Monthly Archives: February 2010

APInews: Call: Arts/Justice Symposium, Toronto, May

Open Call

The Laurier Centre for Music in the Community calls for presentation proposals for “Arts for Social and Environmental Justice,” a symposium at Toronto’s Royal Conservatory, May 15, 2010. The one-day symposium features as keynote speakers arts-integration educator Rena Upitis; Stephen K. Levine, dean of the doctoral program in Expressive Arts: Therapy, Education, Consulting and Social Change at the European Graduate School; and cultural critic Max Wyman. The conference invites submissions dealing with the symposium themes in the form of research papers, interactive workshops and narrative papers describing practices in the educational or arts community. Deadline is February 15. The symposium is co-hosted by ISIS-Canada and the European Graduate School.

via APInews: Call: Arts/Justice Symposium, Toronto, May.

Developing a sustainable approach to public art

JRdetail1 – artist Jane Revitt

The first ever set of FREE guidelines to help artists and commissioners embrace the sustainable as well as the artistic impact of their work has been launched by Chrysalis Arts http://www.chrysalisarts.org.uk, a public art, training and development agency based in rural North Yorkshire.

Public Art Sustainability Assessment (PASA for short) is a free interactive assessment tool available from http://www.pasaguidelines.org/ which aims to promote sustainable practice in public art to artists and commissioners and has been developed to assist Chrysalis Arts in the process of analysing and evaluating projects that they are involved in.

Kate Maddison, Director at Chrysalis Arts comments:”
“ When we set out to discover how to address sustainability within our public art practice, we were dismayed to find so little information to guide us. This prompted us to take the first step and start the process of establishing our own method of working sustainably. What we found interested us greatly because it threw the spot-light on issues that are relevant to others involved in commissioning and creating public art and beyond that to the way society values sustainability.”

“ Art has an ability to reflect and potentially influence our behaviour and public art is by its nature in the public eye. Chrysalis Arts believes it has a role to play in promoting responsible behaviour in this context. It soon became clear that we needed to disseminate this information widely, as the issues need to be dealt with by everyone involved in the process of planning, commissioning and implementing public art.”

The online interactive checklist is easy to use and covers the key issues which surround sustainable practice in public art. This checklist is supported by full guidelines and useful case studies.

To use the free PASA checklist and download the guidelines please visit and register at www.pasaguidelines.org. Registered users can answer questions about their art activity or project online and when the checklist is completed, they can download their answers as a pdf document.

PASA has been created for artists and creative practitioners as well as public art organisations, local authorities, developers, commissioners, funders, architects, landscape architects, engineers, contractors, communities, schools and anyone else who may be involved in the commissioning, development, creation, maintenance and decommissioning of public art at different scales and in different contexts.

Chrysalis Arts have developed  PASA in consultation with a wide range of partners – including artists and arts organisations, local authority officers, specialists from higher education establishments and environmental consultants Gaia Research, as well as looking to government sources and other creative practitioners such as architects for guidance on sustainable principles and practice.

“While artistic considerations should be foremost in creating public art, there is no reason why artists cannot embrace sustainable principles in the way in which they conceive and implement their ideas, as long as this is supported through the funding and commissioning process… “ Kate Maddison

Initial feedback gained from the launch of the Guidelines at “Art Ecology and Sustainable Practice” an event held Chrysalis Art’s base, The Art Depot, was very positive and include:

“Helpful to have these points presented in a useable form” Barbara Greene, artist

“(PASA) asks and answers a range of public art questions” Harry Hodgson, Hull School of Art and Design

“Very useful tool… would like to try putting it into practice” Adele Jackson, artist and project manager, Loca, Kirklees Council

Chrysalis Arts view PASA as very much the starting point in the debate around public art practice and sustainability, and hope that by throwing the debate open to others, the result in the long term will be a more sustainable way of working.

