Project Overlook Interview

Savannah Hoover of the Eagle's Eye posted an audio interview/slideshow with Russell Dudley and Logan Lape about their Overlook Project at Burning Man. It's very well put together, and can be found here:

http://snceagleseye.com/project-overlook-interview/

48 hrs to go for Logan and Russell's Burning Man Kickstarter Project

Just two days (and as of this writing, about 50 bucks) to go for the Overlook Burning Man Project to reach its kickstarter goal. Here's some info on the project: Kickstarter link here: http://kck.st/LkED8y From the Kickstarter page: Conceptually the piece revolves around a simple idea. If you raise your feet at or past your original eye level then look into a periscope that is oriented down such that your view is identical to its original, you have dematerialized your body. Thus you have become a point. Once you have realized this perspective, your view is then activated with the sense that you could simultaneously be in the landscape you are viewing. (This makes a little more sense once you've watched the embedded video).

A New Inhabitant of the Parking Lot

A 1958 Streamline trailer has made its home behind the art building recently. A joint purchase between the department, Tahoe Gallery and Student Gallery Club, the trailer is destined to become a mobile gallery. Work has already begun on the project and if you are in the area this summer and interested in lending a hand you can find us on Tuesday/Thursday afternoons out in the parking lot. The interior had previously been gutted, but there is a bit of cleaning to be done on the interior walls, buffing and polishing on the exterior, flooring to be laid and other little fun projects.

No new project is complete without a fiasco though, right? Luckily we got that one checked off the list early on. In transporting the trailer up from Reno, we had a small issue with some door hinges that sent a decently sized hunk of aluminum (yes, the door) flying through the air alongside Hwy 395. We were able to toss it into my car and to the amazement of all there was nearly no damage at all. Above is a nice shot of the doorless trailer parked in the meadows alongside Mt. Rose. Classy huh?

Dust Notes

I'm still playing a bit of catch-up with last semester's gallery events, and wanted to at least post a few quick notes on the Burning Man show. If something happening twice is the minimum threshold for it to be considered a "tradition," then the show could be framed as the continuing tradition of having students enrolled in the Burning Man class metabolize their experience at Black Rock, via the creation of artwork and a debriefing to the rest of the community on What Went Down. The last time the class took place, two years ago, most of the students were going to Burning Man for the first time; many of the students who were in on that initial experience participated in the second round, so there was a sense of continuity and guidance from the "grizzled veterans" to the newbies. There was also a decided shift in the artwork that was produced in response to the Man.




I have to admit, purely on the level of "artwork" and artifacts, the prior Burning Man show engaged me more. That first reaction to the Man seemed to express itself in a variety of installation objects and approaches; this time, it seemed less about the the objects than about creating a space for socializing. The focus was on creating an environment where interaction could take place, rather than on making things that attempted to riff on the sorts of art-objects that could be encountered on the playa, bending those sparks of inspiration to one's personal sensibilities. This year the environment itself was more explicitly tuned to the low-impact sustainability ethic that Burning Man attempts to cultivate -- the attempt to re-imagine our vast quantities of cultural detritus as the raw materials of a next phase of communal social organization.






However, the discussion at the opening was, I thought, more interesting than the one two years previous. It was less like a panel presentation, and more like an open-ended discussion on the issues -- artistic, social, political -- that Burning Man raises. It was a lively seminar on the ethics and aesthetics of the Man, and how they might (or might not) apply to a wider order. A principle from Burning Man that seemed to hold great charge for the students was the ethic of "gifting." A mode of exchange not entirely governed by the tit-for-tat equations of capitalism; the students found it liberating.

[Below: Nick's shoes, still impregnated with playa dust. Several of the students retained articles of clothing whitewashed with the playa dust, as if the dust were precious as gilding. One presumes their lungs are equally gilded.]



Logan framed Buring Man as an exercise in "ephemeral community" -- I tweaked him a bit on that, wondering whether "ephemeral" and "community" were two concepts that could be considered in opposition. Logan replied that Burning Man creates networks that last beyond the event itself; to restrict the notion of community to the temporal and spatial confines of Black Rock is too narrow.

And shortly after it hit me that this picture of "ephemeral community" -- where semi-structured intimacies occur, where people produce work that leaks outside the normal logic of supply and demand (while also not being entirely apart from that logic), where models of social organization are essayed in an experimental fashion, and where the participants, after a while, depart to their own lives, hopefully sustained in part by some of the ripples generated at the epicenter of the experience -- can more or less find an echo in what is called, for lack of a better term, "college life."

the dust is here to stay

Sue Webster made some great trash pile art.....

Currently the New Gernres class is preparing to install the long anticipated exhibit "NWGN 430: Starland" this weekend. We have been brainstorming on how to make a large sculptural piece made of cardboard and other things we can find. I was playing around with making box piles and here are some phone snapshots.
I like this but it needs to be 100,000,000 times bigger :)

Burning Man, Cookies, Latex Grenade, et al.

Here are some short documentaries that were created for the documentary class running this semester. The assignment was an exercise in using audio interviews and still images. Three of the students were also in the burning man class; they each looked at the experience from different angles.

