Greetings from University of New Mexico

Hi from UNM Art and Ecology 493/593, which includes Bill and Catherine (who have introduced themselves), and Molly the class’ graduate assistant soon to finish a master’s degree in fine arts sculpture. The students include a retired forest service supervisor, a student of photography, a student of sculpture and a student of landscape architecture. I don’t mean to pigeonhole the class by background or area of study, but to demonstrate that this is an interdisciplinary course. We come from different parts of not just UNM’s art department but of Albuquerque and the world, and our ages span sometimes as much as our circumstances. We meet weekly to discuss assigned readings of both art and ecological significance. Weekly topics include water (so imperative, layered, and controversial), history of ecology, cultural ecology, food, eco practice, mapping and walking. We respond, rant, question, contradict, extol and criticize. We can be cynical, direct, simple, childish, confident, obtuse, insecure and insightful when trying to get to the crux of – art and ecology, and ecological art. We review and critique our constructed responses to the readings. We wonder how what we do in this classroom can relate to provocations from somewhere on the web, let alone outside the classroom. Issues addressed provoke and arouse not just questions relating to the readings and of the classroom ebb and flow of discussion, but of concerns connected (and disconnected) to our lives, ourselves, and our creative processes. We meet for two hours a week, oftentimes longer because five minutes before the end of class is when the good conversation starts. Below is a week by week reading list with a sample of some of the art objects and images inspired by the readings.

Week One: Water
Childs Craig, “Phoenix Then and Now”, High Country News, April 16, 2007
Reisner, Marc, Cadillac Desert
Stegner, Wallace, The American West as Living Space, Living Dry.

















Week Two: Water
Childs, Craig, The Secret Knowledge of Water
Irland, Basia, Water Library
SIMPARCH with Steve Rowell, Hydromancy www.bustersimpson.net, Cydlifiad (Confluence), Beckoning Cistern, Water Glass & Water Table, King Street Garden, Exchanger Fountain, Hudson River Purge












Week Three: History of Ecology
Kastner Jeffrey & Wallis, Brian, Land and Environmental Art
Smithson, Robert “Frederick Law Olmstead and the Dialectical Landscape”, Artforum, 1973, pp 62-68.
Mozingo, The Aesthetics of Ecological Design, Landscape Journal, 16:1 1997 pp. 46-59













Week Four: Cultural Ecology
Mann, Charles, “1491”, Atlantic Monthly Vol 289, issue 3 pp. 41-53
Weatherford, Jack, Indian Givers
Tuan,Yi-Fu, Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values













Week Five: Cultural Ecology
Jackson, J. B., A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time
Leopold, Aldo, The Sand County Almanac, Thinking Like a Mountain.
Weisman, Alan, A World Without Us













Week Six: Food
Pollan, Michael, “Farmer in Chief”, New York Times Magazine, pp. 62-71, Oct. 12, 2008
Kingsolver, Barbara, Animal, Vegetable Miracle
Pollan Michael, Omnivore’s Dilemma
Kloppenburg, Jack, “Coming into the Foodshed”, Agriculture and Human Values, 13:3, 1966, p 33-42

Greetings!

I am an artist/teacher/researcher living now in Pennsylvania. My work has been strongly influenced by impressions of multiple geographies layered with my life experience as I have lived and moved from many locations beginning in early childhood. I see posted images here that remind me of my strong feelings for the Mojave desert landscape which is where I spent my teenage years.
A student in the 'Web 2.0 Pedagogy' class at Penn State, I am exploring themes that include: New technologies and their practical and theoretical implications for learning in the art classroom, innovative teacher practice, and social and collaborative learning.

Greetings from New Mexico

Hi all,
We’ve enjoyed reading your introductions. Thanks from New Mexico!

Bill Gilbert here:
I am an artist and educator who has been working in recent years on blurring the boundaries between those two practices. In my research, I have followed a trail that has led me from ceramics to earth art to environmental art/performance/mapping. I am currently involved in a performative series based on the disjunction between our abstract conceptions of the environment and our physical experience of actual sites. These works are enacted on sites visited by the Land Arts of the American West program and translated to viewers using topo maps, gps devices, video and audio recordings.

