ArtSake

Photo above depicts two artists wondering whatever happened to their luggage.

On a happier note, The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority has issued two Calls to Artists for upcoming projects at Washington Dulles International Airport and they have nothing to do with locating lost luggage.

The first call to artists involves the International Arrivals Building. The Airports Authority is looking for artists to make artwork for three permanent installations intended to welcome arriving international passengers to the United States and the National Capital Region, to enhance their travel experience and to promote the cultural diversity of the National Capital Region.

The second call involves the the Federal Inspection Services Area, Concourse C. One project artist will be selected to work with nine classroom/art teachers at schools in the National Capital Region to create student portraits for a public art project titled, HELLO AND WELCOME.

For more information contact Margaret Bishop, Community Relations Manager, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, 703-417-8383, or email Margaret.Bishop@MWAA.com

Deadline for both projects: October 15, 2009.

There are two upcoming free talks to note:
The first is the launch event of Artists In Context on Friday, October 9, 2009, from 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum Lecture Hall, Harvard University, 485 Broadway, Cambridge. Seating is limited so reservation is recommended. Email RSVP@artistsincontext.org to attend.

ARTISTS IN CONTEXT is a flexible organizational framework designed to assemble artists and other creative thinkers across disciplines to conceptualize new ways of representing and acting upon the critical issues. The speakers include: Claudine Brown, Director of the Arts and Culture Program, Nathan Cummings Foundation; Mel Chin, Ann Hamilton, Dava Newman, Director, MIT Technology and Policy Program and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems; and an additional speaker TBA. The moderator is Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University.

The second talk involves Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University, in collaboration with the Massachusetts Poetry Festival presenting Massachusetts Poetry in Hard Times: What the Best of Bay State Bards Offer Us in Bad Times and Good. Poets include David Ferry, Suji Kwock Kim, Jill McDonough, Gail Mazur & Lloyd Schwartz, with moderator Christopher Lydon. For more information, call the Ford Hall Forum at 617-557-2007. Event takes place on Thursday, October 15 at 6:30-8:00 pm, at the Rabb Auditorium, Boston Public Library, 700 Boylston Street, Boston, MA.

Image credit: NASA Center: Headquarters, Image # wrightflyer-1904.

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The environment for media arts makers is, to put it mildly, in a state of change. So many ideas are in play, so many words abuzz - sustainability, monetization, community-building, to name a few - that this month’s NAMAC (the National Alliance for Media Arts & Culture) biennial conference at Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel (April 26-29) couldn’t come at a better time. It’s a chance for media arts groups, artists, and creative thinkers to share ideas and make connections. (Learn about it, register, and/or see a full schedule, here. Online registration ends Friday, Aug. 21.)

Organizers of the conference (called CommonWealth) are looking for volunteers to help keep its many gears in motion. By working ten hours, volunteers will get free registration to the entire conference. From conference assistant Mira Simon: “We will need volunteers starting on August 26 (Wednesday) and ending on August 29 (Saturday). Any interested individuals can contact me with a resume and a list of times that they will not want to volunteer.”

If you’re interested, be specific about times you can’t volunteer; organizers will assume you’re available anytime you don’t specify.

And if you do volunteer and/or participate in the conference, let us know your impressions!

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George Fifield is the founder and director of Boston Cyberarts, Inc., a nonprofit arts organization, which produces the Boston Cyberarts Festival. The 2009 festival takes place April 24 - May 10 at dozens of locations across Greater Boston.

We asked George to offer some insight as to how the region came to be known as a nexus of art and technology.

The Boston Cyberarts Festival came about as I began to understand the incredible history of art and technology that had occurred in the Greater Boston area. At this time in the mid 90s, I was writing a column for Art New England, and in my search for ideas, I slowly came across this history. Of course, this made perfect sense as Boston has always been a center for technology. Boston is where the future is beta-tested.

