AOV grantees announced

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Northern Lights is pleased to announce that the recipients of the 2008 Art(ists) on the Verge grants for Minnesota-based, emerging artists working experimentally at the intersection and technology, with a focus on practices that are social, collaborative and/or participatory have been selected.

AOV Fellows

Christopher Baker, Participation Overload – Reconsidering Participative Art Practices

The core goal of the proposed project is to create an artistic installation that engages and questions the state of technologically mediated participation, both in larger democratic contexts and within interactive new media art contexts. I seek to provide an immersive installation environment wherein participants discover opportunities – through conversation and personal contemplation – to consider the ways that new communication technologies both constrain and enable their participation in democratic and social processes.

Andrea Steudel, Mobile Shadow Projection Theater

This project’s key concept is the simultaneous building of a tool, collaborative relationship, and mode of working that effectively bridges an old approach with new technology in the public sphere. I will expand the ancient techniques of silhouette cutouts and shadow puppetry by using video projection technology on urban landscape.

AOV Mentor Program

Avye Alexandres

I propose to build a motion-activated, interactive installation that visually and aurally presents a collage of a home. The aim is to create a space that functions as memory might, shifting and momentary, referencing images of a domestic interior with audio recordings relative to its component memories.

Kevin Obsatz, Video Cyclorama

A four-wall immersive real-time video projection with both live and pre-recorded sourcing from different environments and scenes. The video feed will be created with four small HD cameras shooting simultaneously on a specially built tripod mount, with a 360-degree field of vision.

Pramila Vasudevan, Dowsing the Mirage II

with Jennifer Jurgens, Mark Fox, Michael Westerlund

Aniccha Arts proposes to engage the Twin Cities community with online discussions and workshops that lead up to a three – day performance that illustrates the contention of humans playing god by taking control of the weather.

Krista Kelley Walsh, (Public access WebCam installation/ performance series)

I propose to make site-specific installations and performances for public access webcam locations for public and internet viewing. This project seeks to create 2-4 site specific public web cam projects, while it explores the technology available to expand audience access, extended life of the projects and effective documentation.

Jury

The jury for the 2008 Art(ists) On the Verge Fellowships and Mentor Program consisted of:

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Art(ists) On the Verge grant program is run by Northern Lights, a new Twin Cities-based arts agency, with support by the Jerome Foundation with fiscal sponsor Forecast Public Art.

Call for Art Exploring Real-Time Connectedness

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Call for Proposals: “Live Bits”

Ars Electronica invites artists and scientists to submit proposals for new and novel ways to connect, in real time, people to people and people to environments in different physical locations. The goal is to expand and explore meaningful exchanges between remote groups of people.

The one essential requirement for all proposals is “live bits:” real-time digital information via any network, of any viable quantity, and in any modality. In addition to symmetrical two-way communication, asymmetrical two-way communication and even one-way communication will be considered as long as a live component is present. “Fresh” and “canned” bits, as well as physically transported objects, may also be incorporated.

We will award up to 20 commissions of 10,000 EUR each. But you must act quickly and we will reciprocate.

Deadline for submission is 31 October 2008

Notification of recipients will be 30 November 2008.

The commissions must be completed by June 2009, for inclusion in “80+1: A Journey Around the World,” an 80(+1) day event in the Linz Main Square and the Ars Electronica Centre, 18 June – 6 September 2009, for Linz09, European Capital of Culture.

Full details here.

Site-specific, public animation

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Blu has recently “vandalized the facade of Tate Modern,” as it is written in Blu’s sketch note-book, and it would be amazing to see, I’ve no doubt. I’m particularly intrigued, however, by Blu’s wall-painted animations, such as Muto, a fantastic and fantastical “ambiguous animation painted on public walls made in Buenos Aires and Baden.”


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

We normally think of animation as having the ability to transport us into a fantastical space often not possible in the “real” world, but this work raises the possibility of a “site-specific animation”; one that knowingly uses the 3D world to metaphorically animate the meaning of the animation.

On one level, Blu is literally animating the public sphere, although beyond the process itself, the result is screen-based playback. Would it be differently meaningful to see the animation projected back onto the walls used in the animation?

And what would it mean if all the “urban screens” popping up around the globe were blu(e) screen studios in the physical world for locals’ creativity not, primarily, a black hole through which to deliver globalized commodity advertising into a local context?

via jugaad

Listen to the public art

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Corporate Head, 1990, by Terry Allen and poet Philip Levine was a response to the $500 billion Savings & Loan bailout. According to Michael Several,

“As ethics took an extended holiday during the 1980s, fiscal irresponsibility at the highest level was joined by a pervasive nation-wide moral bankruptcy. . . . By taking aim at the values and ethics of the foot soldiers and icons of the Reagan-Bush years, Corporate Head instantly became one of the most popular works of public art in Los Angeles. Though small in size, it raises large issues with its critique of the greed and the lack of moral direction that define corporate mentality.”

Corporate Head, Terry Allen + Philip Levine

Corporate Head is located near a Washington Mutual JPMorgan Chase & Co. branch office.

via [view] from a loft

Next time you’re in London

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Check out Drift 08, a new annual art exhibition in public space in London.

Drift, London

According to co-organizer Carline Jones

“‘We found that by putting art in unusual places, the general public were more likely to come and have a look – they weren’t as threatened as they can be by the White Cube Gallery space,’ says Illuminate’s co-founder Caroline Jones. ‘Then we went one step further and thought: Why not take the artwork straight out there to the public?'”

The six artists featured in Drift 08 include Craig Walsh, whose Incursion 37:20:15.71” N – 121: 53:09.51” W I commissioned for the San Jose City Hall as part of the 2nd 01SJ Biennial. His hour-long, 12-channel projection on the interior of the Richard Meier-designed city hall was transfixing, and if the other work at Drift is of a similar quality – and I’m sure it is – it will be well worth the trip.

It’s also interesting to note how the ambitions of the 2012 Olympiics may be at work in the culture scene in the UK:

“Drift 08 has been organised with the Corporation of London and British Waterways and there are plans to double it in scale each year, eventually moving up the Lea Valley towards the Olympics site in time for 2012.”

via metro.co.uk

Welcome to Public Address

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Forecast Public Art

The mission of Forecast is “to strengthen and advance the field of public art locally, nationally, and internationally by expanding participation, supporting artists, informing audiences and assisting communities.” Forecast also publishes the Public Art Review.

Northern Lights

Northern Lights is a “roving, 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.”

Public Address

Public Address is a new blog jointly presented by Forecast and Northern Lights. Its goal is to be a forum for wide-ranging discussion of innovative artists, projects, and practices in the public realm.

Forecast recently celebrated its 30 year anniversary as a leader in the field of public art. Northern Lights, while new as an organization, has over a decade of experience as a leader in the field of interactive art.

Contemporary art is increasingly “untethered” and moves from the white cube of the gallery to any site — including the virtual — to engage the public in its own realm. Public art is an ever-expanding field of inquiry, with artists of all stripes exploring the public realm. Beyond murals, monuments, memorials (and the occasional mime) public art has become a vibrant and engaging practice. From the spectacular to the quotidian, permanent to ephemeral, sited to virtual, material to performative, conceptual to cinematic, we believe there are unprecedented opportunities for new art practices in our shared environment. This is the critical focus of Public Address.

Jack Becker
Executive Director, Forecast Public Art

Steve “mediachef” Dietz
Executive Director, Northern Lights