Community Mosaic, Lord Street, Southport - Chrysalis Arts Photo by Chrysalis Arts

Press contact

For more press information and images contact Jane Redfern PR tel 01845 526720 / 07724 131179 email pr@janeredfern.co.uk

to speak to Kate Maddison, Chrysalis Arts tel 01756 749222 / Mob 07976 731151   email  kate@artdepot.org.uk

Curzon Square Public Art - Chrysalis Arts - Ceramic Mosaic and Forged Stainless Steel Panels, artist and photo Kate Maddison

Editors notes

Chrysalis Arts is an artist-led public art company, training and arts development agency based in the North Yorkshire village of Gargrave. The company was founded in 1985 by Rick Faulkner and Kate Maddison.

Chrysalis Arts are keen to embrace the principles of sustainability in creating public artwork, promoting both responsible professional practice and conscientious use of materials and resources, in line with a fully developed environmental policy.

On October 2nd, Chrysalis Arts launched the PASA guidelines at the seminar event “Art Ecology and Sustainable Practice” which was held at the company’s base, The Art Depot, the subject of one of the PASA Case Studies, in Gargrave, North Yorkshire. The event was well attended by public art practitioners including artists, commissioners, local government officers, university lecturers and researchers.

“Thought provoking” Suzanne Dimmock, Lancaster City Council

“ (PASA) gives a systematic form to much of what we already do instinctively…(it) sums up a transferable approach which artists can pass on to whoever works with them” Sue Harrison, artist

Transitionboatessm - Transition Helix-Spiral-Boat, Manchester, Building Schools for the Future - St Philips and Piper Hill Schools - Chrysalis Arts

More about PASA online

Anyone wishing to use the guidelines will be asked to register before gaining free access to the PASA Checklist Online which is an immediate sustainability tool. Registered users can answer questions about their art activity or project online and when the checklist is completed, they can download their answers as a pdf document.

To accompany the guidelines, Chrysalis Arts have carried out four PASA Case Studies of how to apply the guidelines as an assessment method and to show benchmark examples of the company’s projects and current practice.

Registered users can also download the PASA Guidelines free as a series of pdf documents:
Guidelines – a detailed assessment method which incorporates the checklist and also; The (Full) Guidelines, The Assessment Process, Appendix 1: Chrysalis Arts – Steps to Sustainability, Appendix 2: Sustainable Principles, Appendix 3: Bibliography (including Websites), Appendix 4: Case Studies – Slow Art Trail, The Art Depot, Lord Street, St Paul’s & Piper Hill BSF, Appendix 5 - Template


Additional Resources

PASA Q & A – available

PASA Case Studies: Projects analysed using the PASA Guidelines (available from http://www.pasaguidelines.org/ )

  1. SLOW ART TRAIL: a pilot, public art project – a series of environmental installations (Bolton Abbey/North Yorkshire) exploring sustainability and creative practice – developed by Chrysalis Arts to raise awareness of environmental issues and explore how artists could develop a more sustainable approach to their creative practice. The installations ranged from pieces that tempted visitors to sit down and contemplate their surroundings to those which challenged perceptions about contemporary art-making in a traditional rural landscape.
  2. THE ART DEPOT is the result of a collaboration between Chrysalis Arts and architects Wales Wales and Rawson and comprises an office, design studio and workshop for the public art company in North Yorkshire. The brief was to create a building that reflects the true integration of art and architecture and provide a base for future public artwork, arts development and training activity.
  3. LORD STREET GARDENS ARTWORKS commissioned by Sefton Council to create new artworks to complement the refurbishment of Lord Street Gardens, which were originally designed by Thomas Mawson in 1906, a renowned landscape architect of the arts and crafts movement, and retain many of their original features. The artworks included a new illuminated water feature, seats and a community mosaic.
  4. TRANSITION, Artwork commissioned by Manchester City Council’s Building schools for the future programme: St Paul’s RC High School and Piper Hill High School (for students with special needs) occupied two separate sites in Wythenshawe and were being brought together as two schools that would share some facilities in new premises on the St Paul’s RC School site. Chrysalis Arts worked with the students and staff of St Paul’s RC High School and Piper Hill High School to create a new artwork to celebrate the two schools coming together and to symbolise their ‘transition’ to a new beginning. The artwork is itself an eight-metre suspended helix-boat structure of rope, wood and stainless steel, occupying the space above the reception area.