But the convergence of this technology with art came about in the 1960s. One program was the WGBH New Television Workshop, officially founded in 1972. Though video artists were mostly working in New York, the first television presentation of this work was a WGBH show called The Medium is the Medium in 1969, which presented six video artists to a national audience.

Subsequently, WGBH started an artist-in-residence program allowing video artists in the television studio to use the equipment for the very first time. The first artist in residence was Nam June Paik, who while here invented the Paik Abe synthesizer, the first machine that controlled the distortion of the existing video signal. This synthesizer was distributed around the world. This led to the New Television Workshop, through which hundreds of well known and aspiring artists came to make work.

The first-ever video art exhibit in a museum, Vision & Television, occurred at the Rose Museum in Waltham in 1970.

M.I.T. has germinated many programs of technological art, including the Architecture Machine Group, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), the Visual Language Workshop and the Media Laboratory. CAVS, established in 1967, was especially famous for the number of important artists who worked and visited there. Boston area art schools are well known for the excellence of their art and technology courses.

Boston companies that specifically advanced the technology of art were numerous, like Avid and Z-Corp. Some followed a tradition of working directly with artists to develop their technologies, following the close relationship between Dr. Edwin Land and Ansel Adams in developing the Polaroid camera.

But while digital art works were being presented and exhibited by a select number of Boston area organizations, there had not been a major event highlighting the art and the artists combined with a public education effort. So the Boston Cyberarts Festival was created in 1999 to recognize and celebrate this long tradition of innovation in the arts and focus attention on local artists in this important field.

Today, this region is known worldwide as having one of the highest concentrations of digital artists, including key innovators. Its academic institutions have built up excellent departments in digital art, new media and electronic music. The digital media industry, especially computer game development, has grown and added an important component to the creative economy sector.

The Festival can take no credit for the concentration of digital artists who live here the area is a great place to be an artist, with ample exhibition and performance opportunities and many jobs, including teaching for support. But I do believe the Festival can take some credit that the world knows about us.

Images, top to bottom: Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, “Paik/Abe Synthesizer,”" 1969 and still from “Nam June Paik: Edited for Television,” 1975

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For culture junkies like us, trying to answer the question So, whats going on tonight? can incite a mad scramble across several different websites and one or two free newspapers. Luckily, our friends at ArtsBoston are unveiling their new site, and its a must-bookmark for art lovers. ArtsBoston.org compiles just about every event in the Boston area - music, theater, dance, film, museum and gallery exhibits, opera. If you have a performance or an exhibition coming up, make sure its listed. If youve seen something recently and want to share your opinion, you can write a review.

Were particularly psyched about the extensive visual arts listings, which even come with image galleries. But most of all, were relieved that the answer to that pesky question is finally all in one place.

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Make your voices typed
There’s a great discussion underway in the comments section of our post about Martha Mason and the end of Snappy Dance Theater, ranging from tributes to Snappy to the future of Boston’s dance scene to the virtues of dance as an art form. Check it out and join in.

Leslie K. Brown invites you to guess that photographic image.

Mirror up to Nature wants you to send in your pictures of theatre artists at work.

A Minnesota playwright asks for your definition of success as an artist.

West Coast literary agent Nathan Bransford wants writers to share the worst writing advice you’ve ever received.

Reports from the field
At Best American Poetry, Eleanor Goodman shares her experiences at the Simmons College Chinese Poetry Festival, starting here and continuing here.

At the local indie film blog Kino-Eye, David Tames offers a perceptive, two-part response to the DIY Days Boston conference: part 1 and part 2. The conference was designed to help filmmakers finds ways “to have a say in how their films were reaching audiences.”

A tech reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has high praise for Act/React at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which was curated by Boston Cyberarts Festival founder/director George Fifield and features Brian Knep (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ‘07).

Do stuff
Film-makers and -appreciators in Central and Western Mass. have two upcoming festivals to hit: the Williamstown Film Festival October 17-26, and the Northampton Film Festival October 24-26.

This month in the Berkshires, a consortium of excellent arts groups presents two events in the Tricks of the Trade professional development series for individual artists. Events offer advice on selling handmade work online (October 14 in North Adams) and pricing artwork (October 15 in Pittsfield). Series flyer.

