4.367 / 4.368 Studio Seminar in Public Art
Dialogues in Public Space: Spatial Cultural Identity Final Review Monday, May 12, 2014/ Location: ACT Cube (E15-001)
Professors: Antoni Muntadas and Gediminas Urbonas TA: Mariam Abdel Azim
4.367 / 4.368 Class Description
Public Art is a concept that has been in discussion and revision for probably as long as the evolution of the terms ‘art’ and ‘city’ themselves. By consider- ing art, architecture, urban planning, and media as interdisciplinary public devices, this class explores new ways of understanding the concept of the ‘spatial cultural identity’ as a relevant subject to contemporary critical dis- courses and practices in urban space. Questions and concerns of culture and identity within the cartography of a space are central to our discus- sion.
Spatial Cultural Identity
The Main Public Square in Kuwait
This course focuses on the idea of Spatial Cultural Identity as relevant to the design and intervention of art in urban public space. We use this approach to address and negotiate the complexities of ideas, situations, objects and materials that are inherent to any public space. The cultural contextualization requires discussions of public art strategies and the comparative analysis of concepts and meaning in the public realm.
The Gulf as a Case Study
The class will analyze the concept of ‘spatial cultural identity’ through the lens of the Gulf region, focusing on Kuwait and Doha from the perspective of both tradition/protocol, opening/resistance, and crisis and possibility. The relevancy of the Gulf as a case study is to gain perspective on the critical projects for public spaces. This region should be examined not only as an area that is undergoing constant multiple economic developments and transformations, but also as one that can offer a space for the negotiation of critical ideas, values and cultural traditions. Transnationalism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism have influenced and redefined the meaning and interpretation of space, culture and identity in urban centers. Kuwait and Doha, some of those urban centers that offer juxtapositions and paradoxes, are places to observe and learn.
Student Projects
Each student proposed an individual project and developed it from an initial concept to an actual artistic engagement in the public realm. Assigned readings, guest lectures, and individual meetings supported students in the understanding and development of their initial proposals. The dialogues that came out of this class are considered a point of departure for each student’s individual proposal, which was developed from an initial concept to a publicly diffused project. The public interventions that came out of this class are not created as an imposition but rather as temporary manifestations to activate a long-term discourse.
Spring 2014
PechaKucha Exchange with KU Students
Visit to the Mathaf in Doha
Doha Skyline
Guest Reviewers Lorena Bello Gomez
She teaches fundamentals of the design of the built environment at MIT ranging from the scale of the object and buildings to that of the city and larger territories. She is also a doctoral candidate in Urbanism at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC).
Silvia Bottinelli
She teaches at Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Silvia published two books about Italian art and institutions after World War II: seleARTE: An Open Window to the World (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi and Fondazione Ragghianti Edizioni, 2010); and A forgotten Award.
Kelly Dobson
She is an artist and engineer working in the realms of technology, medicine and culture. Her projects involve the parapraxis of machine design – what machines do and mean for people other than the purposes for which they were consciously designed.
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro
He is the founder of Holes of Matter, a design practice that explores the gaps existing in the relationships between social structures and spatial organizations.
Matthew Mazzotta
He is an artist, alumna of ACT at MIT, inventor, and lecturer at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology. Mazzotta’s work evolves from an interest in exploring the relationship between people and between people and their environments.
The Soundscape Ian Soroka Art, Culture and Technology The soundscape is an acoustic landscape. A soundscape consists of events and details heard, not objects seen or felt. Figure: A signal of focus Ground: The ambient surroundings of sound Field: The soundscape; a location where an observation takes place The distinction in the soundscape between figure, ground, and field is something culturally and habitually determined. The aural experience of a specific locality is filtered through this lens. As our experience is divided between the foreground, background, and distant horizon, how can these localized divisions project themselves into another remote society or locality? On our Public Art trip I made several static field recordings and noting their exact time and location. Using discreet hypersonic speakers, in stereo, the installation reproduces select recorded environments in Kuwait and Doha. For example market scenes, construction work, religious discourse, etc. Subjects unexpectedly stumble upon this projected sonic space and are momentarily taken out of their own context. The installation utilizes a wide glass corridor on MIT’s campus linking the Hayden Humanities Library with the main MIT building complex. As this pathway marks the border between the Mathematics building and the home of the humanities at MIT, the installation attempts to reference the border between our known world, that of the intellect, and our experienced world, that of the senses. By traversing the glass corridor the listener is alienated from their landscape and context, mediated by the glass. The installation attempts to suture in another sonic context in this empty space of transience.