On the educator side I have been pursuing the possibilities over the past twenty years for a pedagogical model based on a mobile studio. In pursuing this idea we have made stops along the way at Acoma Pueblo, Juan Mata Ortiz, Mexico and the Sierra Madre Mountains and Pastaza, Ecuador in the Amazon jungle. In 2000, I founded Land Arts of the American West at the University of New Mexico as a semester long studio arts program committed to providing students with direct physical engagement with the environmental and social aspects of place and
uninterrupted time to work.

Working in collaboration with professor emeritus Basia Irland, I have started a new Art & Ecology concentration at UNM. This spring we are conducting a national search to hire a new faculty member. I am currently team teaching an Art and Ecology seminar and an Art and Ecology studio practices course with Catherine Harris from our Landscape Architecture Department. These classes will both be participating in our generative conversations as we grapple with a cross disciplinary definition of ecological art as a particular subset of Art + Environment.
Adelante,
Bill

Catherine Harris here:

I am an artist and educator working on both sides of the art and design divide. My art practice uses the lines cultures draw on the land to frame boundaries and use. I trace virtual lines, property lines and waterlines with walks and objects referring to the histories of surveying – theodolites, Gunter’s chains and satellite hats. My production varies from large-scale installation to tiny video, with metal work in between. I began my art practice twenty years ago in photography, detoured by way of Fluxus assistant, garnered an environmental focus through masters in landscape architecture and earned an MFA from Stanford University in 2005.

As an educator, I most recently have been teaching environmental art and theory in the Landscape Architecture Department and Art and Ecology Seminar and Studio at the University of New Mexico. I have also taught Land Art at Deep Springs College and Landscape Architecture studios at UC Berkeley, with a brief thesis advisory role at CCA.

Introduction from Julia Christensen

Hi everyone,

Glad to be in conversation with all of you. My name is Julia Christensen, and I am an artist/writer/musician/teacher living in the plains of Ohio. I am professor of the “emerging arts” at Oberlin College and Conservatory. When people ask me what my job title means, I generally say that my courses explore the hybrid forms of art-making that emerge from experiments and crossovers between disciplines, naturally. Furthermore, I am interested in promoting the emergence of art and creativity amongst my students across their traditional academic silos. With creative and artistic environmental scientists, chemists, geographers, and economists around––working together with our artists, filmmakers, composers, and writers––a compelling future is within our reach. I have a joint appointment between the College and the music Conservatory here at Oberlin, and my classes often are cross-listed between Environmental Studies, Art, and Electronic Music.

My work straddles the lines between art and research, electronic and non-electronic, audience and performer, and I work across media (film, photo, net, sound, installation, etc). I have been working on a long-term project about the reuse of abandoned big box stores in the United States since 2002. This project intends to raise a platform for people to talk and think critically about the impacts of this sort of construction on our communities and the future development of our cities and towns. The image I posted is of the Spam Museum, a corporate museum in a renovated Kmart building in Austin, MN.

A few other projects:
UnBox: I recently built a 1500 sf structure called the UnBox, which is modular and folds up into a box 9x5x5 feet in size. It is made of locally milled wood, and locally sourced materials, and I never stepped foot inside a big box building in order to construct the UnBox. It is part of my traveling solo exhibition, Your Town Inc., which premiered at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon last fall (curated by Astria Suparak).

Rust Belt/Bayou: Last year I completed a net art project called Rust Belt/Bayou, a net art commission from Turbulence. It explores the aural landscapes of Cleveland and New Orleans.

Land Arts in an Electronic Age: A course at Oberlin exploring how artists connect with and interpret the landscape in a post-digital world. Matt Coolidge and I took the students on a field trip to Gary, Indiana for several days as a part of this class, and the work the students produced ranged from sound installations to interactive maps to video pieces to dance performances.


