NOTES FROM MARCH 9 MEETING
Reb: So, this is our proposal for how to bring together some of our ideas so far. What we want to do is let go of ideas we already have about how to use a gallery space. Don’t take the space for granted, but see all of it as an opportunity for site-specific showing of work. It’s basically unlikely you’ll find one place where all of your work will live together, because it is ruthlessly about finding the perfect sites and forms for our projects. Whether that happens in clusters or crevices, or a huge diffusion, or in eventsEditor details
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NOTES FROM FEB 26 MEETING
Paul is present, Dan is away.
Andrew: Reb and I were eating dinner and talking about Exhibition. We came up with this new idea
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NOTES FROM FEB 12 MEETING
Department of Physical Presence
Eric A: Basically we are still playing around with a couple variations. We decided to break apart to make sketches. Feric created a 3D rendering of the space. We are still working out ideas of efficiency with ideas about layers, duality, and experiences.
Brad: I’ve been thinking about volume and mass within the space. And also the idea of making people feel a little uncomfortable. This also plays with idea of micro-spaces.
Shows Mock-up
Thought it could be interesting to make a room within a room
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Notes from Feb 5 Meeting
This session is being recorded by Rob on his web cam.
Dan: Passes out Wim Cuyvers text to read for next week. Today’s agenda: Go over departments. Lisa Strausfeld is coming to New Haven next Monday to share some time with us. Be ready with sketches for commentary.
All: Discussion about eating dinner from now on, instead of having class at this time, but this is not going to happen due to conflict.
Dan: Ask Max for space on the server for this class.
Department of Scheduling
If you can email a list of deliverables before Monday, we will have a combined iCal calendar up next week. The calendar is by department. Questions or comments can be delivered to Department of Scheduling inbox.
Dan: Suggests making calendars backwards in time. Starting from show installation.
Gaby: Wants to be updated on the calendar updates.
4:06pm
Department of Web Presence
Rob slowly configures his computer. The class awaits…
Rob: We discussed a number of websites. This is what we like:
http://www.as-found.net/
Seb: A collection of jpgs. It is literally structured like a blog. There is enough space between images that you can isolate items, view each on their own terms.
Rob: Simple four column layout divided into two sections. First example of the dashboard layout.
Seb: Degrees of privacy. All postings in all categories are immediately available.
http://www.showstudio.com/
Rob: Always updating, via text and images. A live link with phone video
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Webcam Images
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Notes from Feb 1 meeting
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Notes from Jan 29 meeting
Show starts May 4, Friday
Opening May 12
Take down by May 17
Show is open for 10 days (give or take)
Seb: How much the show is visited past the opening? Should we be there throughout the show, should it have a publication component? How many people actually come? Just for the opening?
Julie: In our case also, the show will be open a few days prior to official opening.
Dan: Helps that the show is a little earlier this year.
Reb: Concurs
Dan: Things should be lively, but this is not the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Seb: Maybe we can use this one day as an event, use the entire course of the day to draw everyone in.
Kate: Arrives late and is sorry that she has class until 3:30pm
Mission Statements
Rob: In no particular order. Using a set of raw materials at home in the art world, but utilized in an unexpected way. Like push pins or tape. I don’t want the exhibition to have the appearance of being a finished project. Environmentally friendly. Exhibition on demand. A record of documentation. Online presence. And a personalization aspect.
Romy: To create a cohesive space. To work together without watering down ideas. To be playful. Explore how space can be designed. Push and understand exhibition design
Carter: Not sure how I want the experience to happen. Want something multi-faceted. Parts. Something that changes over time. Organized PR. A record and online presence or/also physical book.
Julie: I agree with everyone. Dynamic. Not static. To have a cohesive critical perspective. Or non-critical. Think about traditions and default definition of exhibit design. To reach out to the community outside of Yale
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Images (pretty)
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Notes from Feb 19 meetings
Hi all,
Due to the separation of the exhibition meetings yesterday into three locations, the documentation dept might be at a loss (dept of distributed spycraft?). I had some impressions, from my movement through the sequence of the meetings and people involved.
Dept of Physical Manifestation is morphing into Dept of Inventory Control, aka Dept of Supply. They’re sending reclamation agents throughout the studio, the building, and the campus in pursuit of raw materiel that you can use to make your show on the cheap. They’ll also be capturing this material into a catalog or inventory of some kind.
You guys seemed to initially feel that this approach of space-building-with-materials-at-hand, of sustainability, or of materials recycling, could generate the show itself. But I felt you had expressed only a means to an end, without articulating the end. For example, you know how to make a wall now, but you don’t yet know how to decide what walls you need. What do you want people to do in the space you make. What work do you want to show and what should be its disposition. In general, what are your needs, as Wim Cuyvers would put it.
In response to that, Eric A said that the processes of supply and demand should come simultaneously from opposite ends and meet in the middle. But it’s not yet clear who is actually staffing the Dept of Demand. Julie said that maybe the recycling idea should be a solution rather than a brief. In other words, “we needed to make a wall, oh we made it with this desk we found”– not “we had some desks, look we turned them into walls.”
