hacking arts management, part 3

The initial effort I discussed with regards to hacking arts management produced a core course in the UO Arts and Administration graduate curriculum, a course that ran for several years as the central portal through which students critically engaged practical and theoretical considerations about the relationships between emergent technologies and the diverse practices of arts management. Ongoing revision and refinement to our curriculum through faculty conversations driven by our observations on student needs, field expectations, and developing professional standards (via the AAAE) led to an initiative that has resulted in a more robust modification to the arts management education we offer. This hack, which I oversaw, resulted in a reconfiguration of four core courses into a two-course sequence—and capitalizes on multiple implicit overlaps and connections between previously distinct or siloed learning environments.

The problem, at first, stemmed from the significant number of credits our degree had in the “required course” (core course) category. The graduate faculty, as a whole, sought to reduce the number of required courses without diminishing (or discarding) important content: skills, critical thinking, etc. A plan emerged over the course of several meetings to attempt a merger across four existing courses. Two of these (AAD 584 & 585) comprised a sequence focused on developing skills in design and media creation, with an emphasis on web-based and social media tools that have become prevalent in the non-profit arts and culture sector. In these classes, students learned to work with digital creation and publishing tools (eg. the Adobe Creative Suite), became agile in the WordPress environment, explored video tools, and developed facility with the creation of logos, advertisements, and other visual collateral.

Another class in this mix was a graduate seminar in marketing for the arts. Historically, this course introduced students to issues and strategies central to arts and culture sector marketing, primarily focusing on nonprofit organizations. Students developed skills by generating a full marketing plan for an organization of their choosing. This plan would take shape over the ten weeks of an academic term, and would span several channels or communication strategies—often intersecting with the realms of media creation students had explored in the two-course sequence focused on design.

The fourth course in our curricular hack or mash up was the one I discussed in a previous post, “Media Management Praxis.” Emphasizing critical thinking and understanding of media in arts management, this course sought to establish skills in our students’ repertoire that would enable them to navigate the constantly shifting mediascape surrounding the practice of arts administration in the 21st century. As such, it represented a philosophical backdrop for the kinds of applied skills students developed across the three courses described above (two for media creation/design, and one for arts marketing).

In discussing how to merge the four courses, myself and my two colleagues who had been teaching the marketing and design courses sought to capitalize on both content and conceptual overlaps in order to build an efficient means for delivering essential training. That is, we knew from anecdotal evidence that students in previous cohorts had benefited from synthetic understandings that emerged across the four courses about communications and media use in nonprofit arts administration settings, but we also knew that we would have to cut some material from the ‘individual’ courses in order to distill these into a slimmer package (remembering that the initial ‘problem’ to solve here was a heavy required credit load for our master’s degree). In essence, we needed to develop a two course sequence that alchemized fourteen credits (from the four individual courses) into eight credits (the target across two “new” courses). This, then, was the object of our hack.

For the first run of the courses (Fall 2013 and Winter 2014 terms) we developed a twenty-week syllabus that positioned the fall and winter terms as two modules rather than as two distinct academic periods. Taking the primary assignments from the extant courses, we “disassembled” them into components and arranged them throughout the twenty-week schedule of this new two-course sequence now named “Marketing, Media, and Communications I & II“. The primary assignments at play were: 1. rebranding of an arts organization (including development of a logo and graphic standards through collateral, poster design, and web materials), the aforementioned marketing plan, and an essay exploring media use via a collectively-generated lexicon. Each of these assignments had historically lived in a course-specific environment (a syllabus, an academic term, an instructor’s style), and thus carried assumptions and requirements. These were more than what we typically think of as assignment requirements (eg. those things upon which an instructor assess the assignment), and we thought of them as the building blocks students would piece together toward skill development. In crafting our twenty-week syllabus, then, we took care in ensuring that we accounted for these building blocks (required knowledge or resources). As a group, the three of us distilled the essential skills and content students needed and then created scaffolded exercises and assignments that would build over time in an iterative manner, such that we would introduce students to a tool, the strategy for using it, and some ways to think critically about it with the goal of having them develop their facility with it across the three primary assignments. These assignments spanned the two academic terms and interwove with each other, with “pieces” of each manifesting within specific terms. It was hard to get away fully from the term-based notion of deadlines, as we were working within a structure anchored in assessing work and giving grades, so we had to pursue our hack accordingly.