Some links:

My website: http://www.juliachristensen.com
List of recent works: http://www.juliachristensen.com/recent/recent
Big Box Reuse project site: http://www.bigboxreuse.com
Big Box Reuse Book: http://www.bigboxreuse.com/book
UnBox: http://www.juliachristensen.com/unbox.html
Teaching: http://www.youwillneverfind.us
Rust Belt/Bayou: http://turbulence.org/Works/rustbelt_bayou
WIKIREUSE : http://turbulence.org/Works/wikireuse
Land Arts in an Electronic Age: http://youwillneverfind.us/landarts/gary/main
WAM! Women and Art Music Ensemble: http://www.youwillneverfind.us/wam/
Your Town Inc: http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/yourtowninc

Jarrod Beck Introduction

Hello Con-Generates. I'm Jarrod, an architect turned printmaker and back again. (Installation Artist?) I remake spaces by introducing a degree of entropy into places that have been "cleaned" to challenge the architectural frame of order. I use banal materials associated with the trade of the design/builder: drafting film, silver mylar, lath, plaster, light, and exact ideas of memory, loss, distance on them: the mylar collects the remnants of a painted wall, becoming the formwork for a poured plaster piece, which breaks, but not before it takes the information with it, and is rested carefully on a table, and then packed away. All these pieces add up until finding a new space to generate the next piece.

I've just finished packing all the bits of my last installation into my studio, so I'm hoping to unpack it again with all of you.

Below is the sign posted to the door of my last piece at the South Street Seaport Museum. A twisted frame:

Welcome to Visitor Center. Yes, we’re open. It’s free and open to the public Wednesday - Sunday, 11-5., through February 21st.

Visitor Center is a temporary installation that began with a question:
What could happen if you built a visitor center for many landscapes at once, a space far removed from the landscape(s) it was meant to frame?

The structure of the piece is influenced by visitor centers typical to national parks and historic sites. A model, or large scale map is shown in the center of the space, with artifacts, artist illustrations, images, moving and still displayed to give context for the visitor attempting to understand the journey on which they are about to embark. Here, architectural elements, or framing devices, have collided with material chaos: namely plaster, paper, plastic, ink and dye.

To build the model, plaster was cast into flexible plastic molds on wooden horizontal planes that filled the gallery. Vertical elements: paper, plastic and thread were hung from the rafters to define a labyrinthal path around and through the plaster piece. Last week, the structure of the piece was removed, causing this “landscape” to collapse. Elements are now being pulled from the rubble and displayed as artifacts along the perimeter of the gallery space.

The installation changes everyday: you are invited to come in and be a part of the process, or simply to walk through and sit for awhile. Ultimately this is a space for contemplation, akin to the bench found perched on the edge of a natural vista. Tea and hot cocoa are available (free of charge), just ask.

Introduction: The Canary Project (Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris)

We are two representatives of The Canary Project, Ed Morris and Susannah. We happen to be the founding members. We are a husband and a wife.

The Canary Project produces visual media and artworks that deepen public understanding of climate change and/or energize commitment to solutions. In addition to us (Susannah and Ed), The Canary Project consists of more than 30 participating artists, volunteers, designers, researchers, etc. of various degrees of involvement. We make fact-based art and art-based activism.

Our most substantial project is photo-based. (We used to just say photography and not photography-based). The photographs are of landscapes impacted by climate change. We now say photo-based because we are combining these large scale photos with archival images and other material borne out of research into the implications of the photographs. (None of this is reflected on our website, which like all websites older than a year is in bad need of a makeover, but for the record it is www.canary-project.org. Another recent website is: www.greenpatriotosters.org. We are currently Loeb Fellows at The Harvard University Graduate School of Design).

We believe that era of Galieo sitting in one room and the priests in another is past.

To play by the rules: our practice involves:

Time because we are interested in appreciating the many histories that are culminating in this moment (human, geologic, scientific, etc.) and are interested in the time-scale of climate change as it relates to the human presence on the planet.

Appropriation because we are interested in the found object of scientific data, of old images, and of recylced material such as white dress shirts.