P[op]roduction Chantal El-Hayek, Aga Khan Program The project studies the transformation of the social dynamic at the commercial space as a result of the shift in market production, looking at the contemporary shopping mall vis-à-vis the traditional marketplace that was predicated on guilds. Today’s mode of production relies on a global market with various degrees of separation between the manufacturer, the seller, and the consumer, whereas in the old markets the product was oftentimes produced in the stall with only a screen divorcing the production space from the retail space, and the producer from the consumer. The project involves carpet p[op]roduction, reproducing, through (pop) imagery, patterning, and repetition (which are core characteristics of carpet weaving), a story related to the making and branding of shoes. P[op]roduction interferes in the privately owned and safeguarded space of the shopping mall, which inhibits many forms of sociability. Bypassing security and rigid policies of public performance at the mall, the project engages shoe sellers with the production of patterns of the merchandise they sell, disrupting the sellers’ daily routine and busying them with a procedure of art creation, as well as breaching the conventional display of product. The project interprets the forms produced as a prototype that later gets translated into new imagery and is used by a group of individuals to produce the final carpet. Part of the project’s aim is documenting the process of this new approach to carpet making, engaging different groups of people, the first and the last being the people at the mall to whom the final product is brought back, eliciting their reaction.
Heard and Seen Desi Gonzalez, Comparative Media Studies How can we get people to reflect on cultural heritage embedded in the environments around them? A gallery or museum setting serves as a signal, telling viewers that it is time to look at art. But how can we get people to notice art that inhabits everyday spaces that we have grown so accustomed to? And how can we do this in a way that gets people to respond to their surroundings, question what is around them, and decide what they value for themselves? For my project, I have recorded conversations with people discussing their relationships (or lack thereof) with two works of art in MIT’s public art collection: Alexander Calder’s La Grande Voile and Louise Nevelson’s Transparent Horizon. I edited interviewees’ insights and interpretations into a series of audio files, at times weaving these with excerpts from the official audio guide produced by the List Visual Art Center. These soundtracks were then played near or underneath the art object, overlaying multiple readings onto the static, physical objects. The audio reveals a range of feelings toward and relationship with the art objects, both ambivalent and contemplative, skeptical and impassioned. The subtle auditory intervention aims slow passersby down in their paths, making the recorded community members and these artworks—and the relationships between them—both heard and seen.
Make A Mini Mo[nu]ment Nushelle de Silva, History, Theory and Criticism Historian Joan Kelly-Gadol (1977) notes that “women were largely invisible to the historian, and men’s history was treated as if it applied to the whole human race.” Recently, a petition on Change.org posited that Google Doodles (itself a type of cyber-monument) favour white men. Monuments and memorials are forms of remembrance that epitomise the flattening of complex narratives into a smooth and palatable sound bite. The “Make A Mini-Monument” kit seeks to insert some of the complexity and messiness inherent in multiple narratives back into the public sphere. It consists of a box of perforated boards of laser-cut shapes that draw from (and playfully satirise) monumental forms. The kits are distributed to women in the MIT and Cambridge/Boston community, and can be assembled as the user pleases, emphasizing playfulness and autonomy. Once the user decides on an event/person she wishes to commemorate, she makes a ‘monument’ with the kit, places it in her chosen public space, and takes a photo. She uploads the picture to the project blog, and places it in a space and upload a picture of the monument in its surroundings to a blog that I create, which is then presented as a local landmark on a virtual map. As users add their stories, a constellation of hidden stories and personal moments emerges. Collaboration is also encouraged. By inspiring users to create, place, and record a personalised monument, the kit challenges monumental forms through playful construction. These ephemeral, miniature ‘monuments’ made of easily disposable materials subvert the grand and immovable nature of the monument while still retaining its memorial quality. Ultimately, the kit asks the public to think differently about questions like whom and what ‘should’ be remembered, and the form and space in which remembrance ‘should’ take place.
Do You Hear That?
