Spring term has just ended and most students are enjoying their summer breaks, but 14 students are already back in the classroom. We shouldn’t feel too bad for them because their classroom is in Copenhagen, Denmark, as a part of their three-week Sustainable Bicycle Transportation course in Denmark and the Netherlands.
Students in Copenhagen. Photo by Marc Schlossberg
The students are led by UO Associate Professor Marc Schlossberg. He has planned a three-week itinerary that begins in Copenhagen and continues to Utrecht, Netherlands, and then moves to Amsterdam. In each of the cities, students will do coursework, experience the urban environment on bike, meet with local leaders, and keep a diary of their experiences.
" We started off the day with our first formal lecture, but held the lecture in the kitchen of a local family!" Photo by Marc Schlossberg
While the diary of their experiences is written for themselves and their instructor only, all students and Schlossberg are writing more publicly about their experiences in individual blogs. They arrived less than a week ago, but most students have posted their first reactions to bike culture in Copenhagen and posted pictures that illustrate their experiences. For all of the students’ blogs, check out the class blog directory.
“I conclude from my time cycling in Copenhagen that bicycling is natural. Everyone here is just doing it. It has rained every day I’ve been here and I’ve been told this is normal. They don’t even really bother to cover their bicycle seats when it’s parked in the rain, like many people in Eugene do. It’s just so common that bicycling is a way of living. The hipsters ride fixed gears just like in the USA. People bike in the rain or sun, either way they will still bike because it’s just more convenient.”
“It was really great to talk with locals and compare the bicycle infrastructure here to some of the infrastructure that we have back home. There are so many simple changes that could be made throughout our cities in the U.S. that would make bicycling more feasible and safer.”
“Stop lines for cyclists are often placed a few meters in front of the stop lines for automobiles to increase visibility and safety. “Right hooks” are still an issue in Copenhagen, but this simple treatment has made a difference. Retrofitting lorries with additional mirrors is another simple technique to decrease the likelihood of collisions.”
Photo by Marc Schlossberg
Marc Schlossberg posted a round up of some of the first experiences on the trip so far.
“It is quite satisfying to be on a bike and be part of the dominant mode where all vehicles yield always (and where cyclists all yield to pedestrians always).”
The students will continue to update their blogs as they move to the Netherlands, so keep following along. The blogs demonstrate what the students learn from the experience, but also take everyone else along and teach us about what is needed to build a successful bicycle network and culture.
From January 21 to April 8th, the UO art faculty members will be showing their work in The Long Now, an exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art from January 20 to April 8 in Eugene. Selected works by six art faculty members will be shown at the White Box in Portland from January 24 to March 24. To highlight the artists behind the art, I’m having conversations with several of the faculty in the show to hear more about their practice.
This conversation is with Carla Bengtson. She is an Associate Professor in Art and an Associate Member of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Oregon. Her work will be shown in Eugene, as well as at the White Box in Portland. Previously to coming to the UO, she taught at Yale University, Connecticut College, Wesleyan University, and was Head Curator of the John Slade Ely House, Center for Contemporary Art in New Haven, Connecticut. She holds a BFA from Tyler School of Art, an MFA from Yale School of Art, and was a two-time participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Dave Amos, A&AA writer: Why do you work with insects and ants?
Carla Bengtson: I work with a few different organisms; ants are one of them. Ants were my first experiment in making art with other species. That happened because I was going to the Amazon every year and staying at research stations as part of a larger question about human-environment interactions. Ants kept trying to get into my work as I would go out into the field to draw and write so I decided to welcome that opportunity. I started working with ants in collaboration with a biologist and our first drawings were with arboreal gliding ants. They are ants that live in trees and when they fall from trees they are able to direct their descent like flying squirrels do, so they can find a scent trail and get back to their nest.
Atta sexdens, field document, 2009
I discovered this by accident. We were playing with an ant on a piece of paper and it would always move to the same corner. So I would move the paper to try to understand what this behavior was about. Through a process of interaction I got this beautiful spiral pattern. As it turns out the ant wasn’t just going to a particular corner or a particular compass point, but it was going toward the light, which is how they locate the trees when they fall out of the trees. So the pattern that resulted evidenced something of my curiosity and the ant’s inclinations.
DA: One of your pieces is a result of spreading paper under a tree. Could you tell me more about that?