Hybridity because we are a collective. (And need to make this felt more on our damn out of date website by which hundreds of people misjudge us every day).

(Susannah did not approve this message as she is sleeping at the moment, but I thought it might add some dramatic tension for us to quibble periodically throughout this public exchange).

Introductions

Hello from Nevada!

My name is Colin Robertson. I'm the Curator of Education at the Nevada Museum of Art. I lead the education department of the Museum, overseeing programs offered by the Museum, including lectures, discussions, colloquia, tours, gallery interpretation and new media inititatives, and school and teacher services. I also collaborate on the museum's art + environment initiatives, including the newly founded Center for Art + Environment, directed by Bill Fox, and the Art + Environment Conference held in October 2008. I work closely with Ann M. Wolfe, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections. I truly love my work.

I came to the Nevada Museum of Art from the University of Nevada, Reno, where I formerly taught English, and where I also received my Master's degree in the University's Literature & Environment Program. The program and its faculty are integrally linked to the Association for the Study of Literature & Environment, or ASLE, all three components of which were interdisciplinary enough and encouraging enough to support me looking at the intersections of art and environment, which ultimately led me to the Museum. I've written about the environmental sensibilities of writers, architects, and artists, most recently in an essay about Chris Drury (Hi Chris!) and his beautiful work about time, place, and inhabitation in my region of the country. The Museum's book about Chris's exhibition, Chris Drury: Mushrooms | Clouds, is forthcoming from the Center for American Places and the University of Chicago Press in October 2009. Chris's work was the highlighted feature exhibition during the Art + Environment Conference in October.

I'm fascinated by the many connections, conversations, and perhaps even provocations this group will explore, and look forward to the conversation.

Bill Fox Introduction

Hi All,
I'm a writer and sometimes independent scholar who inquires how we transform land into landscape--or space into place, terrain into territory, depending on the context. I spend most of my travel time in extreme environments where human cognition fails in this process--for example, the Antarctic, the High Canadian Arctic, the Atacama Desert in Chile--and examining how we deploy cultural means to make up for shortcomings in our "natural" abilities. I spend most of my field time with artists and scientists looking at the evidence we leave behind, the art and architecture and narratives of such environments.

I'm also the Director of the new Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. Our mission is: To be a global leader in supporting the practice, study, and awareness of creative interactions between people and their environments. We're currently building an archive and library of relevant materials, such as early materials by Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria, and have up our first exhibition in a small "CA+E Lab" space, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline show from the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

My most recent book is "Aereality: Essays on the World from Above," which appears in bookstores this month, and I'm currently working on a book about "The Art of the Anthropocene."

If you want a more complete description of my work, you can visit my website at www.wlfox.net.

I look forward to the upcoming conversation--talk with you soon.

Bill Fox

Kim Stringfellow: Introduction

Greetings—I’m an artist and educator currently living in Los Angeles. I teach multimedia studies in the School of Art, Design, and Art History at San Diego State University as an associate professor. I received my MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000.

My practice and research interests address ecological, historical, and activist issues related to land use and the built environment through hybrid documentary forms incorporating writing, digital media, photography, sound, video, installation, and locative media. My work investigates the repercussions of human development within the western United States evolving out of a rigorously researched area of interest focused on a particular subject, community or region to discuss complex, interrelated issues of the chosen site. Within my research I attempt to expose human values and political agendas that form our collective understanding of these places. Ultimately, my projects are designed to create awareness, educate and create a rich dialogue in relation to the subject at hand.

I have several projects that could possible relate to the conversation. I would say that these projects fit into the conversation within the ‘hybridity’ principle, as they are often multimedia, multi-form documentary projects. Below is an outline of these projects. Visit these sites directly or go to www.kimstringfellow.com for individual project overviews.

