MixedMedia

As a mixed media artist, I’m always on the lookout for intriguing, clever, playful, whimsical ways of using ordinary materials to bring delight to the urban experience. A few recollections came to mind recently – principally as a result of a cool project I learned about during the annual MIT IDEAS Competition retreat I attended this week.

The project that got me thinking back to my days of RAOC (random acts of collage) is a “kite mapping” project that will engage youth in Brazil’s slums in surfacing the narratives of place where they live. The idea is one part arts engagement (cultivate narratives of place), a second part technical (use sophisticated technology to document narrative), another part advocacy (application of evidence to legitimize place). Of course, I’m crazy about using collage as a means for story-telling. Like Rauschenberg, I believe collage best replicates visually how we perceive the city.

I won’t go into more detail; you can learn more about “My City, My Future” (aka ArteRio) here. But here’s my point: an “owned” city space is a healthy city space.

We as the ambulatory denizens of urban settlements claim public space each time we move through it, yet we rarely leave evidence of that claim. When we do, its either harmful (waste) or viewed askance (graffitti). One generally must be a “professional” – sign-maker, architect, landscape designer – to have the privilege of shaping urban space.

And yet the delight and surprise we encounter when we come across the legacy of a Nina, Keith Harring, a Bansky, or a Shepard Fairey is part of what makes cities great – and ultimately a safe, welcoming, familiar, vibrant, exciting place to call home. Public art has never been, and should never become, the playspace of technocrats and establishment programs. And there may even be a bit of a renaissance in this “claiming” of public space by young artists working in a startling range of exciting media, which I wanted to catalogue briefly with three examples:

• Dispatch Work uses, inspires others to use, and documents in-fill of cracks and fractures, opened recesses and crumbled away facades with delightful lego work. Recent work includes Improvisal Design in Sao Paolo, Brazil.
• Tape Art is a public art and education collective that uses the line, as it can be drawn with tape of any color, to bring rigorous visual work into public and private spaces. Check out their river of art.
• Blu! has created stunning large-scale animations in the UK and Brazil using the cityscape as canvass. MUTO is their piece de resistance (I think).
• And who doesn’t love the work of the little people in London, left to (of)fend for themselves amidst the hustle and bustle of daily life. The micro-macro relationships are jaw dropping.

Its an exciting time for the urban artist and a great time for us to think and push the boundaries around art, participation, and community development.

This summer the Africa-India Technology Institute (AITI) in Accra, Ghana will host Maker Faire Africa, a two-day showcase of African ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Modeled on the popular Maker Faire format developed in the U.S. by Make Magazine and O’Reilly media, the festival will include exhibitions of functional devices invented locally, artwork derived from found objects and materials, workshops and demonstrations such as cellphone hacking, and panel discussions across a range of topics, including financing invention and the challenges of moving from invention to production.More information and a program available at http://www.makerfaireafrica.com 

I sure would like to be in New Orleans Saturday when Prospect.1 New Orleans opens in the Lower Ninth Ward and throughout the city. Its going to be, “the largest exhibition of contemporary art” in the U.S. – ever. Well, that’s according to the New York Times, with a bit of hedging with a “billed as” bit.  Nevertheless, 81 artists, 50,000 out of town visitors and installations scattered across the city – some of which are overtly Katrina related – cited are Wangechi Mutu and her “Ghost House” and “Mithra,” a massive ark-like creation by the LA painter Mark Bradford. Both look like they’re using lots of reclaimed materials. Brilliant.Read the full article about Prospect.1 at NYTimes.com 

I’m settling into my new role here at MIT as the IDEAS Competition coordinator. Its a great place to be – the Media Lab, Arts department, Architecture and Urban Studies – all contained within this vast engine of applied research. My role here is to support student interest in applying their ingenuity to community development problems they care about. This involves a healthy dose of partnership building, mentor recruitment, administration… in the context (or service?) of international development, innovation and experiential education – right up my art + technology + participation in development street.

At the top of my reading list as I settle in – my daily diversion – are Paul Polak’s Out of Poverty and Paul Miller’s Sound Unbound. While these two titles might seem at first pass to be world’s away, I find that both are mediations on creativity, appropriation and problem-solving.

Reading Out of Poverty is like stepping off a plane and onto an arid desert, dry wind tugging at your eyes as a total stranger hands you a glass of water and welcomes you to their world. Along the way, your guide offers some straight forward guidance on working with the local people who happen to have extremely limited incomes – in most cases farmers earning less than $1 a day from a plot > 4 acres – to break the cycle of poverty. That glass of water, by the way: it comes from beneath your feet, pumped by the same people you’ll meet as he introduces ’round. Paul’s experience in this landscape is impressive: as the founder of International Development Enterprises, he has traveled the world over the last two decades listening to how poor farmers talk about being stuck. And has come up with some really basic solutions, namely a pump and irrigation system that, in the right conditions, increase crop yields of profitable produce and thereby raise incomes.

Sound Unbound is another universe. Its an aural and literary tropical jungle of ideas so rich they reach back, way back, to expose vine-covered ruins. And at the same time the essays contained in the book push upward and outward, pointing out the changing constellations in our rapidly evolving digital universe.

Sound Unbound is the perfect kind of book to swallow – like the bird, to duck and dive into suddenly; to withdraw. Repeat. Dodge around Cory Doctorow’s pithy introduction but pause long enough to catch Steve Reich get excited about sampling, not synthesizing. Enter Paul’s world of mixed up, mashed up, layered energy. Collisions reveal ecstasies; catalysts are crucibles. Start anywhere, just begin. Free associate with Jonathan Lethem, feint ‘colored noise’ with Ron Eglash. Its a ripping read I’ve just begun.

What I see that brings these two books together is the curiosity of their respective authors, who happen to be at very different moments in their lives. Paul P. opens talking about his grandson. Paul M. is trying to DJ in your mind. But they are both fundamentally curious about creativity and its roots – whether in poverty or in the prima materia of culture. Both see the dialogue, the synthesis, and the re-production as fundamental to our well being, as farmers and per sons.

Read either? Drop a line, pull a quote, mix it up.

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