all we are is all we were (2013), hand-shaped LED neon light

A new public art work located on the Sandwich Windmill at Mill Park in Windsor, Ontario, commissioned by the City of Windsor and Windsor Community Foundation 1812 Legacy Project.

This work was also made possible with the assistance of Danielle Sabelli and Hiba Abdallah. Special thanks to Cathy Masterson, Heidi Baillargeon, and Tucker Electric.

A set of questions:

1. Did your artwork involve other people?
2. Are you uncomfortable with calling your artwork an artwork?
3. Would you rather discuss this as a project?
4. Did you refer to the other people involved as a community?
5. Have you tried to explain at length the ways in which you are defining the terms ‘involved’ and ‘other people’ and ‘community’?
6. Are you painfully aware that there are unavoidable power imbalances at play in this project?
7. Did you document the results or process of this project using a digital SLR, a camera phone, or Instagram?
8. Are there obvious formal possibilities for exhibiting this documentation?
9. Did you wonder if it would it be inappropriate to sell this documentation?
10. Are there power struggles immediately evident when viewing the documentation?
11. Have you considered trying to present this work as a book, documentary, or play?
12. How much pressure did you feel to defend the work as tackling political change?
13. Did you assume that your project needed to continue indefinitely towards achieving some political end in order for it to be successful?
14. Were you asked about success, measurable outcomes, attendance levels, or evidence of change?
15. Did you expect there to be answers to those questions?
16. Did your research for this project lead you to briefly attend a series of parallel community meetings at which you felt the need to excuse a comment or thought as coming from the perspective of an artist?
17. Did your project dissolve after a public presentation / workshop / town hall meeting / charette / or screening?
18. Did you feel an unresolved guilt around its dissolution?
19. Can your work be critiqued by a painter?
20. Did you feel belittled when approached by a visual artist, theoretician, or architect?
21. Have there been discussions of ‘radical’ theory offered from a great distance to the work?
22. If your project was a math equation, did the sum always end up as a critique of capitalism?
23. Is your project illegible enough to likely never be printed in Art Forum or your local newspaper?
24. Can you imagine yourself being awarded a large-scale prize some years after the launch of your project that you didn’t necessarily locate as an art project in the first place?
25. Could your work easily be mistaken for a project found in surveys of Fluxus, Conceptual Art, or Dada?
26. Did this project align itself to a set of political goals that have already been articulated?
27. Is there form evident in the project that would allow it to most easily fit into an identified granting opportunity?
28. Could your project be mistaken for a restaurant, social service, after-school program, or a guerrilla marketing campaign?
29. Could your role in the project be defined as that of a facilitator, organizer, or teacher?
30. Were you asked to explain the reason you think your project is art?

While Thompson further summarizes Ranciére, “Genuine participation [...] is somthing different: the invention of an ‘unpredicatble subject’ who momentarily occupies the street, the factory, or the museum — rather than a fixed space of allocated participation whose count-power is dependent on the dominant order.”

Thanks, SketchUp. Hope your calculations are correct.

Very excited to have wrapped up producing and installing this exhibition in Halifax with some fantastic BCL colleagues.

Everything I Wanted Is Right Here (street installation shot) | Broken City Lab.

The term artist is an antiquated idea in trying to come to terms with this reality. It can be a useful category because the skillsets of artists are being deployed by power in various forms. But the manipulation of cultural symbols is nowhere remotely the sole purview of artists.

via Inside the Artist’s Studio | Nato Thompson | Art21 Blog.

This would be a really great way to introduce some basics of programming in a foundations-style class…

http://sketch.processing.org/

via https://twitter.com/#!/connors934/status/172341057160351744

Studio Seminar in Public Art: Lec 3 | MIT 4.367 (Lecture 3 of 3) | Antoni Muntadas | Academic Room.

- MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world. It will also enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences.

The first MITx course, 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics), will be launched in an experimental prototype form. Watch this space for further upcoming courses, which will become available in Fall 2012.

The different hand signals used in the General Assembly and other communications between humans. Might be interesting in BCL or in class.

Occupy Hand Signals | Occupy Design.