• Jackrabbit Homestead (www.jackrabbithomestead.com): A very soon to be released (launch is this weekend) web-based multimedia presentation featuring a downloadable car audio tour exploring the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act in Southern California's Morongo Basin region near Joshua Tree National Park.
• Invisible-5 (www.invisible5.org): A collaboratively-created audio tour project of the Interstate 5 corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco exploring the stories of individuals and communities fighting for environmental justice as well as natural, social, and economic histories along the route.
• Greetings from the Salton Sea (www.greetingsfromsaltonsea.com): A website and book (Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905-2005) examining the built and natural environment of Southern California’s Salton Sea.
• Safe As Mother’s Milk: The Hanford Project (www.hanfordproject.com): A website and physical installation examining the atomic history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation through declassified photos, media and other documents available online from Dept. Of Energy’s Hanford Website.
  

Susan Rotilie, Introduction

Greetings!
I have been working in the field of museum education for over 30 years, which probably makes me a different generation than most of you all, but I am excited to be part of this conversation ( event? class? ). Bear with me if I get stuck with the "translations" of how to function in this environment. You are experiencing a learning curve happening live.
So my work as an educator at the Walker Art Center has taken me on very interesting journeys through the evolving practices of contemporary artists and visitor engagement. I usually say that at one point in my life I aspired to be an artist, but now spend most of my time discussing the work of others who are artists. But I am always energized by the way these conversations have stretched my thinking and understandings and enjoy when I am present to see others stretch as well.
So I look forward to having conversations with you and growing together.
-- Susan

Chris Drury - an introduction to my work

Double Echo
An echogram of 3 km of ice and the underlying landscape, made with radar from a Twin Otter plane flying over the icefields of Antarctica, superimposed with the echocardiogram of the pilot who flew the flight.

My work seeks to make connections between different phenomena in the world, specifically between:


• Nature and Culture

• Inner and Outer

• Microcosm and Macrocosm



All of my works, over the past 25 years have been concerned with these connections. This is what unites the whole body of work. I do not have a particular style, nor do I prefer one material or process over another, rather I will seek the most appropriate means and material to find, and make explicit, those connections. 

To this end I collaborate with scientists and technicians from a broad spectrum of disciplines and technology. This may mean that one exhibition or work outside may look very different to another. Each work starts from zero and breaks new ground. Its starting point is the place and/or the situation. My work therefore is a continuing dialogue with the world, exploring our place in the universe.

In many ways the nature of how I work has become more complex and yet out of this complexity I seek simple solutions, presented in the most direct and simple ways. For instance micro organisms found growing in the most hostile places on Earth like the Ellsworth Mountains of Antarctica or The Nevada Test site, are presented as gene sequences, stenciled in those particular soils themselves, directly onto the wall.




Labels are useful only in so far as they allow a way in to start thinking about the work. But usually as soon as you label or categories something it will slip its leach and move into another category. That is how it should be, for these works are not static, they are states of connection. For a new book on the last 15 years of work I am using the catagories: 'Landscapes of the Mind', 'Systems in the Body/Systems on the Planet', 'Heaven and Earth' and 'Life and Death'. For a series of Art/Science seminars I am using Earth, air, Fire and Water. Just as there are elements of Time, Hybridity, Space, Performance and Appropriation in all of my works, none of them quite fit.




Winnemucca Whirlwind made in Nevada last year on the edge of The Paiute Reservation, was a time based piece made in time with the knowledge that with the first shower it would disappear. There was an element of performance in its making with an invitation to people to find it and leave notes etc in a tin nearby. It was definitely concerned with the space of its site and it appropriated a native whirlwind basket design to bring together ideas of history, social cohesion, land and water use, and the question just how does a population of several million, live on a land that in reality will only support a few thousand. Of course the implication of this question can be moved up a notch. In a world fast approaching population levels of 7 billion, and which may possibly only be able to sustainably support 2 or 3 billion, how do we act both practically and morally?

If you would like to know more about my work I have a blog on Antarctica and Nevada on: http://chrisdrury.blogspot.com/
and you can visit my web site on. http://chrisdrury.co.uk

Greetings from Karen!

Students in my "Web 2.0 Pedagogy" course directed me today to a humorous "elements" chart of the Internet with categories such as "aggregators" and "get stuff" and "miscellaneous". See http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2007-06-23--periodic-table-of-the-internet.html as one way to introduce the Penn State students who will be involved in the generative conversations. The categories could be considered a warm up to notions of hybridity (aggregators), appropriation (get stuff), and time/space/performance (mis/CELLaneous).