CB: The following year I went down with some Dutch Boy paint samples, which reminded me of minimalist paintings — little ready made minimalist paintings that Home Depot was selling. I did a series where ants did these gestural abstractions on the paint samples, and then I did several things with them. I based a series of human-scaled paintings on them, which was an attempt to see if I could understand something of the ants’ lifeworld, but through the process of translation I also added something of my own nature and culture. The paintings exist somewhere between my culture and their nature, or between my nature and their culture, depending on how you look at it.
In a following iteration I blew the original up, took it back down to the Amazon, reinstalled it, and had the ants draw on it as a colony. That piece, along with site documents and a video showing the ants beginning to explore the print, are in the JSMA exhibition.
Dutch Boy: R/RR/RRR/RRRR/RRRRR -- In "The Long Now" faculty art showDutch Boy: R/RR/RRR/RRRR/RRRRR in progress
DA: How do they make their drawings?
CB: It’s just ink. It’s non-toxic water-based ink. I just splatter it in their path. They’re busy getting their leaves.
DA: Before you had been to the Amazon had this human-insect interaction always been an interest?
CB: My interest in environmental issues is what took me to the Amazon. When you’re down there, you become very aware that the human perspective is only one among many. So I became more and more curious to see what I might understand of nonhuman culture. I’m also curious to see what other species make of human culture. I did another piece where I cut up and laid out a large print over the leaf cutter nest site. At first the ants rejected the pieces and cleared them from the nest site. Then they started collecting them. I’ve got this video showing that moment of decision. The next year I did it again but I tore the print into pieces that resembled leaves and this time they took them from me right away. And then, not only that, but I had these big chunks left that they started cutting themselves and started collecting. They just collected virtually the whole print. My work in the Portland show is based on that interaction. Both pieces begin with site-responsive actions or interventions and then they take different, but related, forms in the gallery setting.
DA: What insight are you looking for when you make these pieces? What’s fascinating to you about the interactions you’re having with these creatures?
CB: I’m trying to find a place between nature and culture. I’m trying to think them together, rather than in opposition to one another, which is how we’ve been trained. And I’m trying to see what can be seen and what can be said between species. We have completely different physical scales, temporal scales, perceptual apparatus, and cultures. Ants are interesting to me because they have such highly developed, bottom up cultures, while we have highly developed top down cultures. I’m hoping to develop a two-way interaction, not just something I impose on them or something they perform for me, but a two-way dialogue that shifts my perspective.
DA: Is there another species you want to work with?
CB: I am working on a video project with ground squirrels. I’ve done a piece with a studio mouse (below). I’m doing a piece with monkeys and language, called “Starting Over”, in the Amazon.
Mouse Trap With Raisin, Peanut, Butter, Cranberry, Peanut Butter, Cheese, and Crackers, 2010
DA: There seems to be another area of your work that doesn’t directly involve insects. “Lick” (below) is a beautiful piece. How did you make it?
CB: It’s all about this question of human/environment and human/non-human interaction. The question is what falls out when you try to engage other species in the environment. In other words, what can you not access? That’s the falling out. The spilling over is what comes back; the unexpected insights that come back from that attempt.
Bengtson in her studio with "Lick"
”Lick” is about the paint performing it’s own materiality. I’ve painted for years and years and these ant projects have spilled over into how I think about paint. I’m interested in embodiments — my body, other species’ bodies, the body of the material of the paint, and the body of the image. In this piece, I really want to extend the gesture of the paint to show what it wants to do, how it flows, how you can move it. To take that gesture and prolong it and move it through a series of panels so it ripples through without being a big, fat heroic abstract expressionist brush gesture. And the stripe, the other spillover that came into this painting from these Dutch Boy paint samples was when I started to paint them I had to find a technique to show this blown up striping effect. I developed a tool that would do that, so that’s how I developed the striping gesture on “Lick.”
DA: Your primary medium is paint, but you expand outward to serve your mission. Is that move recent?
CB: I was a painter for 25 or more years. The thing that moved me from that strict painting practice was my increasing interest in environmental issues and becoming an associate member of environmental studies and co-teaching with people in other disciplines and just having certain experiences that made me want to address these other concerns more explicitly than I could with abstract painting. That’s what led me to into new forms of making.
DA: Why are you in Eugene?
CB: Eugene had the same draw that brought me to this point in my work. I was living on the east coast, and I wanted to understand more about how I was constituted as both a thinker and an embodied perceiver. I was getting a lot of resources in terms of thinking about art, but I needed to directly engage nature more and try to understand that aspect of my experience. That desire is what caused me to apply to UO. It’s also what took me beyond UO to the Amazon and other places.
