Powerpoint Extreme: Groups and Spaces

In addition to being really excited about InCubate, I was also pleased to discover that some friends of mine, Josh Ipple and Charlie Roderick of Hideous Beast were the current artists in residence, and that they were organizing an evening of Powerpoint presentations by an assortment of artist groups and people who run arts spaces in Chicago. It was almost as if they had curated the evening just for me - I spent last year geeking out on animated Powerpoint presentations and arts groups. I'll post some pictures and short descriptions below.


Bonnie Fortune, a graduate student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, started things off with heavy metal music (complete with high-volume amplifier), tie-dye graphics, flashing lightning bolts and images from books published in the 1960-70's addressing large-scale ideological wars, energy crises, environmental devastation, and destructive global capitalism. These images were culled from an online library, The Library of Radiant Optimism that she is compiling with her husband (and Temporary Services collaborator) Brett Bloom on a website called letsremake.info.



Bryce Dwyer who runs the residency program at InCubate gave a much more linear and methodical presentation on how to run your own residency program. Just follow The Five Steps, and you'll be set! (By the way, they're looking for residents now here.)



Members of a gallery space called Green Lantern gave a talk on the trials and tribulations of the Kennedy Family over the years. I wasn't sure how this fit in with what they do.



Linsey Caplice ran a presentation about her group, the Honor the Cheifbot Society's suggested replacement for the current controversial University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign mascot, Chief Illiniwak. The proposed replacement, the Chiefbot, would be nine feet tall, made of cardboard, and shoot clouds of glitter from its head. The Society's top three reasons why it's a robot:

Here's a link to the full presentation in case you're interested. It doesn't read in robot voice like the presentation I saw did, but it still rocks. Link.

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Group Work by Temporary Services

Co-written and edited by the three current members of the art group Temporary Services, Group Work is a thorough investigation of groups of artists, activists and musicians in the form of interviews and short profiles. Temporary Services interviews the band The Ex, Pedro Bell from the band Funkadelic, AA Bronson from General Idea, ex-members of Political Art Documentation/Distribution, and current members of the groups Haha, Wochenklausur, and What, How and For Whom, asking questions specific to artists who work in groups. Each interview is prefaced by a brief introduction to the group’s history, major events and shows, and current status, and gives context on who is being interviewed and why.

This book provides unique insights into the workings of groups as it is conceived, planned, and orchestrated by a several people who have first-hand experience with the various misconceptions that the individual-centric art world holds towards groups and their practices. In addition to talking about past projects with the artists interviewed, Temporary Services' questions center around: group formation, member roles, communication techniques, common misconceptions by art administrators in terms of compensation, recognition and travel, navigating conflict and negotiation, managing individual art practices in light of group membership, and membership changes, including how groups deal with the death of members.

As someone whose longest collaboration has spanned a mere four years, I found reading about several groups with more than a decade of work together deeply inspiring and encouraging. Many of the questions raised by Temporary Services evoked stories from groups similar to experiences I've had as a member of a group, such as having to explain and re-explain to arts administrators that the more outspoken member of the group isn't the 'leader,' or that all of the members of our group are needed to perform a show and that we can't just send one or two people. I also did a bit of thinking about ways that The MOST could possibly re-structure to give ourselves more flexibility by figuring out a way to open up to new members. Because we've taken on the letters of the word "MOST," we've sort of limited ourselves to adding new people. It seems like a lot of the long-standing groups have found ways to add new people and allow other members to leave if they need to, or if they aren't interested in a current project. I've always imagined my work with The MOST or Mostlandia as something that could last a lifetime, but it doesn't seem like that should mean we have to all work on everything forever.

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Collaboration Research

Shelby and I had a great conversation about defining collaboration during the post-lecture dinner we had on Monday. He has been thinking a lot about collaboration because he has been working with friends and family to co-create his MFA thesis and made the astute suggestion that I post some of the reading I'm doing on my blog. Great idea, Shelby!

In Melbourne, I met a guy named Mark Elliott who had just completed a PhD developing a general theory of stygmergic collaboration. If you want to know what stygmergy is, you might just have to read about it. I have to say I'm only about 30 pages into this 220pg. document, but I'm loving his thoroughness both in trying to define the difference between cooperation, coordination and collaboration, as well as in discussing the ways in which various disciplines such as IT, business and sociology define collaboration based on what their foci are. I'm also really loving all of Mark's flow charts describing the difference between all of those "C" words. I'd recommend checking out his dissertation as well as some of the projects he did leading up to his writing.
Mark has lots of weblinks to his writing and various projects that can be reached from this page:
http://mark-elliott.net/view/Dissertation
In the spirit of looking at students' blogs, here's a link to the blog he kept while working on his PhD: http://stigmergiccollaboration.blogspot.com/

I am also currently reading a book put out by Temporary Services called Group Work published by Printed Matter.

And finally, Eric Steen pointed me to a website called collabarts.org

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Unmag Article

Here's a link to a PDF of unMagazine, with an article including The M.O.S.T. titled, "Conflict, Hierarchy, and Hard Work." (pg. 22)

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Collaboration and Competition

I lead a class focusing on the idea of collaboration for the social practice critical theory independent study group.

The more I learn about negotiation (which is my elective this quarter), the more I am starting to think of each interaction we have as artists with the audience as a kind of negotiation. Negotiators are trying to "create value" for the other side and to persuade them into thinking about the issue at hand in a new way. So in theory, as artists, we can decide to have a collaborative style or competitive style or avoidant style with our audience, or with other artists, or with funding institutions. So, instead of thinking of negotiating as something a lawyer does, we might have fun seeing negotiation as something each of us does in every interaction we have with another person. I have been wondering what it would be like to try and match different artists with different conflict styles. Do painters negotiate with their audience in different ways than social praciticioners? If so, how?

For the class, I had people:

1. Take a Confict Styles test. We read through descriptions of five different conflict styles - competitive, avoidant, compromising, accomodating, and collaborative - and then tried to come up with examples of specific situations where different conflict styles would be helpful or not helpful. For example, we talked about how being competitive is helpful in a military or sport situation, but maybe onot in a situation where you want to build a relationship. We also talked about how this test is really only relevant to Western individualist cultures and not to people from Eastern Asian collectivist cultures, such as Thailand where Varinthorn is from.

2. After the discussion of conflict styles at a personal level, we moved into discussion around the Introduction from the book Collectivism After Modernism edited by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette. We reviewed how societal perception of collectivism has changed in America since World War 2 and also after 9/11. We talked about reasons why the American government (democrats and republicans) and the mass media might prefer the American population to have a competitive mindset, and what effects that has on our culture.

We also talked about what can happen when the artist collaborates with their audience or
with other artists. We how Varinthorn wonders if using the web and language of advertising in her work is not collaborative enough, and how maybe other parts of her work are collaborative.

I haven't fully wrapped my head around these ideas, but feel like I am headed into rich territory. It is great having this opportunity to look at collaboration from historical, political, economic and conflict resolution lenses, and to then be able to bring this discussion back into the art realm.

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