Throughout the initial experiment, we continued to hack and modify by taking into account student feedback and our own emergent understanding of what we were doing (and what was working!). By threading marketing, design, media creation, and critical thinking through the twenty-weeks, we had intended to demonstrate to students how these were all connected and why a holistic approach would benefit them professionally once they move from the program into a career. For the most part we were succsessful, and the hack worked. We are now halfway through the second round of this effort, as the Winter 2015 course has just started. For this academic year, we shifted content around and hacked a bit more so as to make the experience useful and enjoyable for students. Upon wrapping up this term, the three of us will gather to evaluate the current structure and see what needs changing. After all, the ethos of hacking in many ways embraces the idea that nothing is ever finished…

hacking arts management, part 2

In the previous post I outlined what I mean when I say “hacking arts management,” and I will use this post to expand on the idea while also providing some details. I want to be clear that by “hacking” I do not imply that there is something ‘wrong’ with arts management education, nor that there is some ‘weakness’ I think we should exploit in the system (a common understanding of the general notion of hacking). Instead, I propose that we explore both the content and the means that we use in training future arts leaders at the graduate level in order to craft and deploy modifications (hacks) that push such education in responsive and exciting directions. These may not always be the “right” directions, but part of the ethos of hacking is learning by doing—and then revisiting or refining based on immediate feedback. I guess I’m entangled here with the idea of ‘rapid prototyping,’ at least to the extent that I envision hacking to entail the agile process of having an idea, putting it into ‘production,’ and then determining its fit with the broad system or structure of which it is part. In the case of arts management training/education, the idea or part I’d like to focus on at the moment is pedagogical design, or, the class.

My hire in 2009 at the University of Oregon aligned with the launch of a ‘media management’ area of concentration within the arts management graduate program (AAD). Building on a trajectory of technology-rich coursework within AAD that tracked through desktop publishing and into web-based communication and design since the early 1990s, the vision for the media management area of concentration encompassed preparing our students for challenges and opportunities afforded arts managers by the shifting mediascape of the 21st century. In support of this vision, I developed a seminar course called “Media Management Praxis” that was core to the AAD Master’s program (meaning it was required of all students). In many ways, the development and teaching of this course was my first effort to hack arts management. Through the course I sought to collaboratively explore with students both practical and theoretical issues surrounding the place of media in arts and culture sector work. My use of the word ‘media’ encompassed communications strategies, delivery technologies, creative tools, and archiving mechanisms—while also embracing “new” and legacy forms. Coupling applied and academic readings with in-class visits by arts leaders and professionals working in the Eugene area, the course offered students a space to critically engage with the ways that broad trends or issues involving media and technologies impact non-profit arts organizations and the professional practice of the executive directors, artistic directors, curators, board members, and staff providing audiences and communities with opportunities to engage a diversity of arts. I ran the class in this format for four years, establishing an environment within which students (and myself) could become conversant with the economic, political, social, and cultural contexts within which arts management and media technologies mingle. Some students hated the course, some loved it, but all participated over those four years by bringing a wealth of insight and a good number of rich examples and questions into the mix.

Within this initial, maybe even ‘clunky,’ hack that was the course I continuously worked to update and refine it based on student needs and trends in the field of arts management. I sought a different roster of guests every year so as to get a broad sweep of perspectives and practices in front of students, and tweaked the technologies I used in teaching in ways that introduced students to tools or platforms that they might find useful beyond the classroom. They often responded in turn, bringing interesting or idiosyncratic tools to my attention so that we could collectively try to understand what, if any, use these might have in the professional world. In some instances, students responded by ‘hacking’ the class a bit, demonstrating a bit of meta-play with digital participation. A weekly ‘lexicon’ excercise in which I asked them to post responses on the course site to a short list of terms (usually three) that we identified together based on readings, often resulted in me generating a word cloud (first using Wordle, then Tagxedo) to provide a visual representation. At one point in the second or third year of the course, students began “bombing” this assignment, but in a good way: furtively deciding across the group that a certain word other than one of the lexicon terms was “important,” a significant number of them would include the word in their responses. Improvisatory in nature, since the word would often be on that had appeared in an early response by one of the students, the snowballing use of that same word would up its frequency such that when I created the word cloud it would appear disproportionately large. Playful, and not disruptive, this momentary hack of the assignment (which began early in the term and appeared for several weeks) demonstrated, for me, the dynamic interplay between learning about something and learning through something—and confirmed the value of engaging students in the co-creation of knowledge (however silly, in this case) that a ‘hacking’ ethos enables.

