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NEWS FALL 2011:

It has been a really busy year and so I apologize for only now updating this page! I try and use Facebook to announcing things that I am up to or find interesting (spurse also has a Facebook presence).


Upcoming & Ongoing projects & exhibitions:

  1. • Post Natural ecosystems and communities: we are working on developing a research project with Bishops University in Quebec to re-imagine our modes of being-of-the-world after nature. This will lead towards an exhibit in 2012.

  2. •Opening November 10th in Salina Kansas: Streams of Consciousness. This group exhibition will feature three spurse projects engaged with questions of water -- from fishing to the continued reality of now dried up ancient oceans. Catalog available in spring 2012.

  3. •Project Issue Room + SUNY New Paltz + Tyler (December)

  4. •Coming Nov. 15: An Atlas (the final conclusions from our project Live Feeds with the Guggenheim Museum).

  5. •Spurse will be hosting a workshop at the Salina Art Center: Salina the Ocean on Feb. 11th. Preceded by a lecture on the 10th.


  1. Some Highlights of the Year (so far):

  2. Fall:

  3. •New ways of sensing time: Our “sense organ for Deeptime” app has finally launched! As part of the CAFK+A Biennial in Kitchener we launched our first app and hosted a research lab to develop this app. You can find this app for apple systems and android systems.

  4. •For 11 weeks beginning in August we conducted crowd-sourced research and experiments into rethinking urban life as part of the BMWGuggenheim Lab. For more information on this project: LIveFeeds

  5. • I have been doing a number of workshops recently around developing new logics of creation and practice. In early October is was up at University of Maine  conducting a workshop on “Worldmaking” I also presented a lecture on Research as Art. In addition I presented an argument about why we should abandon the idea of creativity and focus on creation as part of MSU developing a new course to focus on creativity.

  6. Summer:

  7. •Life Feeds began its 11 weeks of public research as part of the BMWGuggenheim Lab. We conducted workshops and fieldwork sessions to develop new models of ecology, subjectivity and action.

  8. •Solo exhibition of diagrams at 37a Gallery Portland ME.  Things: Propositions/Exaptations. Here is a nice review.

  9. •The traveling exhibition Experimental Geography was up in Canada (its final stop). The catalog is quite good. It contains a brief text I wrote on collaborative research and making.

  10. Winter/Spring:

  11. •I was in Boulder lecturing with fellow spursian Petia Morozov and giving a workshop on alternative ideas of ecological design and architecture. We were presenting ways of working in ecology without the concept of nature; how to work as architects via a systems approach coupled with a new logic of what an apparatus is (architecture as entangled apparatus).

  12. •Later in the spring I was up in Alaska as part of a very interesting initiative: Common Space. This project was hosted by the Alaska Design Forum and spurse presented new models of commons and working directly with communities to understand, amplify and modulate existing spaces of the commons. This became a project: Eating Place.

  13. •I took a group of MFA students from the University of Maine out to Detroit as part of an experimental urban studio: Rapid Practices. It was an astonishing week in a remarkable place.

  14. •I was a visiting professor for the semester at Bates College in Maine -- teaching across Cultural Studies, African American Studies, and Environmental Studies.

  15.     Last Year:

  16. •At the end of last year I presented an alternative vision of activism in the arts with the Vera List Center at the New School for Social Research: Entangled Activisms: Emergence, Betrayal and the Possibility of Rethinking the Possible. The respondents where Petia Morozov, Nato Thompson, and Brian McGrath. You can view part of this here. I am in the final stages of editing this text for publication.

  17. •This spring we (spurse) where up in Montreal with our friends Erin Manning, Brian Massumi and Martin Rosenberg at the Sense Lab. We worked with Erin’s students on choreographic objects and gave a lecture on some of our ideas of extended practices. It was wonderful to work in the Sense Lab -- one of the most forward thinking places in regards to teaching and learning as a space of collaboratively generated research and making.

  18. •At the beginning of the summer spurse was in Eastern Poland participating in a panel discussion as part of the project Bodies of Dispersion.

  19. •During the summer, as part of our project with the Whitney Museum of Art, we did a type of ‘seafood throw-down’ at the union square public market. I was on a panel at the beginning of the fall with David Harvey as part of the ICI project: Experimental Geography. You can view this here. It puzzles me greatly how much simple credence is giving to the logic of “Revolution” in conjunction with the work of the Situationists. With spurse we have written about alternative ideas of psychogeography here and here; as well as alternative logics about practice here, and here.

  20. •I was in Detroit with my colleague from spurse Petia Morozov to do a workshop and give the first Toyota Design Lecture. The workshop + lecture was part of an investigation into rethinking art and design teaching methods at the behest of Leon Johnson. This promising to be a very interesting work -- what Leon is up to at CCS is also more than promising and worth a look. I just finished writing the first draft of a text on how to reorient art and design education. I will put a link to this as I finish it over the winter break.

  21. •In the summer we developed a piece Seeds of Dispersion for a very interesting show Bodies of Dispersion: Mechanisms of Distention at the Galleria Arsenal, Bialystok Poland. Here is a PDF of the Catalog.

  22. •During the summer we presented our OCEA(N) project with the Whitney Museum of Art as part of Undercurrents: Experimental Ecosystems in Recent Art. The Whitney and Yale published a wonderful catalog. We published an overview of our current thinking in regards to art and ecology Towards an Aesthetics of the Real. We imagined it as an expansion/compliment to our 11 Thesis on Hyper-Natural Entanglements. This project is part of an interest in design + ecology + new teaching practices + extended collaborations. This project involved students from the New School, the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA), spurse, NY Greenmarkets, fishermen, The Whitney Museum of Art and others to develop a rigorous and systematic approach to designing tools to modulate large scale social-natural systems (in this case focusing on fishing). Here is a link to the Whitney’s Blog on it. This came out of wonderful alternative exhibition design class that I taught in collaboration with Petia Morozov at the New School.

  23. Press:

  24.     Here are various interesting reviews of different projects:

  25. •Jennie Klein wrote a good overview article about spurse’s work in ART PAPERS. It is worth a read.

  26. •I spoke with NPR about our multi-year research project on Deep Time Rapid Time @ Grand Arts in Kansas City, Kansas.

  27. •The wine store we designed with MADLAB is still getting great press: NYTimes, Elegant Thrifter, Design MIlk, AM NY. As well as many design magazines: Monitor, Korean Design, Art Travel, Interior Design...

  28. •Our project MATR was reviewed thoughtfully. You can link to this via the Beamis Center for the Contemporary Arts web site.

  29. •much else that the world of google will supply...

Writings:

  1.     In addition to the writings mentioned above, I have written a number of other pieces recently:

  2. •A short introduction to the work of Bartow+Metzgar (a remarkable art collaborative). This is an excerpt from a longer work reflecting on their work and ideas of the non-human in design and art.

  3. •A collaboration with Petia Morozov on how imaginary and real geographies entangle. This was part of a great book on urban design and landscape ecology focusing on Australia.

  4. •With spurse we wrote and developed an intervention in the CAA Art Journal Time Drills. This is at once a claim about art and design as practices that cannot accept ‘viewers’, while at the same time advocating for an embodied, entangled, and emergent idea of a participant.

  5. •Our piece on the politics of listening is, I feel, more relevant today: 11 Listening Posts for an Entangled Agent.

  6. •I am currently finishing a longer piece on rethinking art and design education and hopefully I will have it up soon.

  7. •With spurse we are working collecting and editing our writings into a book. Stay tuned.





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