Today I stood outside the Native American House as a volunteer docent to answer questions from passersby about the art installation, “Beyond the Chief,” by Edgar Heap of Birds. “Beyond the Chief” is a series of twelve signs posted on both sides of Nevada Street on the University of Illinois (UIUC) campus, where the Native […]
To You, Little Bigger than a Sweet Summer Pink Peach
This three-dimensional colorful drawing that is a joyous tangle in the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York City, captures the energy and delight I have been feeling since the trees began to blossom here and the tulips and daffodils are popping open. The sculptor named it “To You, Little Bigger than a Sweet Summer […]
City from Below
One reason I don’t blog more here is because I keep up two other blogs, one for I-Powered, a group of students, staff and faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and another for the Race, Space and Law Reading Group at UIUC. This report on our most recent meeting has so many great […]
The Blogosphere
I went to a brownbag talk by historian Ray Fouche this past week. He commented that he’d like to find more ways to communicate with “everyday folks,” rather than addressing academics all the time. So I asked him if he blogged. Then I inwardly laughed at myself, because I blog, but I don’t do it […]
Transmission
The Guggenheim currently has an exhibit called The Third Mind which features American Artists who contemplated Asia, from 1860 to 1989, with a special commission of a work by Ann Hamilton that circles the rotunda, spiraling down from the top of the spiral to the floor. The Guggenheim website has a short interview with Ann […]
Digital Stigmergic Collaboration
I like the word “stigmergy,” which according to Wikipedia means “a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent […]
Long Live Activist Art!
Holland Cotter, an art critic at The New York Times, recently wrote an article called “The Boom is Over. Long Live Art!” I read the article with interest and several of us on the activist art education listserv exchanged reactions. I felt a little silly coming to Cotter’s defense because he hardly needs my defense […]
Technology as Spatial Lens
In early February I went to hear Paul Dourish when he was visiting the University of Illinois. He’s a professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and in Anthropology. In addition to the Informatics program, he also teaches in the interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts, Computation, and […]
25 Things
Friends on Facebook the last couple of weeks have been playing a game called “25 Things.” It’s been great fun to read people’s lists. Rules: Once you are tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits or goals about yourself. At the end, choose 25 people to tag. I […]
Actions
Another inspiring link from Sarah Ross: Actions, a show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). The exhibit includes suits that transform into swings, mobile pool tables, urban farms, dumpster diving, and Sarah’s own velour suits for urban lounging. The table wedged between freeway columns activates the space in a way that creates intimacy. CCA […]
