After the Green Festival on Friday night is AFTER GREEN, a creative party that Dreamfish is co-sponsoring. I hope you will come out for it. The party is put on by artists, will showcase environmental artists, and will benefit Artsfest. Hope to see you there! We'll be social networking 
Tiffany
Bob Silverman, organizational theorist, just sent me this very cool announcement for a competition and world tour that will bring visibility to the area of art and organizational life. I have several proposal ideas for organizational art projects simmering on the back burner, and thought you might too. ….
Aesthesis is involved in an exciting new project. This project [see below and attached] invites proposals from individuals, groups, societies or organizations from any background to submit an idea, proposal or scheme that employs art/aesthetics to inform or benefit organizational life. Over the next few weeks we will be sending this call to 10,000+ arts-based organizations across the world.
In return, in association with our partners 'Arts and Business', we will provide resources to develop these proposals for inclusion in a global touring gallery – an exhibition of developed proposals which will reach broad-based audiences in over 12 countries and 4 continents.
This project is an exciting opportunity to offer support to new ideas, but it also offers the fantastic prospect of conducting both a longitudinal and comparative ethnographic study with each of the 12-15 projects we select for support. Furthermore, this project will also provide the opportunity to examine each of these projects in the contexts of different cultures and audiences.
However, in the first instance we need your help to get this call out to as many people/ groups/ societies as possible – can you help? As well as yourself there may be other people who you think might be interested. We would be really grateful if you could distribute this announcement as widely as possible. We look forward to receiving good quality submissions from far and wide. For further information and submission details please see http://www.essex.ac.uk/aesthesis <https://exchange3.essex.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.essex.ac.uk/aesthesis>
Thanks for your help with this and our very best regards to you all.
The Aesthesis//CREATE team
Sam Bower, Executive Director of greenmuseum.org, just emailed me while he was participating in an online conference on Environmental Art, led by Caffyn Kelley. There are some lively concurrent sessions in chat rooms and excellent resources, discussion and images, like the one Sam posted above. it's free and easy to join in. If you are new to environmental art,it is an inspiring field to learn about multicultural collaboration for sustainability, with artists, scientists, researchers, parks procurement people, activists. And learn about online networking. Sam emailed me, because I am nose deep right now in designing the new site for Dreamfish (which is why I have been not as active recently here! ) and am looking at best practices for social networking for good. If you go the conference, please tell me what you think of the online space and tools that you find helpful. Check the conference out …
This is a lovely opportunity to collaborate with Paige Sorvillo…
AUDITION & CLASS INVITATION.
project info.
thirty seven isolated events begins with the normal running temperature of the human body and gradually fabricates a facsimile body. Within the noise of networked society, our intimate distance and distant intimacy induce a virtual, mediated sensibility. We are anesthetized – our breath mechanized – as our human biological system is hybridized with the global system. At thirty-seven degrees celcius, we also have an unprecedented potential to connect, to risk, to make contact inside the noise. …
paige starling sorvillo / blindsight invites you to participate in…
performance research – imaging text, moving image.
with paige starling sorvillo / blindsight and marc bamuthi joseph.
Audition – Thursday August 30th, 2007 – 7:30 to 10:30pm
Project & Class Dates – September 14th to November 15th (details below)
site. Margaret Jenkin’s Dance Lab, #301 8th St, 2nd Floor, Studio 200, San Francisco, CA.
contact. paigesorvillo@mindspring.com, 510.601.7494.
** audition info. Please reserve your place by emailing your bio/cv with a short note by August 28th. Please arrive by 7pm to be dressed/warm by 7:30.
** class info. Class is open, no audition required. Participation by arrangement (not drop-in) w/ donation to blindsight. Email to pre-register.
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO FORWARD AND/OR POST!
sorvillo / blindsight continues creative work initiated in 2007 at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, to further explore the intersection of compassion and complicity within the context of both passive and active political violence. Developed in and across the languages of immersive and interactive video, live and techo-manipulated butoh dance, and experimental music/sound installation, sorvillo’s thirty seven is an interactive visual meditation revealing our daily complicity in remote-access war and the socio-economic violence of globalism. This new work seeks to challenge both audience and artist(s) to recognize and respond to the violence of our daily lives.