The course no longer exists, at least in the format I described above, as a more recent curricular ‘hack’ that I was part of has pushed us in the program to reconsider the ways we want our students to learn with and about media and communications technologies. I’ll get to that story next…

new project: hacking arts management

 

 

 

 

Hacking arts management is a concept that I have been knocking around for some time, trying to shape into a pragmatic engine for pedagogy and practice in connection to my faculty position in an arts management program at a public university. What do I mean by “hacking arts management”? Hacking, in the criminalized cyberworld sense, refers to taking advantage (or leveraging) vulnerabilities—usually in security systems or software. This is, unfortunately, the dominant prominent popular meaning of the word, and many commentators on digital culture have sought to push other, more complimentary or positive meanings out into public discourse. One such meaning is “to tinker with” something: an electronic device, a toy, a household object that doesn’t quite do what you need it to in the way you want it to. Another related meaning is “to improve” something, make it better by fiddling with the innards or reconfiguring the underlying structure (software or hardware, in the broadest senses). Combining these two notions of “hacking” moves toward a “better living through tinkering” ethos that resonates with my thinking about arts management education and work.

As a professional field, arts management comprises a broad set of skills, responsibilities, and settings. It is not a singular or monolithic domain of work, as any arts manager can attest to, and the development of skills, literacy, and competency when it comes to all of the components of administering arts—financial, programming, technology, advocacy, policy—is an ongoing process. “Hacking” in the professional realm is often part of this process: modulating or altering existing practices and systems in order to get things done more efficiently, quickly, or (in many cases) with a diminishing set of resources (often people or money). This is not the world I work in directly, nor is my observation necessarily “new” in that anyone working in the arts and culture sector (especially the non-profit area) can confirm that you often have to figure out how to get something done in a constantly shifting economic, technological, political, and social environment. But naming the process “hacking,” or at least attempting to identify an ethos of hacking within the process, does get me closer to the world that I do work in: university-based training for arts managers.

The program I teach in at the University of Oregon has just begun its twentieth year and is dedicated to educating “cultural sector leaders and participants to make a difference in communities.” For the past seven years or so, I have taught and mentored graduate students in this program through a combination of coursework, research advising, academic guidance, and collaborative field-based practice. Ostensibly brought onto the faculty to oversee a “media management” area of concentration for the Master’s program, I’ve worked hard to make sure that all students coming into the program—those with an interest in media and technology, as well as those who abhor the stuff—build a fluency for the many ways that media technologies, as well as cultural patterns of use and value around them, intersect with arts management work today. As such, I’ve resisted the siloing of “media” into its own fenced-in zone of specialization and sought to get students to see how digital literacies can cut across arts institutions, programming practices, and opportunities for participation. Toward this end, I’ve mad moves to diminish the “media management” area of concentration and instead push the content into the core of our graduate curriculum—not as a galvanized topic, per se, but as an integrated awareness and structure of understanding (with apologies to Raymond Williams and his “structures of feeling”).

What does this all have to do with “hacking arts management”? In tackling the broad issue of “media technologies in arts management,” I seek to strike a balance of critical evaluation and step-by-step “how to” such that students learn through thinking and doing. Something I encourage is ‘tinkering’ with ideas and systems: with the kinds of arts programming and engagement strategies we read about in classes, with the approaches to fund raising and audience development that come out of case studies, and with the technologies and tools that surround us on a daily basis. In encouraging tinkering across ideas and things (digital or otherwise), I hope to instill an ethos of hacking in the emerging arts leaders coming out of our program. Whether they are technologically -phobic or -philic, my aim is to get all students conversant with and confident about intentional exploration of possibility. I want them to be able to “exploit” opportunities (rather than vulnerabilities or weaknesses) in the systems and structures through which arts management occurs, and I want them to do this in order to serve constituents and communities through whom art happens.

 

I will return to this idea in a forthcoming series of posts, as I hope to turn it into an essay of some sort…In other words, stay tuned!

