Architecture of Agonism from the Kitchen Table to the City Street
Public Symposium
April 12–14
Co-Presented with and at the Walker Art Center
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?
That question was a starting point for this three-day symposium on agonism in the public sphere. A term unfamiliar to many, agonism describes an approach to politics that embraces difference and disagreement as an important part of democracy. As a series of talks, workshops, actions, and playful experiments, Discourse and Discord aims to explore the structures or “architectures”—whether it’s the built environment, online technologies, songs, or recipes—that can draw people together for genuine dialogue and debate. It also reinforces the notion that democracy thrives on and even requires an agonistic foundation: the friction of varied publics and participation by people of different minds, views, and beliefs.
Join with a range of other unlike-minded people to debate and discuss, disclose and expose—and find out what happens when you move beyond agreeing to disagree.
Northern Spark is a free, dusk to dawn, participatory arts festival that presents visual arts, performance, films, and interactive media indoors and outdoors in both Minneapolis and St. Paul. In 2011, during the course of one night, there were 50,000 visits to 100 projects by more than 200 artists at 34 venues in collaboration with 60 partner organizations and sponsors.
At its core, Northern Spark is about supporting artists to reinterpret the city through art and creative interventions.
Northern Lights.mn presents the third edition of Art(ists) On the Verge (AOV3) at The Soap Factory. This exhibition features new work from five Minnesota-based artists. AOV3 is an intensive, year-long, mentor-based fellowship program for emerging artists working experimentally at the intersection of art, technology, and digital culture with a focus on network-based practices that are interactive and/or participatory. Previous exhibitions of work by AOV fellows have been at the Weisman Art Museum (2009) and the Spark Festival at the University of Minnesota (2010).
Feel your heart race as you pull the trigger of Drew Anderson’s “shotgun projector” illuminating the point of view of an animatronic hunter in the north woods of Minnesota. Zero in on Mike Hoyt’s video paintings of the Powderhorn neighborhood and join the online civic dialog. Get on the horn and leave a status update for Caly McMorrow’s sound and light installation. See yourself and the world around you differently in Anthony Tran’s hertzian funhouse mirror. Make your mark on the environment with Aaron Westre’s urban planning video game.
A related symposium on creative solutions for public discourse, “Discourse and Dischord: Architecture of Agonism from the Kitchen Table to the City Street,” will be co-presented with and at the Walker Art Center, April 12-14.
Northern Lights.mn is a collaborative, interactive media-oriented arts agency from the Twin Cities for the world. It presents innovative art in the public sphere, both physical and virtual, focusing on artists creatively using technology, both old and new, to engender new relations between audience and artwork and more broadly between citizenry and their built environment.
Art(ists) On the Verge is generously supported by the Jerome Foundation.
Northern Lights.mn announces a fourth round of Art(ists) on the Verge commissions (AOV4). AOV4 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. AOV4 is generously supported by the Jerome Foundation.
We are happy to announce a number of calls for participation in the 2012 edition of Northern Spark, which will take place June 9-10, 2012. For some background on this year’s Northern Spark see here. The new website will launch later this week at northernspark.org.
Please note that the deadlines for submission are different for different calls.
We are looking a project that is sited/performed in public space and engage a broad public audience in that space. Projects can be in any medium or discipline. This call is funded in part by the NEA is for artists living or working outside of Minnesota. Application deadline: February 7. The call is here.
This is an open call in collaboration with The Eyeo Festival for a data visualization project. Application deadline: February 7, 2012. The call is here.
We are looking for up to 10 projects that are sited/performed in public space and engage a broad public audience in that space. Projects can be in any medium or discipline. Look at the project line up for Northern Spark in 2011 to see the wide range of works presented. Application deadline: February 27. The call is here.
4. Call for Minnesota Center for Books Arts project
Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA), in collaboration with Northern Lights.mn, is accepting proposals for an all-night event in MCBA’s gallery and studio space as part of NorthernLights.mn’s Northern Spark Festival (June 9-10, 2012). Application deadline: January 30. The call is here.
More Calls
More calls will be announced in the coming days. Subscribe to the Northern Lights mailing list (at the bottom of the page), Like us on Facebook, follow us @Northern_Spark or get the tumblr feed to stay informed.
On Give To The Max Day, Wednesday, November 16th, you have a special, one-day opportunity to support a special, one-night project: Northern Spark, Minnesota’s only nuit blanche.
Northern Spark is a free, dusk-to-dawn, participatory public art event that takes place in both Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Northern Spark is all media, all night: performances, visual arts, projected images, interactive media, participatory events.