From September 14th through November 15th, paige starling sorvillo / blindsight and marc bamuthi joseph invite performers to participate in choreographic research and an image/script development phase for blindsight’s thirty seven. The research will be conducted along two parallel paths, a weekly technique, imagery and improvisation class with paige starling sorvillo and a weekly research/rehearsal period. Both periods are required for project participants (in addition, class will be open to non-project participants). Project participants will present an informal performance of our research at Margaret Jenkins’ Dance Lab, be paid a small honorarium, be recognized for their research contribution in all future presentations and will have the opportunity to be considered as performers for the world premier in Spring 2008.
PROJECT DATES**
AUGUST 30TH, 2007
Audition Thursday – 7:30 to 10:30pm
SEPTEMBER 14TH TO OCTOBER 7TH, 2007
Company Class Fridays 6:30 to 9:30pm (Sept. 14, 21, 28; Oct. 5)
Rehearsal Sundays 4 to 7pm (Sept. 16, 23, 30; Oct. 7)
OCTOBER 8TH TO NOVEMBER 15TH, 2007
Company Class Wednesdays 7 7:30 to 10:30pm (Oct. 10, 17, 24)
Company Class Thursday 7:30 to 10:30pm (Nov. 1)
Rehearsal Sundays 4 to 7pm (Oct. 14, 21, 28; Nov. 4)
Performance To be Determined.
** All rehearsals and classes are required of project participants.
** Company Class open to the community for a small donation, please email me.
paige starling sorvillo / blindsight is an interdisciplinary performance collaborative sighting the unseen. Devising work in and across the languages of immersive and interactive video, contemporary Butoh dance, and experimental music, blindsight creates sense-saturated performance and live environments that are visceral, immediate, and inevitable for both performer(s) and audience. The company’s collaborative creation methods draw deeply on the talents of extraordinary artists from multiple disciplines to build fully integrated performance and installation works where each discipline’s voice is heard equally and where new dialects emerge across forms. We seek to engage our audiences on both intellectual and emotional levels and are dedicated to artistic engagement as an opening to conversation. sorvillo / blindsight has created and presented work alone and/or in collaboration throughout the SF Bay Area, Seattle, New York, Boston, Germany and the Czech Republic. sorvillo has been deeply influenced by her work with inkBoat, Degenerate Art Ensemble, SO.GO.NO., Yuko Kaseki, Minako Seki, Jess Curtis/Gravity and Ruth Zaporah as well as by her work with recent collaborators Lucy HG, imaginationandmymother, George Cremaschi, Liz Allbee, Ian Winters, Sherwood Chen, Kanoko Nishi and Isak Immanuel.
Development for thirty seven isolated events has been supported by Zellerbach Family Foundation, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Dancers' Group and the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. Commissioned by Oakland's new Noodle Factory Performing Arts Center with the support of the East Bay Community Foundation's Fund for Artists, the new work will be presented in the Noodle Factory's inaugural presenting season and will premier at San Francisco's CounterPULSE as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival.
marc bamuthi joseph
Originally from New York City, Marc Bamuthi Joseph is an arts activist currently living in Oakland, CA. He entered the world of literary performance after working in "traditional" theater, most notably on Broadway in the Tony Award winning The Tap Dance Kid and Stand-Up Tragedy. During that period he choreographed a series of music videos and film segments working with Savion Glover, George Faison and Harold Nicholas, among others. Since beginning a career in performance poetry in 1998, Joseph has been San Francisco's Poetry Grand Slam winner three times. He won the 1999 National Poetry Slam with Team San Francisco, and founded and continues to host Second Sundays, the nation's largest ongoing monthly spoken word gathering. He is a Gallard Fellow, an AmeriCorps fellow, and the 2003 SF Bay Guardian GOLDIE award winner in Spoken Word. This winter he will be an IDA resident artist in Stanford University's Drama Department, teaching Spoken Word and Community Activism. Joseph's first solo evening length work, Word Becomes Flesh, was commissioned by the National Performance Network, La Peña and the New World Theater. Joseph's proudest work, however, has been with Youth Speaks where he mentors 13-19 year old writers, co-facilitates an interdisciplinary workshop with bassist Marcus Shelby and develops the Living Word Festival for Literary Arts.