Streetlight Storm by Katie Paterson


“At any one time there are around 6,000 lightening storms happening across the world amounting to some 16 million storms each year.”

… a delicious fact is culled from Pippa Irvine’s review of Paterson’s Street Light Storm installation on Deal Pier on FAD Fast Art News:

Inspired by such dizzying statistics Paterson set about translating this natural phenomena into a poetic and beautiful artwork on Deal Pier in Kent. Harnessing everyday technology, lightening signals from as far away as the North Pole or North Africa are received by an antenna on the pier and projected as short bursts of light. As the pattern of lightening strikes changes, so the pier lights oscillate correspondingly, with a subtlety that contrasts with the power and drama of the storms they reflect.

To watch the pier by night is a genuinely magical experience with each flash anticipated with mounting tension. Every sporadic burst is accompanied by an appreciative emotional thrill and a sense of awe at the fact that somewhere out there the ominous rumbles of thunder and lightening are mounting. The work connects spectators to the vastness of the world beyond, collapsing the distance between the individual and remote meteorological events.

It’s an interesting way of making art that represents scientific data in an open-ended way. Paterson turns Deal Pier a kind of lightning rod for the world; the romantic-era majesty of a lightening storm is reduced to data, but then remade as flickers of light.

The artwork was originally intended to run throughout January but has apparently gone down so well that it’ll remain there until February 28, weekdays 5-10pm, weekends 5pm-8am.

www.katiepaterson.org/streetlightstorm/

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

The new bucolics: Caught by the River


Illustration by Jonathan Newdick from Caught by The River

In our industrial societies,  nature comes to represent the escape from the business of our lives. Caught by the River (“the antidote to indifference”) has been around a while; it’s an interesting collective of people who have come together to reflect on the luxury of taking time out in by a riverbank.

It’s a website less inspired by environmentalism than a kind of gentle refusenik-ism – something more to do with Tom Hogkinson’s and Gavin Praetor-Pinney’s The Idler than anything more strident – but it’s growing into a great online repository for new ways of looking at the British countryside.

Co-founded music entrepreneur Jeff Barrett and including a contributor list of artists, writers, photographers and songsmiths it claims the late Roger Deakin as its patron saint. Deakin’s brilliant Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain is becoming a handbook for a kind of half-mystical, half-historic neo-Romantic approach to the world.

The site is full of gems. Last week they featured a timely reappraisal of the work of Richard Brautigan; today they start to feature a series of pieces of music influenced by birds. They begin with a song from British Sea Power called “The Great Skua (Plover demo”) which you can listen to here.

Last year they published an anthology:  Caught by the River: A Collection of Words on Water.
Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

The impossible hamster & RSAnimate: thoughts on “nubs”

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqwd_u6HkMo

Yesterday, the New Economics Foundation released this video to support their report about the irreconcilability of the idea of sustained economic growth with the idea of sustainability itself,  Growth Isn’t Possible. It’s made by Leo Murray, one of the makers of The Age of Stupid and the short film  Wake Up Freak Out.

The Impossible Hamster is a clever way of drawing attention to an idea, using a short viral video. In some circles this would be called an agit-nub, nubs being “short videos that explain or bring an idea to life“.

In the last couple of years, nubs have increasingly become the means by which new ideas are spread around the web. They encapsulate how the web works; by making them embeddable, they become a freebie for other content producers. Spreading ideas and messages on the web is about reciprocity; you have to give in order to receive attention.

