he will begin installing on Friday. The wooden robots are awesome!
Tomorrow we install Scott Kildall’s 2049.
Nuit blanche as meaningful civic spectacle panel at New Museum
“On October 24, Richard Flood will moderate a roundtable discussion considering the future of the international “nuit blanche” phenomenon. The organizers of Nuit Blanche New York, Ethan Vogt and Ken Farmer, will be joined by Shauna McCabe (Curator, ScotiaBank Nuit Blanche Toronto), Steve Dietz (President and Artistic Director, Northern Lights.mn and the Northern Spark festival), and Council Member Stephen Levin to explore critical responses to, challenges, and opportunities for the “nuit blanche” model, and visions for its continued evolution. Informed by this global context, panelists will propose strategies for sustaining an annual “nuit blanche” tradition on the New York waterfront, rooted in the extraordinary potential of the city’s public spaces and creative communities.”
More information: New Museum
ReGeneration to open at New York Hall of Science
Northern Lights.mn and New York Hall of Science Present ReGeneration
Ten artists present their interpretations of cultural sustainability
October 27, 2012 – January 13, 2013
ReGeneration, a new exhibition exploring the relationship between sustainability and cultural vitality, opens October 27 at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI).
The exhibition includes interactive works by 10 artists that inspire visitors to think about the notion of cultural sustainability through collaborative engagement and futuristic visions built upon the history and traditions of New York’s diverse neighborhoods.
Despite the near ubiquity of the term “sustainability,” there remains significant ambiguity about everything from the actual meaning of the term to overarching solutions to the challenges we face as a community. Technology and behavioral changes including energy production, agriculture, recycling and pollution reduction are all on the table as we work to understand and address the challenge of sustainability.
“ReGeneration is an exhibition about the future,” says NYSCI president and CEO, Margaret Honey. “We challenged the artists to take inspiration from science and imagine a future where we live sustainably, not just in the foods we eat or the materials we use,
but in our fundamental approach to how we view our communities and the interdependence between people and our environment.”
NYSCI produced ReGeneration in collaboration with Northern Lights.mn, a media-oriented art organization supporting artists who work innovatively in the public sphere to foster new relations between citizenry and the built environment. It is curated by Steve Dietz and Amanda Parkes.
“The artists in ReGeneration are change agents,” says Dietz, artistic director of Northern Lights.mn. “The most lasting and sustainable way to change the environment is to change our habits and envision new and exciting possibilities. The artists of ReGeneration each have a unique, engaging and rigorous take on the intersection of art and science in relation to a sustainable, emergent future.”
“As an institution, NYSCI has long explored the intersections of science, art, technology and culture,” says Eric Siegel, NYSCI’s chief content officer, who leads the project team that produced the exhibition. “With ReGeneration, NYSCI explores and celebrates particular indicators and examples of cultural vitality. These engagements can ultimately be adapted to other environments, enabling a network of local practices that helps sustain a regional or larger cultural vitality.”
Artists
BIOMODD, biomodd [nyc4]
In biomodd [nyc4] a team of collaborators led by artist Angelo Vermeulen has created symbiotic relationships between plants and computers. Algae are used to cool computer processors so they can run faster, while the heat that is generated by the computer electronics is used to create ideal growing conditions for a plant-based ecosystem.
Futurefarmers, Ethnobotanical New York
As humans transition from a rural to urban existence, indigenous plant knowledge is being lost and western models of school-based education often do not include traditional skills. Through a mobile structure and workshops, Ethnobotanical New York collects, displays and facilitates the regeneration and production of new and traditional knowledge.
Shih Chieh Huang, 99plus
For 99plus, Huang created glowing, kinetic sculptures of flowers and insects made from materials bought at 99¢ stores in Queens. The items have been integrated with LEDs, computer fans, and microcontrollers to create sculptures that Huang invites visitors to imagine as real life forms “that are adapting to each other, finding ways to coexist, and working together to form a self-sufficient society.”