photo credit: Ian Winters
Anne Chao sent this to me. This is an entertaining animated music video of Avril Lavigne. It is also an ethics fable, which speaks of power at the margins, social class, and the dynamics of status. The video is meant for youth, but is appropriate for all ages. Tiffany
For the 7th International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference
Cultural Studies Initiative, University of the West Indies Kingston,
Jamaica, scheduled for July 3 to 7, 2008, we are looking for submissions
for a panel on:
Rethinking Performance" and "Performativity"
The notions of "performance" and "performativity" have become key
concepts in gender and queer studies, from where they traveled into the
intellectual terrain of cultural studies. While the terms have often been used to discuss relations of body, power, knowledge and gender or sexual identity, it remains a question how well they function in various disciplinary and cultural contexts. This panel will look more closely at the relationship between performance and performativity. We are interested in working through productive intersections of and tensions between the terms. Despite a number of publications that discuss the theatrical as well as the linguistic valences of the terms, the specific dynamics between the two in cultural analyses still has to be theorized. The panel will provide a critical reevaluation of existing notions of "the performative" in discourses of gender and sexuality in relation to new cultural and disciplinary perspectives.
Possible topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:
- a "politics of the performative"
- intersections of performance and performativity
- "the performative" in media theory
- performativity, performance and re(media)tion
- performativity and the visual, the sonic
- performativity and translation
- transcultural performance / performativity
- speech act theory in new contexts
- queer and gendered speech acts
- uses of the performative in various disciplines
- performance, power, resistance
Please e-mail abstracts of 150 word to Annette Schlichter,
aschlich@uci.edu by June 20.
Narrating the Nation
Television Narratives and National Identities
An International Meeting, Reus (Catalonia), 4-5 October 2007
http://www.urv.cat/comunicacio/narratingthenation.htm
Narration is a powerful tool for the definition of reality and television remains even today the medium that has the most pervasive presence in everyday life. Many authors have noted the importance of television in the construction of collective identities and more specifically in the definition of national communities. However, less work has focused on television narratives in fictional and reality programs (drama, comedy, documentary, reality shows, entertainment, current affairs and news, even adverts) and their implications for the changing processes of national identity formation.
Narrating the Nation: Television Narratives and National Identities aims to bring together scholars researching the processes of national identity building in relation to television narratives and the ways in which national identity is reflected in and itself influences television programs in content and form. Thus, this event will be an opportunity to strengthen international relations in a field in which scholars often work solely or primarily within their own national social, political and media contexts.
This conference is conceived as an open meeting for the exchange of experiences in the fields of television fictional and reality based programs, social identities, cultural identities and national identities. The meeting invites work on television narratives, from production to textual and reception analysis, focused on the study of the following issues:
- National and cultural representations
- Politics and ideology
- Language and linguistics
- Discursive conflicts around nationhood
- Immigration and cultural diversity
- Genre, national identity and television
- The relationship between cultural policies and television fiction production
- Representations of history in television
- Television genres, formats and strategies related to national spaces of communication
The conference aims to attract the participation of international scholars specialising in these issues and will include the following confirmed keynote speakers:
- Milly Buonanno, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
- Lothar Mikos, Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf, Postdam, Germany
- Paul Julian Smith, University of Cambridge, UK
The organisers are pursuing a number of avenues in relation to a book publication based on the conference. Contributions should be written and presented in English.
This international conference is jointly organised by Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona), Glasgow Caledonian University, and Universiteit Antwerpen and will be held in Reus (Catalonia), hosted by the Communication Studies Department of Rovira i Virgili University, on 4 and 5 October 2007. We invite contributors to send an abstract of 300 words (approx.), with a brief biography including contact information, to narratingthenation@urv.cat before 15 June 2007.
Organising Committee
Enric Castelló, Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Josetxo Cerdán, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona/Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Alexander Dhoest, Universiteit Antwerpen
Hugh O’Donnell, Glasgow Caledonian University
Hosted and Organised by Communication Studies at Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Jointly organised with: Caledonian Glasgow University and Universiteit Antwerpen
As we are inviting everyone to a blog fest, I better start myself! O.k., … I am sitting at lunch with Sunshine Mugrabi and we are talking about compostable furniture. We then get into deep conversation about the use of green space as transformative intervention for individuals, groups and organizations as away to develop more green awareness and behaviors.