DA: Who or what are your influences?
CB: Artists that are interesting to me at the moment are Katharina Grosse and Shannon Ebner and her work with language. In terms of thinkers, a German by the name of Jan Verwoert is really interesting to me. He’s a contemporary theorist. There’s also a biologist from the 19th-20th century, Jakob von Uexküll, who developed theories about animals being at the center of their own perceptual bubbles. He has some really intriguing ideas about understanding other animals as sensing subjects and not just objects.
DA: Is that what your art is trying to get at?
CB: Yes, right. The alterity, or otherness, of other species, but also their agency. So the idea around the studio mouse piece is to show both my desire to interact with the mouse, but also its agency in refusing to cooperate.
Oculus, 2007
DA: Tell me more about your circular pieces (like above).
CB: The circle shape originally came from a recognition that when you see in nature, you see in more of a circular or elliptical pattern. You don’t see rectangles, frames around your perception. It was that, but those works were also inspired by an investigation of this encounter with the world. Before you name things, what is that pre-apprehension moment? You’re always inevitably at the center of your own experience. So that’s why both the outer frame is closer to the way you see, and why a lot of them also have oculi. You’re always moving through the world, which is circulating around and opening up before you.
Teams of landscape architecture, architecture, and business students around the country have spent an intense 15 days working on an urban design proposal for downtown Houston, Texas as a part of a yearly urban design competition. Here at the UO, two teams of five students each have submitted their work with the hopes of becoming finalists and the eventual winners.
Heather Ferrell, Shannon Arms, and Lee Jorgensen look over their project on the last day of the competition
The ULI/Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition asks graduate students to form multidisciplinary teams for an exercise in responsible land use. Submissions comprised drawings, site plans, tables, diagrams, and financial data. On the week of February 20th, teams will find out if the jury selected their entries to be amongst the four finalists. The finalists will then get a chance to revise and enhance their proposals before a winner is chosen in April.
Looking back at the 15-day process, participants were still exhausted by all of the work they put in. “We knew that we were going to have evenings free and from five o’clock on for every day in the competition, and we were meeting until ten, midnight, one, four…” says graduate architecture student Jamie Corsaro.
Last year, the team from the UO won an honorable mention for their entry “Water Scapes,” but this year teams hope to best that effort. Last year was also the first year a team from the UO participated, and they’re using the experience to become more prepared this time around. Interested students met with faculty advisor and landscape architecture assistant professor Deni Ruggeri in the fall to review past winning entries to critique them and take lessons.
“The early meetings were really helpful because they gave you an idea of what this was all about,” says Vanessa Walton, graduate landscape architecture student. “A lot of them were talking about broad, interesting urban design ideas and how to finish the project in a short time period.”
During the 15-day design sprint, teams got critiques from a variety of landscape architecture and architecture professors. Ruggeri used his experience as an advisor last year and his three years of experience advising students through the ULI competition when he taught at Cornell.
Students learned about urban design, but also about how to approach a contest and communicate an idea effectively in a limited amount of space. Teams had to fit all of their work on six 11”x17” panels, so brevity and clarity were key. “What we spent more time producing was these conceptual diagrams that would explain how we were solving the problem,” says Lydia Chambers, graduate architecture student. “That was way harder than developing a plan, section, or a perspective.”
Participants also had the opportunity to work with students from other disciplines collaboratively. Each team consisted of two architecture students, two landscape architecture students, and one business student.
One team consisted of architecture graduate students Jamie Corsaro and Lydia Chambers, landscape architecture graduate students Vanessa Walton and Carol Stafford, and James Collins, MBA student. The other consisted of architecture graduate students Heather Ferrell and Lee Jorgensen, graduate landscape architecture students Shannon Arms and Emilie Froh, and MBA student Jaxon Love.
Working with business students gave the others grounding in the financial reality of their urban design schemes. But even the cross-disciplinary work between architecture and landscape architecture students was unique. “It was really great to work with Lydia and Jamie and so interesting to see how everyone comes from a slightly different place but then we all get to the same goal,” says Walton.
So now teams must wait until the week of February 20th to see if they’ve made it to the final round. Win or lose, the participants will always have the skills and memories gained during their harried two-week design adventure.
“It was one of the best learning experiences I’ve had within the program,” says Heather Ferrell, graduate architecture student. “I really enjoyed learning from my peers, working as a team, and the distilled design process. We had a three-scheme day, involving two reviews with four different professors. It was nuts and I can’t wait to do another one.”