Northern Spark brings together a multitude of artists, creating hundreds of art projects in partnership with numerous arts organizations at multiple venues.
Northern Spark was an exhilarating first-time event for Minnesota. Throughout the night, there were 50,000 visits to more than 100 installations and performances presented by 200 artists in partnership with 60 organizations in 34 locations.
Your support of Northern Spark is support of local artists, who help us to create and sustain a vibrant community year-round by:
Building a broad audience for serious art and creative fun
Cultivating open and active civic engagement
Heightening awareness of the cultural and natural wonders of the Twin Cities
Partnering with MN arts and cultural organizations, strengthening public awareness and support of our local non-profits
Like an art comet that blazes through the night sky once a year, Northern Spark enters the Twin Cities’ orbit on Saturday, June 9, uniting two cities and bringing together a multitude of artists, art projects, arts organizations, and venues in a confluence of culture and nature.
Please become a co-creator of this remarkable project by supporting Northern Spark through your generous donation at GIVEMN.org.
If you missed Northern Spark this year, please check out the links below for great video and images from the June 2011 event, all of which is accessible from the Northern Spark website.
As well, we want to share here some of the comments about the event, which over 500 attendees wrote in response to our survey question: “Imagine you are out to dinner with friends who were also at Northern Spark and each person is taking a minute or two to describe the most memorable part of the event. It’s your turn; what would you say?”
“Northern Spark opened up my eyes to more of the arts in the Twin Cities. For once the places that I want to go to collaborated, stayed open and I was able to see what they were all about. Its a great chance to check things out!”
“Northern Spark has tremendous opportunity to become a signature summer event for Minneapolis, much like the White Nights in St. Petersburg, Nuit Blanche in Paris or Fete des Lumieres in Lyon. There was fantastic energy on the Stone Arch Bridge — you could tell people were loving the strolling and being outside on such a beautiful night and craving artistic inspiration.”
“A friend of mine commented that she expected to see the ‘usual art-nerd’ suspects out and about. We realized together that there were many people out who may have never participated in a community art event before. What a great way to expose the entire community to the arts!”
“Art is everywhere. The night of Northern Spark transforms your consciousness. Yes, you read the brochure and move from installation to installation, but you’re also always on the lookout for what might be new or different. Suddenly, everything becomes art: the lights under the 35W bridge; couples stealing a kiss under an archway; even the spaces themselves which you had previously never considered as anything other than no-man’s-land. The next morning, the sensation continues.”
An organization like Northern Lights depends on a fair and open Internet, as do many of the artists we work with. Join us in protesting legislation that places, once again, commercial interests as a higher value than open culture.
5×5 is an exciting program to commission 5 curators to each curate 5 public art projects for presentation in Washington DC during the National Cherry Blossom Festival Centennial, spring 2012.
“5×5, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’s new temporary public art project, will result in twenty-five groundbreaking temporary public art installations that will be installed concurrently throughout the District of Columbia. DCCAH is seeking five highly-experienced and innovative contemporary art curators to select and work with five artists each to develop and present exciting, temporary art works in public spaces throughout the District of Columbia. The resulting twenty-five projects will activate and enliven publicly accessible spaces and add an ephemeral layer of creativity and artistic expression to neighborhoods across the District.”
Northern Lights/Artistic Director Steve Dietz was selected as one of 10 semi-finalists for 5×5. We will be presenting a final proposal in early December. Other semi-finalists here.
On a sunny, unseasonably warm October afternoon, nine people gathered in a circle and wrote a story. The story was of a tree seed – the sugar maple – at risk of survival due to the environmental impacts of climate change, and the possibilities of its migration north. It was a story in action and of action, told next to a 200 year old Sugar Maple at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts, in the midst of the largest and most diverse collection of maple trees (genus: Acer) in the world.
Participants spread around the maple grove, picking out seeds that looked mature, dried, and worn. A viable seed pod needs at least 4 maple seeds (often maples drop seed pairs with only one half of the pair carrying the ability to germinate, and including 4 or more improved the likelihood of the wearable garden’s survival.) Around the seeds, participants packed dirt, moss, and leaves. to protect them during the next 3-5 months in a cold, damp environment where they are exposed to friction. Participants addressed the design challenge of making a wearable pocket that could travel on a human body, that could keep the seeds moist and cool, and have some level of friction through its movement. The creations varied: seed bearing scarves, an armpit band, a garter belt, a jacket sleeve and a pocket-on-a-stick. The items were decorated with embroidery, with lace, with yarn and with instructions.