Another way to meet the students is to look at Hongkyu's blog in which he facilitated discussion with the class last week about "Ecological Perspective, Consumerism, Art Education, and Web 2.0 Pedagogy" at http://ecologicalperspectiveconsumerism.blogspot.com/?zx=984232fe1111b508. Or, the image avatar is an aggregate of their introductions both in text and in creating an avatar they use in meeting in Second Life.

I invite you to my Web site at: http://www.personal.psu.edu/ktk2 if you want to know about me, or you can find and "friend" me in Facebook.

I look forward to the generative conversations on this blog. I, along with several of the Penn State art education students who are participating in the generative conversations will be at a conference in Minneapolis in mid April and will visit the Walker Art Center within the National Art Education Association conference dates of April 16-21. Susan, I hope that we can meet in person then.

Caryn's Introduction

(still from my film "Alstromeria")


I’m a filmmaker and media artist living and working in New York and Seattle. I was a teacher for many years at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Recently, though, I returned to school to make films and re-tool my technological skill set. I left the Pacific Northwest with an image of myself as a budding “urban farmer”: I was a gardener and composter, in my very own small urban yard. I’ve tried to find a way to maintain that aspect of my identity while living most of the time in New York City. I’m engaged in art-making activities and I frequent sites in the city that allow me to exercise those commitments in the new environment. Activities like cooking, gardening and composting are central to my work as well as my life. At screenings of an early short film, “Recipe,” I handed out copies of my soup recipes to viewers. Thus, I extended the theme of the film into the lives of audiences who viewed the work, especially if viewers went home and made, revised, and shared my soup recipes with others.

Here in New York, under the influence of Stan Brakhage and his exquisite works “Mothlight,” and “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” and under the tutelage of artist, filmmaker, and mentor Jeanne Liotta, I began to create short collage films working with plants and flowers. My first film of this type, “Alstromeria” (see the image, above), explored the various aspects of that one fascinating flower. “Seattle Solstice” (from which the still for my blog is taken) used fresh and dried plants to map the landscape in my Seattle garden in winter. I have several more films of this type in various stages of production. Each is species or site specific: I made one from plants I gathered on my neighbor’s terrace garden (“Lucy’s Terrace”). Another film (“Riverside”) used plants (even weeds) gathered at Riverside Park in late spring. “In the Conservatory” makes use of plants from the Volunteer Park Conservatory in Seattle. I believe that site specificity is central to the work, that the plants carry with them a sense of the site, and that that element is a subtle but important aspect, a kind of aura if you will, in the work.

I’m also captivated by the continual surprises inherent in the materials. For example, in making “Riverside” I discovered a weed with little heart-shaped flowers. I don’t even know the name of the weed, but it is the kind of plant you would step on or mow over without even thinking about it, and yet, especially projected in a frame, the leaves are delicate and beautiful, and that interaction changes the way I feel about the weed. For “In the Conservatory,” I wanted to preserve the freshness of the plants I used in the film, so I kept the film refrigerated before I took it into the optical printer (where I re-photograph the frames, so that I can alter the movement between frames and make it possible to really see the plants themselves). I discovered that some of the flowers retained a lot of moisture, and that the water moving through them was visible on the screen—contributing a natural animated element that I hadn’t tried to create.

I theorize that a change in scale alters the way a viewer looks at the environment the work includes and evokes. As cultural critic Richard Lanham observes,

To change scale is, as with repetition, to transform reality utterly, without changing it at all. To make art of scaling changes means making us self-conscious about perceptual distance and the conventions, neural and social, that cluster around it. That distance itself can so change an object—give it, to use Duchamp’s phrase, a “new look”—locks us into a conception of art as essentially interactive. This interactivity is the very opposite of canonical passivity. (The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts, p. 42)

I would like to find opportunities to work with young people making DIO films using this technique, in conjunction with a botanist and in the context of a sustainability or environmental program. Making art films out of plants, exploring the immediate natural environment to find materials, understanding the way plants are put together in order to take them apart, might lead to a new and different understanding about the important role plants play in the world.