For me, I’d agree with Julie’s take on the disposition of the Dept of Inventory. It also seems to me that your eventual assembly of these materials should be in some sense beautiful, not random. It should have some delicacy as a series of gestures (Tara Donovan? Dept of Harder Than it Looks? although I don’t think that work is particularly spatial), or a considered movement back and forth between the delicate and the brutal (Thomas Hirschhorn?). An appropriate word could be “bricolage” in the senses meant by Levi-Strauss, de Certeau (productive consumption), punk rock, or evolutionary developmental biology. With those things said, in my opinion the Dept of Inventory/Supply can form a very good, if incomplete, part of a brief for the total design of your show… And furthermore, the need to gradually shape, curate, annotate, or garden a potentially unarticulated mass of “goo” into something careful and beautiful, without killing anything, seemed to reoccur later in the web meeting, especially as asserted by Romy at one point. More on this later.
One more thing about the Dept of Supply/Inventory before I move on. You talked about it as a way to identify and gather building materials. But I think it could also be a way to identify and gather work, which is also an activity that needs to happen. Soliciting, extracting, cataloging, repurposing, leveraging, making do with the work of the past three years that is on your computers. In other words, it seems you have two equally problematic challenges facing you: how do you produce a successful exhibition as consumers of the resources available to you; but also, how do your exhibition processes consume the materials you’ve already produced (your work). I’d love for your exhibition to be a fully-articulated solution to that two-part brief.
To the Book Trader now. I’ve been really impressed by the lists growing at http://art.yale.edu/GD2007DeptPromotionAndMedia . This Dept’s efforts have the potential to expose the program and the show to a massive amount of people, some who would come in the flesh and others who would use the website or who would just give “mindshare.” We talked about making the press release into a more engaging, accurate, and critical document while still sitting comfortably within the normative form of such a thing. (There is the obvious challenge that you don’t yet know what your show is about, but that’s only a challenge.) I urged you to focus this department on solving a simple problem: how to clearly, honestly, and accessibly communicate what you lot are up to, in this department and with this show.
You listed several possible forms for an invitation. There were three that I really liked, because I think they would work well for the goal of honest and successful advertising.
16 page book: A day in the life (of the studio) (full bleed images?)
16 page book: Each designer needs to contribute one existing piece or part of a piece of their work, using the criteria “would this be good for the invitation.”
16 page book: Each designer needs to spend one hour working on one page for the invitation.
Those ideas might also start to reinforce the idea of “consumptive production” already engaged by the Dept of Inventory, and to begin a process of work selection that could simply be useful.
On that note, segue to Eric Nevin’s house. The web group showed off an application they’ve made that allows each of the 16 of you to instantly post images, which then appear as a long scrolling bunch of images. I think that that project is all about making it easy to publish diverse images to the website– diverse in the sense that they come from all 16 of you, and are presumably either of your work or related to your interests.
The challenge that I think you’ve taken on with that project is a kind of resource extraction– how to get your classmates to contribute images. This is an important problem on the web as well, and so I think the website could define its brief as an attempt to solve this problem within the domain of your studio, using all available means: extremely fluid or efficient interface design, application architecture, attention to metaphor, social engineering (see drinking), and best-of-breed approaches to the relationship between effort and incentive and to the elimination of barriers to entry.
The web group is talking about releasing new versions of this application at regular intervals, with increased features for curating or organizing the set or adding more kinds of content– the timeline being the one along which the web team is able to program and design those features, and also reacting to the content contributions that have been made at each stage so far.
I’m quite impressed by what you’ve done so far in this area, and basically think you should go forward with it in this way.
As we were talking about those things, I asked whether you thought it would be possible to gather a thousand images from your classmates in this way. I was wondering about it, because we were talking about whether it would be meaningful to create trails or collections within the set of images, and so quantity seemed relevant. Romy said (paraphrasing), “Maybe, if it’s any old images, but that’s unacceptable: we need these images to be the good ones.” For me, the rightness of that question was a moment when I felt I understood the problematic of your show the most clearly so far: as a conscious push and pull (among the 16 of you), or a conscious time-based evolution (over the next few weeks): between collecting and curating, between disorder and order, or between “goo” (usually means “biomass”) and the things you can make from it or of it.
A thread that emerged rather strongly from the PR and web meetings was the need for efficacy: making it succeed, making it honest, meeting your needs, being fast. The gallery group expressed a similar ideal, although in an as yet more exclusively aesthetic way, the needs of that group being as yet less clear I think.
So this is what I’d like to ask you all to do this week. This assignment is for each of the 16 of you, working independently.
An exception can be for individuals who already have more than a couple hours “homework” this week for this class, due to their responsibilities to their main department: you can skip this assignment if you wish. Web, Publication, Inventory/Supply, and PR Departments do all need to make progress as planned.
Here is the assignment:
Each of you: Go back to your goals for the show that you wrote for the second class. Draw a proposal for the gallery that could accomplish your goals, and be ready to explain why it does so (and why in an interesting way). In your proposal, consider using found/at-hand/recycled/reclaimed materials in pursuit of your goals. Also, you must give specific consideration to specific projects that actually exist in the studio: your own, or other people’s. You can design the entire gallery space in this way, or your proposal may require only a small amount of space. Also, your proposal can incorporate all the work of the show, or as little as a single piece.
Be free with respect to scale: even if your proposal includes only one piece of work, it can take up the entire gallery if you want, or just a tiny corner.
Unfortunately, I won’t be here on Monday. Exhibition that day will be taken over either by Paul, or by Lisa.. more on this in a bit. In either case, you should make coherent, beautiful, succinct-but-complete presentations of your ideas to date, and the class that day will take the form of a crit with minimal discussion of logistics.
Over,
Dan
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