Big tubs of Gatorade poured on the heads of (i.e. congratulations to):
Massachusetts playwright Kirsten Greenidge, recently named a 2008 Time Warner Storytelling Fellow by the Sundance Institute. The fellowship “provides substantial support over four years to help fund the development and celebration of independent artists across the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film and Theatre Programs,” according to a press release quoted on the Filmmaker Magazine blog.

Massachusetts novelist Sue Miller, this year’s winner of the Kate Chopin Award, according to the Word Up blog from the Phoenix.

Americans for the Arts, who actually did what the debate moderators have yet to do: ask about the presidential candidates’ positions on the arts.

A parting question
In an ideas piece, Marjorie Garber asks: should universities become the ultimate patrons of the arts?

Art today is often collaborative, costly, and ambitious. Whether for an installation, a film, a theater or dance production, or some combination of these, art requires large and flexible spaces, and large and flexible budgets. There is more need than ever for connections, global and local, and for expensive, delicate, and complicated tools and equipment…

… Universities would create open spaces for art-making, with natural light, high ceilings, flexible flooring (for dance and other performance activities), and acoustic sophistication, furnished with state-of-the-art technology, staffed by skilled technicians, and providing spaces for encounters and improvisation across art practices. With augmented funding and a new vision of art’s centrality, universities might set up endowed centers that bring together international practitioners, begin directing major donations toward art centers, and recruit major working artists and give them a home during the prime of their careers.

Read the full piece.

Image: Still from String Beings. Premiered at the Virginia Wimberly Theater, June 2007. Image by MIT scientist and New Media artist, Jonathan Bachrach. Photo by Allison Evans.

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As we mentioned in the October Fellows Notes, Boston Cyberarts Festival founder/director George Fifield has curated Act/React, an exhibition of interactive installation art at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

So if you’re planning on being in Milwaukee sometime before January 11, go and see and re-, inter-, or otherwise act with it. The show is worth another mention here not just because it was curated by the brain behind a groundbreaking arts and new technologies festival, and not just because it looks, in the modern parlance, massively righteous (or was that modern 20 years ago, back when I was?), but also because it features an artist from these parts: Brian Knep (who’s appeared on this blog here and here). Brian is premiering his piece Healing Pool, a project of Creative Capital.

George and Brian are both contributors to an exhibition-specific blog called, forthrightly, the Act/React blog. Commenting on why he’s excited about the show, George writes:

Being director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival exposes me to other intersections between art and technology including electronic music, digital literature and dance and technology. But the growing use of interactivity in the arts has always been a main interest of mine…

… in many ways, this is my dream exhibition. I’ve followed the field of interactive installations for many years and have known and supported the work of most these artists before. Many of them are friends of mine. It was fascinating to watch the seismic shift that occurred when artists moved away from techie interfaces to allowing the audience to intuitively interact with the work with their own bodies.

His description “allowing the audience to intuitively interact with the work” is such a good description of Brian Knep’s installations. In his own post, Brian writes of some of the practical challenges of realizing such an intuitively interactive piece.

Anyway, good on ya, gents. And how massively righteous is it to know that when an art museum elsewhere in the country puts on a cutting-edge, interactive exhibition, innovative folks from our fair land are called on to participate?

Image: Brian Knep, HEALING #1 (2003), Computer, custom software, video projectors, video cameras, vinyl flooring. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

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I’m officially blown away. There’s an article in the Sunday edition of the London Times online that reports on a colorblind painter who is fitted with a device which allows him to paint in color by hearing what he sees. I see a red door and I want to paint it black…R.O.Y.G.B.I.V!

And here in the states, if you are not familiar with the Hyperscore Project at Tewksbury Hospital, take a moment and check out this video. Tod Machover, Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, along with MIT graduate students and Berklee College of Music created this project with patients and staff at the hospital.

(Photo credit: image from London Times Online)

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