Here's Victoria Buck's piece on looking at Burning Man in retrospect:



Thomas Grana's overview of the structures the students inhabited at their encampment:



Jenna Bache's look at the burning man himself, and what he represented to Thomas as he went down in flames:


Outside of Burning man, Jake O'Leary did a profile of an aspiring filmmaker:


Lane Huntington interviewed the bassist for Latex Grenade:


Victor Gutierrez walks us through a cookie recipe:

Ontology?

Here are some videos that I thought went well together

My friend Brittany sent me the El Guincho link a few days ago and I thought it was too great not to share (it is slightly nsfw) http://vimeo.com/15274619.

And two more:

When I Grow Up from Fever Ray on Vimeo.

BIRDY NAM NAM - THE PARACHUTE ENDING from Steve Scott on Vimeo.

Ramblin'

                    

I find that I am contemplating what to do after I graduate in the spring time. It comes to me all the time, like when I'm concentrating on a sentence or picking out my socks.. BAM! "What are your plans after your done?" "Are you going to grad school?" "What kind of job do you want?" 

The commitment to anything right now makes me want to hop in a time machine and go back to the 60's and hitch-hike to someplace obscure. I guess what I'm saying is, the idea of building a form of mobile living to attach to my Ford Ranger is very appealing right now. I was googling images of home made campers and I found some good ones...

I feel like my ideal camper would be a hybrid of all the examples provided.. Maybe I would have an electric tricycle, with a tag-a-log type teardrop gypsy king, mini eco bubble chambers, and solar panels... and maybe it could be attached to the Lone Ranger for trips to colder climates.... maybe I could trike-it all the way to burning man... the Yucatan... (fade in camper bike atop Machu Pichu)

Starland, Bambi and the rest

Via the Burning Man Class blog, here's a video tour of the class encampment, created by Logan Lape and Tom Grana in the Video Practices class.

NWGN 430 Starland from Tom Grana on Vimeo.

More Burning Man documentation to come -- three students who went to Black Rock are in my Documentary class, and are polishing up some mini-docs about the experience.

Burning Blogging Man

I'm sure I'll be pilfering images from it from time to time, but if you want to go straight to the source, there's a blog for the current Burning Man class here:

http://sncburn.wordpress.com/

A link has been posted to the "student blogs" list to the right of the page.

Some samples of what can be found there:

Cubic Cubed

Gregg Fleishman's show, "Cubism," is up at the Tahoe Gallery through November 17th. There's something stubbornly literal about the title. The show has nothing to do with the illusionistic representation of three dimensions on a two dimensional plane. "Cubism" in its art-historical flavors -- analytic or synthetic -- isn't the purview of the work. If the type of cubism could be tagged here, maybe "functional cubism" would do. Fleishman is interested in the architectural possibilities of cubic forms, their adaptability and modularity (and also their beauty, but I suspect that, for Fleishman, their beauty is a direct extension of their adaptability and modularity).



Fleishman, in his artist's talk, revealed a mind at absolute ease in the manicured wilds of geometry. Not everyone is able to sensibly incorporate "icosehedrons" and "archimidean solids" into their patter. And I get the impression that those words don't just tumble out of his mouth when he's giving a speech. For him, I suspect they amount to an everyday argot. His vocabulary has the recklessly technical clarity of a specialist or an autodidact -- and it's sprinkled, too, with the autodidact's propensity for new coinages -- like "rhombicube."

("Rhombicube" has a nice ring to it, especially when set against the term it's meant to simplify: "rhombicuboctahedron.")






As mentioned above, the modularity of the forms Fleishman works with is a big part of their appeal. The architectural structures he creates seem to multiply outward, from an implacable recombinatory logic. A shape multiplies, like an apartment growing out of an expanding crystal formation. There's a self-sufficiency of means, as the structures hinge together via tab and slot systems. On a graphical level, I was reminded of M. C. Escher, who used the six-paned window of the cube to free the eye from gravity and unitary perspective. On a procedural level, I was reminded of Albers and Sol Le Witt, in their patience for playing variations on a theme -- using a finite number of elements to point toward infinity.





In the gallery, I was particularly taken by the work's tendency to re-frame itself. Portals and windows cropped interiors or other structures in gratifying ways.


The work isn't just "art stuff" -- it's designed to be deployed, used, inhabited. Fleishman intends for his larger structures to be used as housing for disaster relief (so the modularity and self-sufficiency aren't just aesthetic gestures). His studio in Culver City is close to a school, and he's designed charming playgrounds for it. He claimed the play structures were "incidental" to his practice, but honestly, the playfulness of the use seems perfectly wedded to the playfulness of design.

More recently, a structure of his was erected at Burning Man -- Black Rock being, as he framed it, a place in need of sudden infrastructures.






Below are a few pics taken the night of the reception and artists' talk. The night of the reception, there was a bit of a playground vibe to the gallery. Students climbed up the large structure, and tried to piece together elements of some of the smaller structures, while Fleishman looked benevolently on, sometimes giving hints.

When Fleishman asked how long it took for the gallery crew to put together the large structure in the gallery, Russell said (if I'm remembering correctly) "four or five hours." There was a beat and Fleishman said "That's too long."






The last pic is Sheri, beaming over her latest acquisitions: some tiny squiggly chairs designed by Fleishman, scaled to the size (if not the comfort) of a mouse. She already had one in her collection, but couldn't resist a couple more, especially because they're cheaper now that Fleishman is using computers in his production workflow -- no longer cutting the serpentines by hand.