ALBERTA COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN

This coming Thursday we shall be talking about our work and our plans for the next 18 months in Calgary with Watershed+ at ACAD.

PECHA KUCHA CALGARY - WEDNESDAY 28TH SEPTEMBER

Next week we will be taking part in Calgary's Pecha Kucha 9 organised by Calgary Arts Development. The night kicks off with pre-show entertainment on River Walk. The main event starts at 7pm at the Golden Age Club on 610 8th Ave. SE. Seats can be reserved by visiting CalgaryCulture.com.



It would be great to see you there!

The move

That's it, the studio and our personal belongings are all packed and waiting for Mr Fed Ex to come and ship it all to Calgary.
Once we're settle there we'll start posting more, especially about the Watershed+ project that is taking us there for 18 months.
More soon

Frankfurt

Just back from installing Limelight: Saturday night in Frankfurt for Playing the City, an event organised by the Schirn Kunsthalle.

From their website:
Playing the City—take three. From August 11 to August 25, 2011, more than fifteen international artists will occupy the inner city of Frankfurt with their actions, performances, and installations. Art will take to the street again. Playing the City 3 will focus on public space as a venue for artistic activities involving the city and its inhabitants in a variety of ways again. Each day will see new participatory projects by such artists as Tania Bruguera, Minerva Cuevas, Jacob Dahlgren, Tim Etchells, Christian Jankowski, San Keller, Kommando Agnes Richter, Levent Kunt, Eileen Perrier, Il-Chin Atem Choi, Sans façon, and Upper Bleistein. Political manifestations, demonstrations, or markets and stands specially organized by artists will help carry on the discussion on the collective, free and designable space, its limits, and not least its inhabitants' involvement.

In parallel to the activities unfolding in the city, the project team will do its work in public in headquarters set up in the Schirn—feeding the website, answering questions about the exhibition, and organizing and documenting all activities. Playing the City 3 can also be followed on the Internet as a digital extension of public space:

DIRECTOR: Max Hollein. CURATOR: Matthias Ulrich (Schirn). ASSISTANT: Clara Wörsdörfer.

The electricians really enjoyed Tristan's colour choices for the installation day.

Pecha Kucha - tomorrow night

We will be taking part in Glasgow's Pecha Kucha 5 at the Tramway, kick off is at 7pm, I think its ticketed, we are looking forward to it - hope to see you there.

Shamelessly cut from a website:
Another set of talks in the Japanese Pecha Kucha format, which, for the uninitiated, allows creative speakers to show 20 slides for a strict 20 seconds each, keeping things pacy and exciting. This month's event is jointly curated by Trigger producer Suzy Glass and freelance designer Katy West.

University of Oxford

Last week we took part in a seminar at the University of Oxford, Creative ecologies: conditioning inventiveness.
The other people invited were eminent geographers, archeologists, political theorist, musicologist, philosopher and anthropologist, an amazing combination of knowledge.
To put it simply, we were looking at creativity in its wider sense, basing the discussions on some of the objects from the awe inspiring Pitt Rivers Museum which hosted us for 3 days. The objects used, which we were allowed to manipulate,
included a tupilak,
a mandrake root,
a desiccated heart encased in a heart-shaped lead container and a Micronesian Nautical chart.pictures from the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

From the introducing paper by Charlotte Bates, Joe Gerlach, Thomas Jellis, Wendy Morrison, and Sefryn Penrose, the seminar aimed to engage "with objects which are in some ways unfamiliar to us, which will stimulate us to engage and to talk in ways unusual in an academic meeting. As we have stressed above, the idea of mutual making of people and objects is key to many current approaches to the material world. Academics tend to write and talk about this mutuality, rather than engage with it. There is risk as well as potential in such engagement, but we are hoping not just to consider creativity from a distance, but also to set up some of the conditions in which creativity occurs."
As part of our engagement for the seminar we devised a workshop session looking at the importance of individual recollection of objects and their personal meanings.

We felt very privileged to be able to spend a week discussing and exploring such notions in the company of fascinating people and with the access to such unusual objects.

Marseille

Last week we went to Marseille to meet some people (amongst others Vanessa Santullo one half of the great culture blog Marseille face b) and, after talking about it for many years, we finally started to discover this exciting city.

Along the way we were advised to check the Bonne Mère (the Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde) to see the ex-votos.
There were indeed some fascinating ex-votos paintings but the most amazing sight was the of dozens of models of boats of different periods, and a few planes, hanging from the ceiling, placed there in gratitude to the Saints. Boats floating in church.

We look forward to returning to Marseille soon.