Brakhage referred to many of his experimental films as documentaries. I think of my films that way as well. They are experimental documentaries, a hybrid form. I submitted “Seattle Solstice” to a documentary festival, and I will be interested to see whether it is accepted. Right now, I am mostly working on 16mm film, but I’m exploring another kind of hybridization, that of working between the analog and digital worlds, and trying to make sense of what approaches and techniques work best, and when. On a basic level, it is necessary to digitize the film in order to work on a sound track using sound editing software. I edit a silent workprint of the film on a Steenbeck first, then digitize the negative, then further refine the cut using digital editing software, add the soundtrack digitally, then go back to the Steenbeck with a mag track of the sound for further refining before I submit the film to a negative cutter. Stills from the film are created digitally. These days, it is difficult to share a 16mm print in many venues, and impossible online. I love the look of film, and seeing my pieces projected with light behind them is the best way to view them, but sound is more robust and detailed when it is presented digitally, and digital films are more accessible. I'm still exploring these techonologically hybrid possiblities.

Introduction: ExtremeMediaStudies.org (smudge studio inc.)

Hi from Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth, co-directors of smudge studio. We're excited to be facilitating this conversation.

We think that our studio's project, ExtremeMediaStudies.org, activates the principle of "hybridity" as a strategy in contemporary art, because it cross-pollinates education, journalism, art, media, and design. We are using media to experiment with a hybrid voice for public discussion and education--one that actualizes the power of art and aesthetic experience as ways of knowing the world. We hope to make ExtremeMediaStudies.org a generative resource and outlet for expanding the fields of art and media by orchestrating collaborations among artists, art educators, museum educators, college teachers, and teacher educators.

smudge is also a collaborative art practice and design/media studio based in New York. The artist statement for our practice is: Humans, the landscape, and the built environment are forces in play. At times their relationality creates intense points of contact that necessitate extraordinary acts of creativity and invention. Our practice uses media to locate and pass through these "limit cases."

Much of our work addresses Art + Environment, especially the "limit case" project and our projects of "topographical signaling."

Here's the abstract for an online article that we published based on the Limit Case project:
The Limit Case project grew out of a 3700 mile trip that we took, as artists, through the American southwest for 28 days. We selected destinations that would offer us experiences of intensity: intensity of landscape, color, climate, remoteness, shape, history, and site-responsive built environments. We found ourselves arriving at sites where humans, the landscape and the built environment converged to create exquisitely concentrated zones of contact. State borderlines converged with deep economic divisions; remote desert "wasteland" converged with garish tourist attractions; a quonset hut used to develop the atomic bomb converged with present day efforts to redesign it for sustainable living practices in the desert. The experiences compounded and we began to regard such moments as "limit cases": intense points where natural and built forces mutually contaminate as they play out to their most extreme forms, levels, and junctures.

In response, we created a series of 30 postcards. Each evokes sensations of humans, the landscape, and the built environment themselves converging at and as crossroads, where they compound, reach their "limits" and pass into something else.


Litter Reaches A Limit, from the Limit Case postcard series, 2007

Our interest in "topographical signaling" comes from our fascination with how natural and built forces shape and shift the topographies of landscapes, urban environments, and human experiences. We go to emerging edges of places in the making. There, we invent transmission devices and responsive practices that move with, change shape, frame light and sound, mark rhythms, and indicate direction and intensity of forces in play. With the resulting topographical signals, we try to make the emergence of natural and built topographies material and palpable--and available for creative expression and making. We hope that our work offers experiences of what cannot be grasped by words: namely, sensations of emergence ... the felt reality of being in relation.



We welcome you to view signals of topographical forces (wind, tide, waves, light) that we generated from Marconi Beach, Cape Cod and shared with listeners of WOMR outermost radio.

Visit the site for our art practice smudgestudio.org