 

BTW, I wrote most of the above on 750words.com, a cool writing tool a friend recently recommended.

 

nearing end of 2014 spring term, or a much belated update

I’ve started a new research/professional project of helping the City of Eugene create rich, audio-visual documentation of public art projects. The pilot effort focuses on documenting the murals commissioned for the Washington-Jefferson Skatepark (apparently the largest covered and lit park in the United States…). The park opened on April 14th, but the official ribbon-cutting ceremony will not be until later in June. From now until then, I’ll be working with a graduate student advisee (Jonathan Lederman) on getting video, audio, and still images of the artists’ progress. We’ll also be getting some interviews and developing a ‘narrative strategy’ for pushing  snippets of documentation out via social media and web-based portals on up until the June ceremony. After that, we’ll edit short (5-7 minute) films that will be “bio pics” of sorts for the two sets of murals. The GIF animation above shows Esteban, one of the artists, at work on the northeast column mural. For more info on the skatepark, as well as some documentation of the actual construction, check out this site hosted by SK8EUG.

I’m also getting ready to leave town for a conference in Coimbra, Portugal. It’s called “Mapping Cultures: Communities, Sites, and Stories” and is sponsored by the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. Here’s the abstract for my presentation:

For some time United States-based folklorists have leveraged multiple approaches to cultural mapping, from tracking geographic movement of traditions to exploring ways in which collective and individual identity overlay cultural patterns and interchange. More specifically, folklorists working in the public interest—via nonprofit agencies, governmental offices, or university initiatives—have sought to assist communities in drawing up inventories of cultural resources and connecting these inventories to senses of place: physical, social, and emotional. These public sector efforts often entail engaging communities around issues of policy, social justice, and cultural planning, and often emerge in a zone of interplay between advocacy and aesthetics where mapping becomes a process of locating, presenting, and interpreting. The recent surge of digital mapping tools and technologies embedded in mobile devices as well as computers provides myriad opportunities for folklorists and other cultural workers to collaborate with communities on agile, dynamic, and highly portable cultural mapping projects. Such opportunities portend both potential and pitfalls, especially with regards to the shifting sands of digital technologies and web-enabled communication, and this presentation seeks to explore a handful of key issues delineating the intersection of cultural mapping, digital/mobile technology, and community engagement. Concepts such as privacy, access, and sustainability will thread through the presentation, forming anchor points for discussion. While stemming from a U.S.-based folkloristic perspective, the presentation will draw on a range of examples anchored in arts and expressive culture so as to extend discussion about digitally-enabled cultural mapping to the broadest audience.

Should I have time during the actual conference (May 28-30, 2014), I’ll post some thoughts and reflections on the emergent themes across presentations.

"node among other nodes…"

“In a world of constant change, if you don’t feel comfortable tinkering you are going to feel an amazing state of anxiety.”

John Seely Brown

 

I like that quote quite a lot, and especially like the video it came from:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/49645115[/vimeo]

I posted this video to the site for a course I’m teaching this term, and we watched it on the first day. I had run across it via the DML Facebook flow as I was prepping for class and was struck by how much Seely Brown’s narration about education today meshed with the way I approach teaching, learning, research, and just about everything else I do in my world. Running into this video was a nice, poetic way to kick off the academic year for me as it reminded me why I do what I do. It also reminded me how I do what I do (to some extent)…All of this reminding reminded me that I had been up to a lot since the spring term (2012), but had not posted much here. On to a round-up…

Toward the end of spring, I helped install a display at the Jordan Schnitzer Art Museum that celebrated the 100th anniversary of the decathlon as an event in the modern Olympics. This celebration coincided—surprise, surprise—with the 2012 Track and Field Trials, and my primary responsibility was to coordinate or curate materials that visually narrated the past ten decades of U.S. Olympic decathletes. Much of the material came from the collection of Dr. Frank Zarnowski. He loves the decathlon (verges on an understatement…), and was able to loan us a bunch of fantastic stuff. Along with two graduate students, I worked on sourcing historical images, coordinating production, and hanging the show. It was all quite successful and I got to work with great people. Here is an image from install day (on Flickr, where you can find a set with more documentation):

 

