Last night we held a workshop at our residency at the Montalvo Art Center with the resident artists, staff and culinary experts. We started by asking people to create a diagram of the space they navigate when in their neighborhood at home. We then split everyone up into groups of 4 and asked each group to identify common ways to understand these personal diagrams. Finally, we met together, 12 of us, and tried to limit these common understandings, or ‘elements’, into 7 groupings.
The text for the workshop: MontalvoWorkshop1
Here are the individual diagrams:
We then split into groups of four and asked each group to come up with 7 ‘elements’ that their drawings shared. Then all 12 people met, we put up all the elements, and tried to find a way to distill them. Here are the seven final ‘elements’ condensed from the individual maps:
We will use the seven elements created at the workshop to generate the forms for the studio installation at Montalvo on January 12th.
We have been thinking of different ways to show [here][now]. The project begins through a series of workshops in or near the final installation. Using individual experiences, of a sense of place, of city or town, we distill a set of ‘elements’. These are a distillation of how the workshop participants understand the physical and virtual influences around them.
The installation then, is an expression of the workshops, where we try to create a set of dynamic codes that correspond to an experience of place. These installations can be formal – in a museum of gallery setting as at Incheon, or can be informal, spontaneous events that take place on an outside wall or other non-standard place.
see installation at the Incheon Digital Art Festival
In the 2nd workshop at Nabi we explored how individuals navigate the city and structure their thoughts and actions within it.
Continue reading Workshop 2 : Nabi…
The first workshop at Nabi produced a series of elements to be used as organizing principles for the project. The workshop instructions.
Continue reading Workshop 1 : Nabi…
[here][now] is being workshoped at Nabi in Korea prior to our installation at the Incheon Digital Art Festival.
[here][now] investigates concepts of space and society through a virtual environment. The virtual and the real are counterpoints that serve as a dialectical springboard to a discussion about the ways that we, as modern citizens of the Information Age, function within the structures around us – in both virtual spaces, and in the physical spaces of our communities. The workshops are essential components to our work, as the exhibit is a reflection of its Korean location – to synthesize how people conceive of the city around them and find ways to characterize the relationships that they have to each other.
Our first workshop consisted of three parts. In the first we asked people to write ‘elements of the city’ on sheets of paper. The second we split up into 3 groups and tried to find structures for these ‘elements’. The third part consisted of a discussion. Below are three diagrams that try to relate the different elements of the city.
left
The large triangle represents ‘concrete’ concepts. The top circle represents ‘abstract’ ideas. Different elements are dispersed throughout the structure – garbage bags at the bottom; Charity, Liberalism in the middle of the circle; sneakers strung on cables across the middle of the triangle.
middle
The city is divided into 7 ‘cogs’. The sun and the moon represent time. A sort of perpetual clockwork. Charlie Chaplin is running on the outside. Roundly criticized for not expressing change in the city.
right
Time is running up and down, engineering from right to left. The ‘moral umbrella’ is in the middle, a compass turning in every way. The future “Red Light, Ice Cream Van” is desire. The past is narratives ‘Filthy Stories”. Organization is perceived as ‘Hustle and Bustle” on the left and a school with plumbing on the right. Loneliness, the candle, was supposed to exist in every quadrant.
The first workshop on Sunday May 10th is to establish elements of a city. These elements will become the specification for the generated objects in the project [here][now].
part 1:
List all the elements of a city, each on a separate piece of paper. If there is not enough paper, cut up
more.
part 2:
Create about 4 groups, divide the pieces of paper between the 4 groups.
Create a single diagram that structures all the elements in a relationship to each other.
You can only use 12 words in the diagram. You can’t use the pieces of paper. You can draw anything
you want.
part 3:
As a large group, look at the 4 structures and create visual criteria, forms and behaviors, that characterize the pieces. For example, politics has an abstract quality, whereas an assembly hall is a concrete part of the city. Criteria could be complexity, color, scattered/orderly, tall, skinny, dense/sparse, etc.
These spatial and temporal attributes become the specification for the generated objects. So a fast
red thing could be a fire-engine and a tall, fat, etherial structure could be a bureaucracy.