To close, each wearable garden was attached to a map to aid in sending these seeds on their way north. The map included information on the various viable territories for the maple seed, and how they may change between now and the year 2100, along with how to care for the seeds. It included 3 different highway routes up the East Coast, each ending up in a different region in Canada projected to have the most conducive climate to Sugar Maples 100 years from now. Each participant had ideas in mind of where they would leave their pods. One participant was on his way to Maine that very weekend and intended to leave it by a maple sugar shack at the trailhead where he was going to go hiking. Another was headed to Vermont. Yet another had plans to visit a CSA farm, also in Maine, and planned to leave her creations there. One wearable garden was hung on a pedestrian crossing sign on a nearby highway, along with the map and a wish of safe journeys.
A project of Platform2: Art and Social Engagement, an experimental event series that sits somewhere between a classroom, community organizing, and 1960s happenings. Platform2 is organized by Catherine D’Ignazio (kanarinka), Jane D. Marsching, Savić Rasović and Andi Sutton. Andi Sutton is an artist whose current practice explores the ways that duration, dialogue, endurance and exhaustion can push socially prescribed boundaries of human interaction. Working in a solo and collective context, her projects take the form of web, media, and street intervention, video and performance art installation. Her works have been shown nationally in shows and festivals such as Pathogeographies (2007), Contaminate II (2007), PURE: An Exhibition (2006), The Paper Show (2005), Mix NYC (2003), Better Homes and Guardians (2003), Politically Charged (2002), among others.
The show is down now, but it was such a pleasure to walk into Pace/MacGill’s Social Media exhibition and not have to get frustrated about all the work that was overlooked for a show. That is, even though one could imagine dozens of other possible projects, at least it was a strong selection of work whose creators had a history and weren’t just dabblers. David Byrne’s imaginary apps fell short for me, but the “kodak” photo frames for Democracy in Action were a perfect way to “share” his YouTube fascinations (or his assistant’s?). Other work was stronger, however. Christopher Baker’sMurmur Studywith its cascading receipt tapes of twitter hashtags perfectly captures the torrent of the information age in all its glory and waste. Aram Bartholl’s Google Portraits are also pitch perfect renditions of the QR code moment. It will be interesting to see whether they retain their funhouse magic in a year or more. Now if only the curators had included someone like Mark Lombardi….
The broad outlines of all four teams’ (4rm+ula), coen+partners, and VJAA + HouMinn) proposals are currently on view in the Target Studio at WAM. On Wednesday, October 26, we will present our final proposals to an expert jury in the afternoon and to the public at large at WAMChatter. Final selection of will be announced the following day.
Join us Wednesday, October 26 at 7 pm for 24 minutes of exciting pecha kucha by the 4 cross-disciplinary teams about the Mississippi River Bridge Plaza Design Competition at WAMChatter (preceding reception at 6 pm).
SEH/EE&K/Northern Lights.mn/Christopher Baker team members
Bob Kost (SEH), Peter Cavaluzzi (EE&K), Steve Dietz (Northern Lights.mn), Christopher Baker (SAIC), Rachel Baudler (SEH), Michael Imranyi (EE&K), Mister Blue (SEH), Yehui Xu (EE&K), Dongshin Lee (EE&K), Gaylen Perkuhn (EE&K), Amier Hossein (EE&K)
"This call for ideas is not about perpetuating protests; it is about empowering them."
“Storefront for Art and Architecture is making a call for submissions for projects and strategies that offer a new, creative and productive way of spatial occupation for public demonstrations and actions in cities throughout the world. Gathering expertise from the various acts of civil occupation throughout the world during the last months, we ask architects, artists and citizens at large to offer their ideas for enabling acts of communication and action between the civil society and the structures of economic and political power.”
Metro magazine's Top 100 list includes Northern Spark at #7
7.Northern Spark, June 4 to 5, 2011
“Modeled after nuit blanche events in Paris and St. Petersburg, the Twin Cities’ first-ever all-night art party spanned galleries and green space on both sides of the river (it even spilled into the mighty Miss via a variety show aboard an old paddleboat). The highlight? Artist Jim Campbell’s “Scattered Light” installation at Upper Landing Park in St. Paul: hundreds of glowing glass bulbs strung together to create Northern Spark’s unofficial nightlight. We’ve been catching lots of Z’s in preparation for next summer’s citywide sleepover, which promises to be bigger and better than the first. northernspark.org“