In early June, I traveled to Montreal in order to participate in the 2012 McGill/ICASP colloquium. “ICASP” stands for Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice, which is a large-scale nationally-funded research project in Canada. The 2012 colloquium focused on the intersections of improvisation, technology, and critical theory about the body, under the title, “Skin-Surface-Circuit.” I was lucky enough to co-present with my colleague and good friend, Dr. Kevin Patton (artist site here, professional site here), and we talked about improvisation, boutique guitar pedal circuits, ethics, and business models. It all worked out quite well, and we received some great comments and feedback. Here is the Prezi we used (though it might not make much sense without us talking over/around it):

One of the coolest things I encountered during the ICASP symposium was the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments project, which is housed in the Deep Listening Institute. We all participated in a demo of the tools/software at a school focused on other-abled kids, and it was somewhat transformative to be part of that effort. I highly recommend going to the AUMI site and checking out the materials, but if you don’t I’ll just say that the software takes advantage of various digital technologies and available computer equipment in order to make “music” and “instruments” more widely accessible for people of all ages and abilities.

For a month I was out of the country with my family, traveling to Dakar, Senegal and then on to an area in the French part of the Swiss Alps. This was mostly fun, though I did a bit of work-related stuff by meeting scholars and artists in Dakar. The art scenes around Dakar were lively (long tradition of that since Senghor), and I’ve put together a small Flickr set documenting our travels. Here’s a sample image from the artists’ colony on Goree island, and clicking it should take you to the set:

Finally, in September I traveled to Minneapolis for the 2012 NAMAC conference. It was a phenomenal meeting, and I learned so much about media arts and culture in the U.S. that I’m still digesting it. The official conference blog does a great job of capturing all that was going on, and I’ll try to post more once I gather all my bits of paper and ephemera together. I had been asked to chair a panel on mobile media and creative place-making, so will focus a (near) future post here on that panel.

Crowdsourcing (part of) a syllabus…

 

Diversidad etnica
Image via Wikipedia

I’ll be teaching a new course this coming spring term (2012) on digital ethnography (with a likely, but somewhat bland, title of Digital Ethnography). As a methods course preceding the establishment of a new media & culture graduate certificate, I’m thinking it iwill attend to at least two areas under the “digital ethnography” heading: doing ethnographic work using digital tools, and doing ethnographic work in the digital domain.

Barring a few reading options, this is as far as I’ve gotten in the planning. I am seeking comments and input from students (potential or otherwise) about what else the course might take on. So, please post comments here with suggested readings, methodological issues, tools you are curious about (or have used)—in short, anything that you’d love to see in a class of this sort. In that I’m imagining this class to be a collaborative experiment in general, having at least part of the syllabus co-authored/crowdsourced is fine first step in my mind. And I’ll certainly credit any/all contributions that I end up using!

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mimetic inquiry @ AFS 2011

I’m heading to the annual American Folklore Society meetings in Bloomington, IN, and will participate in a poster session focused on digital humanities. This will be the test drive for the “mimetic inquiry” concept I’ve been batting around. A JPEG of the poster is above, and here is how I describe the concept on the poster:

Embracing an ethos within digital humanities that positions the “digital” as simultaneously object of study and context of scholarly practice, mimetic inquiry utilizes tools of digital content creation and manipulation to generate interpretative analysis that is both process and product-oriented. As such, it entails ethnographically-grounded interpretation that echoes artistic processes, while proposing a move beyond textual representation as the norm for cultural research.

I’m hoping to get some feedback so that I can continue to refine the ideas I’m working with and push this idea further into the realm of usable.

 

A documentary I'm connected to…

My wife, Dr. Lisa Gilman, finished a documentary film this past spring, and I helped her out with some of the music by recording original pieces and placing a few songs (one by a friend, one by a band I was in…). The film is called Grounds for Resistance, and you can find out all about it here (or here, for you FB people). Basically, it follows the story of a group of young vets of the U.S. Armed Forces who served in Iraq, and, upon discharge, gather together and start an anti-war, G.I. rights coffee house just outside the gates of Joint Base Lewis-McChord (near Olympia, WA). The coffee house is called Coffee Strong (here is their FB page). Should you be inclined, please do support them as the work they do for vets is invaluable!