Michael Lee, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Do You Here That is an electronic sound installation which will draw upon and render social and spatial interactions. Set within the specific interior of MIT's Stata Center, this apparatus will recount the usage of material and space through the perspectives of their occupiers, users, and maintainer. Contemporary design and technology has greatly broadened possibilities in scale and composition. These nonconventional forms, particularly embodied in the commission of Frank Gehry on campus, test the capacity of contingent amenities (electricity, lighting, plumbing, and maintenance among general use) and the capacity for individuals to sustain these systems. Do You Here That looks to extract that specific ethnographic experience as simple 'domestic' acts and gestures become creative performances. Sound is further employed to reclaim spaces. The visual quality of the urban environment typically dominates the accessibility of historical knowledge in a public realm, commanding a site. By strategically directing sound to what Marc Auge deems the “non-places” of interaction, the heard can direct the perception of the quotidian user. In addition, the very content of that indicative medium will contain verbal accounts of past physical and nonphysical procedures. This tacit knowledge will bring attention to the more holistic and dynamic ecology of new public space. With this procedure, Do You Here That will convene experiences towards an outlier space and empower it with the potential to retain and accumulate history.
Neutral Zone: forced new reality Adi Hollander, Art, Culture and Technology The term Neutral Zone refer to a space which is in between, it is used in different connotation such as in sport games like football and hockey, in territory and war, and in dentistry. The title introduces my aim to question the line that separates spaces, physical, mental or personal border that created for us or by us. My intension is to create an awareness to a problem, which even though we feel it and it bothers us, we slowly learn to accept, live with, and stop to question why is it there, and how can we change it. The idea of the project is to create a mobile device that will be almost invisible. The device consists of a motion sensor and a speaker. When an individual crosses the field of the motion sensor a sound will react. The sound is a recording of a sentence “you are standing in a neutral zone” spoken by computer voice and the ring we hear when we make a miss call or call a number, which does not exist any longer. <too…doo...doooo… you are standing in a neutral zone> Using this recording allows me to force the individual to question why they have access to a space. There are always rules and regulations entering spaces so this device will make one question their natural right to use or be in a particular space. And at the same time question the reason for the specific border and how as an individual each person feels about it. The device The device is placed in a bucket used for cleaning by the MIT custodial workers, inside the bucket the electronic is placed. It is a mobile device that works on batteries. The device was originally designed for a particular space, Room #140 at the Media Lab Building E14. It is a reaction piece, which was developed through examining a problem and the history of that space.
The Printer Discourse
Alice Huang, Mechanical Engineering The goal of The Printer Discourse is to capture the general sentiment of MIT at a moment in time. A thermal printer display will print out the real-time responses of the audience’s texts. The audience can participate by texting responses to the prompts and/or reading the collection of printed messages. These messages will be displayed using thermal printers – each thermal printer collects the responses to one prompt. The project hopes to unearth the many diverse perspectives that the MIT Community holds. By highlighting the diversity and the similarities of the MIT community, I hope that the audience has a sense of community and they engage in dialogue about self-worth and confidence. Especially during the last stretch of the semester, I hope that this project will bring some excitement and positivity into our high-stress environment.
Take Out Protest Barry Beagan, Master of Architecture Everything in our lives today is digitized even revolutions. In Egypt, what really stroke the 2011 Egyptian revolution that resulted in the outsetting of a regime that lasted for over 30 years was Facebook. Social media is becoming even stronger than our actual voices, more convenient and far more reachable. The aim of this project is to facilitate even more the right to protest and to claim rights in America since itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a long and tedious process to complain or to claim a right. A monument of the obelisk of the white house is replicated and insterted in different places around the MIT campus asking people to express and share their claims and rights. The outcome of theses written expressions will then be shared on the social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and a Tumbler website with other people claims, which will then be trasferred and heard by the authorities.
Breathing as a Revolutionary Message
Fabio Ciaravella, PhD Student, UniversitĂ degli Studi della Basilicata
It talks about our relationship between intimacy and public dimension as a questioning point of view to consider in a social, political and cultural contemporary perspective. The project is made by two parts: the first in which I stop people which are running to work, asking them to breath for a little while (30 sec) in a megaphone (I record image and sound separately); the second part in which experimentally I install the two recorded sources in order to repeat and amplify experience using a loud image (large and visibly installed in a space open to public fruition) and a silent but present sound made by breath. As in the first part, action/ image of someone using a megaphone in public space creates a tension together with the subtle sound of a breath. That tension is addressed by the sentence which gives the title to the project, which is inserted in the narrative of the video regularly, at the end and start of each different breath, as a breath itself, that creates a third rhythm bonded to cultural imaginary.