Nubs raise a few questions. Firstly, at the moment wit is still prized as much as quality, but will the increasing standards of advertising viral videos begin to crowd out the more low-fi productions like Leo Murray’s? Take a look at this ad about the persuasive technology of a musical staircase which turns out to be an advertisement by Volksvagen. Made to look low-fi by the adevertising agency DDB Stockholm, it became one of the most successful virals of last year. Advertisers are spending increasingly large sums producing these virals.

Secondly, if nubs are the repository for political messages, will we soon have “nub wars”? As somebody in the office pointed out the moment they saw The Impossible Hamster, a climate sceptic might have made a video of a hamster growing not only fat but clever enough to start building new worlds.

Thirdly, do they respresent a kind of Darwinism of ideas; if an idea is not reducible to a three minute nub will it become worthles?

Myself, I don’t think so. I think their mix of expression and intellect makes them an incredibly powerful new genre.

On the last point, the RSA’s own RSAnimate series shows that nubs don’t need to be reductionist. Take a look at Matthew Taylor’s Left Brain Right Brain which is just out this week:

Look out for new videos coming up on the new RSA Comment pages:http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Happy New Year from the Los Angeles Urban Rangers!

We’re pleased to kick off 2010 on the homefront with two exciting exhibitions, coming up just around the corner:

  • Come see our work and that of other participatory based projects in Actions, Conversations, and Intersections at the LA Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park from January 24 – April 18, curated by Edith Abeyta and Michael Lewis Miller. The opening reception is Sunday, January 31st from 2-5pm. Check out this link for more events and weekly goings on around the exhibition.
    http://www.actionsconversationsintersections.com/
    http://www.culturela.org/lamag/Home.html
  • Our Portable Ranger Station is winging its way back from the 2009 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam en route to Tijuana! Stop by Performing Public Space, curated by Owen Driggs, at La Casa de Túnel: Art Center from February 6 – March 21. Leave your transit behind and just walk across the border. Other artists in the show include Fallen Fruit, Lauren Bon, and Jane Tsong, among others.
    http://cofac101.org/casa.htm
  • The new year promises new investigations as well. We are currently working with the University of California’s Institute for Research in the Arts on a major project for the UC’s Natural Reserve System, returning to the Netherlands next summer to build a field guide for our trail system in Almere’s favorite vacant lot, and continuing development of a series of programs for our very own Downtown Los Angeles.
  • Finally, thanks to support from the Coastal Conservancy, we will be wrapping up our highly successful Malibu Public Beaches program next month! The newly translated Spanish version of our informative map and guide is hot off the presses, and will be distributed throughout LA County and on the Metro 534 line, and of course, available on our website. Our very last public safari is tentatively scheduled for the last weekend in February. Stay tuned!

Ever onward,

Los Angeles Urban Rangers
http://www.laurbanrangers.org

Bandit Lites Strives for 80% Green by December 2011 | iSquint.net

From Justin Lang over at iSquint.net

Here is an interesting story from Bandit Lites in Nashville. With the huge kick to “Go Green”, Bandit Lites has taken it one step further. While most companies are working on ways to develop and manufacturer low energy usage lighting fixtures, Bandit Lites is re-thinking their entire operation, starting with the logo.  To help show that they are serious about the push to go green, Bandit Lites has changed the color of their logo and website to green.  But it doesn’t stop their.  They are also looking at their facilities as well and how to cut down on energy loss and waste as well as cutting back on printed materials and sorting for recycling.

But it doesn’t stop there, what about out on tour.  Bandit Lites has been working with GRNlite to develop energy efficient and affordable LED fixtures. Below is a photo of the LEDs that Bandit and GRNlite have developed.

You can learn more about Bandit Lites GRNlites LED fixtures by visiting their web site at www.banditlites.com.  So why is Bandit Lights pushing so hard to become much more energy efficient by December 2011?  The same reason all of us need to look at our energy usage, to help keep our world here for many years to come.

via Bandit Lites Strives for 80% Green by December 2011 | iSquint.net.