Check out the trailer to get a sense of the film:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdDlvQHa4gk[/youtube]

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Deviation: an installation @ OPUS VII

Bio-poster that was part of the exhibition...Click for larger size

In late June, I set up a small exhibit in Eugene’s OPUS VII space, consisting of materials connected to my ongoing research with boutique effects pedal builders. More specifically, the exhibit focused on the work of Devi Ever, a builder who has participated in my research into boutique pedal culture since I started the project back in 2008. This exhibit, titled Deviation: the sonic design-build of Devi Ever, was part of a larger show put together by Cindy Ingram called “Designing Sound: A Visual Exploration into Sound and Music,” and it ran from the end of June until the third week in August.

Putting the show together was quite fun, and I truly appreciated the support that Devi gave. Once she realized that I was going to do all of the work (a relief for her, given the crazy expansion her business has undergone this summer…), she gave me her blessing to pull an installation together as I saw fit. My goal was to showcase her work with electronic circuits by focusing on the aesthetic elements at play: visual, sonic, and technological. Given the number of other artists/participants, I opted not to go with an interactive, sound-producing installation—i.e. one that would have allowed visitors to interact with Devi’s pedals and actually hear what kind of sounds one can make with them. Instead, I sought to build an exhibit that would echo the aesthetic textures and practices of Devi’s pedal building, as well as that of the boutique community as a whole. Ultimately, this approach resulted in an exhibit that privileged the visual, but by incorporating two iPads running video I was able to sneak some sound in; one of the iPads ran a loop of a demo reel I assembled (see vid below), while the other iPad ran a YouTube playlist I curated featuring video demos of Devi Ever and Effector 13 pedals. The playlist had videos produced by Devi herself as well as a diverse set of “fuzz folk” community members from around the world, and you can find it here.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLpv7_UlZ0c[/youtube]

 

While I admit it was kind of strange to mostly look at Devi’s creations—many pedals in a jewelry case, photos, and schematics—doing so also foregrounded the ways in which visual and sonic aesthetics co-mingle when it comes to boutique effects pedals. This dynamic between the visual and the sonic is something I’ve been encountering in my research, and have written/thought about a bit (eg. here). Given the wide range of graphic approaches and tastes that boutique builders embrace, the connection between what a box looks like on the outside and what it does on the inside (i.e how the circuit impacts the instrument or audio signal) is never a given. And with a builder such as Devi—who constantly alters the graphics of any given pedal in her product line, including one-off custom paint jobs—the visual flux stands in contrast to the sonic constancy. While a circuit remains the same, the graphics might radically change with her pedals across the years. As such, the pedals I put in the exhibit represent this visual diversity, and in some cases I was able to show a single circuit with a few different graphic manifestations. Here are some images of the installation, documenting the process of putting it up as well as the opening on July 1, 2011:

[nggallery id=2]

Getting the exhibit in front of many, many visitors  was quite rewarding (over 200 on the opening, and OPUS VII staff indicated that over the course of the show’s month-long run there was a steady stream of people exploring all components of this innovative show), and represented for me an exercise in presenting aspects of my research to a broader audience. While not necessarily “academic publication,” participating in this show offered me the chance to extract a few key ideas from my ethnographic investigation into boutique pedal culture (what I’ve been calling “fuzz folk“) and interpreting these ideas in an accessible and engaging format. Anecdotal feedback from visitors (and friends!) indicates that I had some success here, and Devi’s enthusiasm at the time pushed us to talk about doing another, more interactive installation up in Portland (maybe @ the White Box?) sometime in the near future.

A final thought on this opportunity to showcase Devi’s work and present my research in a public environment: the process of putting together the installation gave me a chance to further explore a research approach I’ve been calling “mimetic inquiry.” While I’ve not fully fleshed out the concept, I’ve taken to thinking about it as a research method that employs the creative practices, tools, and strategies associated with the artists or individuals I’m exploring. Mimetic inquiry, then, is a representational strategy that generates interpretive understanding through redeployment of artistic strategies found in the work under consideration. As such, mimesis here serves to recontextualize rather than solely represent artists and their creative practices, and forms the basis for dialectical insight rather than straight ahead explanation. More on this in future posts…

Extra special thanks to ILF community members Ganiel Seruru, Tom Bacon, Gunnar Recall, and Pumpkin Pieces for sending images that appeared in the installation!