Tag: culture

"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):

 

Skin: Surface: Circuit 2012 on Prezi

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.

OFN symposium: a debrief

This past Friday (11/19/2010) proved to be a successful and energizing day, with the Oregon Folklife Network moving into a chrysallis phase of development via a symposium held at the Many Nations Longhouse on the University of Oregon campus. Titled “Public Folklore in the 21st Century,” the symposium focused on entertaining questions on, insights into, and critical examination of the shape a state-wide public folklore effort should take here and now. An array of local & regional panelists and active attendees anchored the proceedings in immediate context of Oregon, while special guest Bill Ivey brought a national-policy frame to things (often from the 20,000-foot perspective, as he noted periodically…). This combination of distal and proximal, macro and micro, created a dynamic intellectual climate in which we pursued collective analysis of several key issues/themes:

  • the relationship between ‘non-profit’ and ‘for-profit’ models for cultural programming
  • developing sustainable structures that support arts & culture (maybe the issue, according to Devon Leger of Hearth Music)
  • the terminological salad: folklife, folk art, culture, art, or expressive life (Bill Ivey’s suggestion)—which is best for describing the “what” of our efforts?
  • the difficult necessity of including as many voices/constituencies/interests as possible in developing the strategies, projects, and goals of the OFN such that it serves all communities of the state

An invited panel of arts & culture leaders started the day off, by responding to prompts and offering perspectives on the challenges and possibilities in front of the OFN. Discussion and audience response to this panel bled into a working lunch, during which each table chewed on food and a key question distributed by symposium organizers; my tablemates and I batted around ideas for an OFN mission as well as strategies for generating state-wide engagement. After a short table-reporting session, we moved into the final panel for the day: a student-centered discussion about the relationship between academic training and community-engaged work that emerges at the nexus of folklore and arts management. I moderated this panel, but the four students—two representing the Arts Administration Program, two representing the Folklore Program—did all the work, providing compelling examples from their own research or coursework that gave everyone plenty to think about. To wrap up the day, Bill Ivey presented a short series of synthesizing observations/remarks; the overall theme of these (and the day as well) was: the network-model put into place via the establishment of the OFN is unique and potentially very powerful, so let’s make good on it!

As an experiment, and in order to encourage an avenue of participation that enabled those in the room as well as those far away to partake, a Twitter stream drawing on the official hashtag (#ofn2010) ran on one of the walls as a projection. You can access an archive of it here…While most of the tweets were from people in the room, this stream nonetheless provided a meeting-within-a-meeting of sorts, a meta-commentary on the events and a simultaneous exploration of how/where/why emerging tech can play a role in arts and culture work. Look for video from the symposium in the near future on the OFN site.

Conference presentation

In preparing for the upcoming Experience Music Project “Pop Conference” in Seattle (April 15-18), I’ve put together a Prezi that I’ll use during the session I’m on (see previous post). This Prezi pulls together images, websites (links and screen captures), YouTube videos, and a bit of text that together illustrate the dynamic between analog circuitry and digital community that I’m going to be talking about during the conference. Here is the Prezi:

AC_DC-EMP on Prezi

If you are not familiar with Prezi, it’s a new-ish presentation tool that enables a kind of interactivity and non-linearity not really found in PowerPoint/Keynote. I’m using it as an experiment, and hoping that all works out! I’ll be adding bits to this Prezi as I wrap up my paper for the conference in the next few days.

Another facet of media management

A post on Henry Jenkins’ blog this morning pushed me toward thinking about media management in yet one more way (find the full post here). I’ve been concentrating on the relationship between two aspects of “management” as I move forward with establishing the media management area of concentration in the AAD program. On the one hand there is the technical and practical sense of the term, by which I refer to the administrative wrangling of media—the tech know-how, use skills, or savvy that we have about various media with which we are quite familiar. On the other hand, I’ve thought about “management” in relation to meaning and interpretation. That is, I’ve tried to focus on the ways in which people draw meaning from and invest identity in various mediated forms of culture. Running through both of these conceptualizations of “management,” I’ve emphasized a pluralistic sense of “media”: the term refers to technology as much as commuicative strategies, old or legacy forms as much as new and emergent forms.

The post on Jenkins’ blog—introduced by Jenkins himself, but largely penned by Anna Van Someren as an initial report on a new research project—focuses on what I’m thinking of as another facet of media management: the ways in which participation in media intersects with civic engagement. Van Someren briefly outlines two unrelated “flashmob” efforts: one ‘rewards’ business owners who attempt to incorporate ecologically-sound practices into their buisnesses (Carrotmob), the other sought to save the television show Chuck by having people buy Subway sandwiches (for more details on either of these, read the full post on Jenkins’ blog…). Van Someren says this about the two efforts:

These two projects have entirely different goals, and some might say Save Chuck is a far cry from civic engagement, but it’s interesting to note that the skills and strategies being used are so similar. We began to wonder if participants in campaigns like Save Chuck might stand to gain some of the skills and knowledge needed to become active citizens. With so many young people so engaged with popular culture, this potential is critical to understand. In Convergence Culture, Henry describes how popular culture can function as a civic playground, where lower stakes allow for a greater diversity of opinions than tolerated in political arenas. “One way that popular culture can enable a more engaged citizenry is by allowing people to play with power on a microlevel …popular culture may be preparing the way for a more meaningful public culture.”

As I read through the post a bit more, the idea crystallized that the socially-concerned components of media participation culminating in what Jenkins, Van Someran, and others look at as forms of civic engagement or citizenry might constitute another facet of media management. I’ll certainly be thinking more about this (especially as course prep kicks into high gear…) and am looking forward to sorting through these ideas with students in the winter term. In the meantime, I encourage everyone to read the post by Jenkins/Van Someran, take a look  at the examples they reference, and push ahead with thinking about the multiple roles media have in our lives.

Art & Culture iPhone apps

I know not everyone is an iPhone nut, but this post from Technology In the Arts caters to those of us who are and also happen to move around in the arts/culture sectors. Even if you do not have an iPhone, I think the subtext of the post is relevant: people with mobile devices are wanting to engage programming with/through/on/via those devices. Here is the video embedded in the post, in case you are not interested in reading…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjs5QopL0Pc[/youtube]