We are touched and moved and shaped by the water we live in. While public art is supported by rich discourse on how environmental art can transform society, this understanding of the power of “connective aesthetics” (Suzi Gablik, Italian) lives in the world of participatory performance, visual art and architecture. My hope is for more fertile collaborations and cross-pollinations between artists, green architects and organizational theorists and consultants, who are working at the social levels – group, interpersonal and intrapersonal levels. There are evocative connections being made between open source movement and connective aesthetics, and connective aesthetics as embodied social corrective to disembodied times…..…. [click to read more and comment]
Experience from participatory choreography, group facilitation and inquiry into social improvisation leads me to advocate for creating projects that allow people to make connections between caring for the environment, each other and themselves via experiences that are emotionally and aestheticly rich, appreciative and participatory. The design of space makes a difference. This is because our emotions and senses are intimately coupled to the environment. In designing a transformative experience, I seek to design for simple fun ways for to people to physically jump into an “interactivist” practice — the self practices identifying with the interconnective processes of the senses, practices being hyper-aware of this interconnectivity, and plays with creative choices from this connected place. A pro-active awareness practice of Interactivism creates visceral opportunities for shifts of thinking about how deeply we are connected and builds capacity to step boldy into the unknown of trying out new relational behaviors, even while our new huggy behavior goes against the social norm around us. We can realize that, quoting Joanna Macy, the experience becomes “world as lover, world as self”
all for now, hugs (my space/ your space/our space), Tiffany
Sue Lebeck introduced me to SocialDesignSite.com and it is a cross-pollinating whirlpool of creative projects to check out. They are soon having a multicultural exhibit in May. Please be invited by their invitation…
"SocialDesignSite.com is an international online platform with the purpose to foster a discourse on social design. Social design refers to the inescapability of the social other. We are not isolated individuals. We have social interactions everyday. We have to deal with the social other. And in finding ways to do so, we create and design our social world. Every new day we need to choose. We could preserve habits and manifest traditions or we could do things differently. It is our responsibility. Both will have consequences. We cannot not change the world."
INVITATION: We would like to invite you for our DESIGNMAI: http://www.designmai.de exhibition: SocialDesignSite at www. SocialDesignSite.com, May, 12th to 18th (11a.m – 20p.m), to our Office in 10117 Berlin-Mitte, Marienstraße 20.
During 12th to 18th May we are participating at the DESIGNMAI “Digitabilty” in Berlin. Therefore we exhibit all social design projects of our website, either physically or via movies. We would like to get you in touch with the ideas of social design and with the projects’ initiators from all over the world. We count on the exchange of ideas and opinions. The atmosphere is going to be relaxed to smoothly slide into interesting dialogue.
Additionally we would like to invite you to the:
Opening party on Monday, 12th May, 5 pm – 8 pm.
Open Space discussions on Saturday 19th May, 11 am – 3 pm
Please register to receive further details at: Jan.Lachenmayer@SCgroup.de.
Last October, Don Bushnell and I were giving out free hugs at a conference, inspired by the Free Hug project video. We had so much fun that next Friday, we are setting up a Free Hugs booth at the Dreamfish Launch party so that we can give some squeezes. Our free hug project is part of a larger phenomena of social action projects of varying artists worldwide. Below is the World Hug Day project.
World Hug Day
by Gao Brothers
Beijing New Art Projects
"We propose the World Hug Day project. We started it in Shangdong Province, China, together with a worldwide Internet project, an interactive international campaign via the Internet, and have got enormous feedback and support. We carried out the first such performance, The Utopia Of Hugging For Twenty Minutes, on 10 September 2000. We invited some 150 volunteers, who were previously strangers to each other, to participate. We asked the participants to choose a person at random for a hug at the same time, and then cluster into group hugs. Since then, we have hugged hundreds of strangers, and organized group hugs for strangers in different public locations in different ways many times."
In order to develop the World Hug Day project worldwide, we are planning to go global to hug hundreds of strangers, with permission, of course, and organize group hugs for strangers, and hold a travel exhibition of these photos of the hug-performance worldwide.
Biography
Gao Zhen (b. 1956) and Gao Qiang (b. 1962) were both born in Jinan, China.
The Gao brothers are a pair of artists based in Beijing. They are authors of several published works, including How Far Can You Walk in One Day in Beijing, The Current State Of Chinese Avant-Garde Art and The Report Of Art Environment, who have been collaborating on installation, performance, photography works and writing since the mid-1980s. Some of their works were published in A History Of China Modern Art, China Avant-garde Photography, The Best Photography Of China, etc. and collected by Chinese and foreign people and museums.
4 Jiuxianqiao Road,
The Factory 798 Art District, Beijing
P.O. Box 8503
Beijing 100015
China
Tel: +86 10 84566660
Fax: +86 10 84566660
gaobrothers [at] gmail [dot] com