Marisa Jahn and Stephanie Rothenberg, World’s Fair 2.0
In World’s Fair 2.0, Rothenberg and Jahn collaborated with teenagers to re-envision the World’s Fair to celebrate people and community. NYSCI visitors will take a virtual augmented reality tour to see what the artists imagined.
Scott Kildall, 2049
Using garbage scavenged from a San Francisco landfill, for 2049 Kildall has built imaginary devices that might be needed by a visitor from a future with fewer people and resources. These include an infinite battery, a trans-dimensional mailbox, and an emotional distiller. Kildall will also construct a time capsule called “Imagine 2049” with letters from visitors to the exhibition and from schoolchildren. The time capsule will be buried at NYSCI on January 12.
Zach Lieberman, Face by Face
Lieberman’s Face by Face installation makes faces out of other people’s facial elements. It combines a photo booth, which records video of participants, and a live visualization, which uses custom software to visualize faces using the eyes, noses, mouths, eyebrows and other face parts of previous participants. It is designed to investigate the diverse textures, rhythms and styles of our faces and present an algorithmic, collective portrait of NYSCI visitors.
The Living and SOFTLab, Common Weathers
Design studios The Living and SOFTLab created the exhibition design, Common Weathers, for ReGeneration, which consists of an interactive “cloud” structure, which is suspended from the ceiling and is made from wood and mylar. Lighting elements are embedded within the cloud. The cloud envelops the nine art installations and glows in response to visitors’ text messages.
Carl Skelton, Tomorrow 2.0
To create Tomorrow 2.0, Brooklyn artist Skelton and Joe Frattoni worked with middle and high school students from the Louis Armstrong Middle School IS 227Q in Queens and the Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology in Manhattan. Tomorrow 2.0 uses Betaville, a collaborative and participatory virtual sketchpad and laboratory platform to focus on an imaginary future for Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
Nick Yulman, New York Immigration Song
New York Immigration Song is a digitally controlled, acoustic sound installation by artist Nick Yulman. It features mechanically actuated piano strings stretched from nodes across a wall-mounted map. Data about immigrant patterns to New York is translated into music, which is played by the piano strings. The resulting music represents the New York City’s changing population and the countries to which it is connected through its residents.
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, A Geography of Being/Una Geografia de Ser
Brooklyn artist Zúñiga uses kinetic sculptures, a graphic zine, and a video game to explore the subject of undocumented immigrant populations in the United States. While visitors play the video game, the sculptures react to the game play and help the player. A graphic zine shows the challenges and options that are presented in the video game.
ReGeneration Website
For more information about ReGeneration visit http://regeneration.nysci.org/
Tell us about YOUR Northern Spark
Tell us about YOUR Northern Spark
Some press links for Northern Spark 2012
Sarah Brumble, “The best of Northern Spark: A whole lot of Twin Cities love“, Twin Cities Daily Planet
Deboarah Carver, “Night Lights in the City,” mnartists.org
Marianne Combs, “Highlights and lowlights from ‘Northern Spark’,” MPRNews
Lightsey Darst, “Night Vision: A Northern Spark Diary,” mnartists.org
Zac Farber, “Wheelies, Skids and Bunny Hops Yield Chalk Art at Northern Spark Festival,” Southwest Minneapolis Patch
Jay Gabler, “My Northern Spark Journey,” Twin Cities Daily Planet
Tom Horgen and Mary Abbe, “Northern Spark Festival: Up all night,” StarTribune
Stephanie Kwong, “A Taste of Northern Spark,” phenoMNal twin cities
Andy Lien, “Photo Gallery: Northern Spark 2012, The Instagrams,” Lavendar
Jahna Peloquin, “Saturday: Northern Spark Festival,” Vita.mn
Sheila Regan, “Northern Spark: Minnesota’s sleepover art party,” City Pages
Joel Schettler, “Nuit Blanche: An Art All-Nighter,” Minnesota Monthly
Brittany Trevick, “Think and Wonder, Wonder and Think,” Twin Cities Metro
Joel Zimmerman, “MN Original’s Northern Spark journey,” MN Original
Vita.mn staff, “The Crawl: Northern Spark: What just happened??”