PUBLIC ART / PUBLIC SPACE 1
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4.368/369 TR 9:30am-12:30pm E15-001 (The ACT Cube) Units: 3-3-6. U: HASS-A. G: H-level Professor: Gediminas Urbonas TA: Ursula August (until April 7th), Jie Zhang (since April 13th)
What is public art? And how does our understanding of the public, art and cultural production affect the way we activate public space? This course focuses on the production of art for public space. The subject conceptually deals with new modes of public art that shift a discussion on public space towards the discourse on environment by unpacking, reevaluating, and recombining the notion of Anthropocene. By considering art, design, and architecture as public devices, the class will explore new ways of understanding artistic intervention. Suggesting to rethink remediation, mitigation, recycling, sustainability, the participants will develop projects aiming to appropriate, hack, parasite, remake and bricolage existing technologies, tools, materials, as relevant to contemporary critical discourses and practices on urban space.
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The subject is organized around the research and design of a public intervention on the site of a recently decomissioned United States Naval Air Station located in Iceland. From the perspective of both crisis and possibility, the class considers attempts to develop sustainable culture, environment, and enterprise in a post NATO and post economic meltdown environment. Working towards the “cleaning up”, the site-specific research seeks a dialogue across geographical boundaries – with parallel experiences and work- in order to develop critical strategies, methods and ways to develop alternative narratives, social imagery and actions towards social and ecological transformation. The aim of this project is by combining research and art to develop and share new vision of decontamination and the possibility to productively critique the ”creative turn”.
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TRIP
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STUDENTS
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Wednesday, May 14 ACT Cube, Building E15, MIT 9:00 - 9:15 Introduction 9:15 - 13:00 Student presentation and review
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9:15-9:30 9:30-9:45 9:45-10:00 10:00-10:15 10:15-10:30 10:30-10:45 10:45-11:00 11:00-11:15 11:15-11:30 11:30-11:45 11:45-12:00 12:00-12:15 12:15-12:30 12:30-12:45 12:45-13:00
Lisa Caplan Kristopher Swick Young Joo Song Zoe Schreiber Amy Jorgensen Shu Cao Mo Marcos A Munoz Vero Smith Emily Royall You Jin Hannarae Nam Ty Turley Koharu Usui Elaine Kung Magdelena Ewa Rembeza
13:00 - 14:00 Wrap-up and discussion 12
REVIEW
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Lisa Caplan Master of Landscape Architecture, what year, Harvard GSD AsbrĂş Asbru is the rainbow bridge between Midgard, home of the humans, and Asgard, home of the supreme being. The nine worlds of Asgard exist in parallel dimensional realms. Ragnorok is the destruction of the rainbow bridge, the occurrence of various natural disasters and the subsequent submersion of the world. The Tectonic plates are being pulled apart by the continuing high and low frequency inter-dimensional battles among elves, vikings, dragons, off-planet beings, nukes and whales. The character of the on-going resistance is expressed in cataclysmic tectonic movement; extraction of geothermal energy further exacerbates this phenomenon.
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You Jin Master of Architecture, 2016, MIT SA+P Flying Art
“Our perception of the world is determined by culture - meaning that the same things can be seen in many different ways, and that sight can be deceiving.” -- Olafur Eliasson, Danish-Icelandic artist Inspired by the contexts of Ásbrú Enterprise Park in Iceland and the campus of MIT, this project will explore how colors, movement and visual equipment can help to identify, to navigate and to reveal new meanings of a still, disoriented public sculpture. 15
Amy Jorgensen MFA Dynamic Media, MassArt, 2015 Municipolicy
One hundred percent of energy production in Iceland is from renewable resources and only 13% of energy production in the US is from renewable resources. Here in the US, legislation for any increase in renewable resource production has been met with resistance. This project is an energy-consuming 3D visualization of the difference between renewable energy production in Iceland and the US. The structure is a scale model of obsolete infrastructure from Iceland, infrastructure that used to transport energy made from non-renewable resources.
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Elaine Kung Bachelor of Science, Environmental Engineering, 2015, MIT Under Water / Above Water
My project will address environmental issues by depicting the rise in sea level on campus due to global warming. I will create a web of strings that will connect between trees in Eastman Court on the MIT campus, and the height of the web will be the rise in sea level. Normally people sit on the grass in this space and use it for studying, lounging, etc. This web of strings will change how people use the space and effectively make the space unusable. Hopefully people will be able to lie on the web, like you would float on a body of water. On the Asbru base, especially while walking through buildings, there was an eerie and abandoned feeling present—the feeling of a civilization that used to be there but is now no longer. I’d like to convey this feeling by installing mini speakers throughout parts of the web that will play sound recordings from the Asbru base.
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Shu Cao Mo Master of Education, 2015, Harvard GSE The Merchant of Iceland
A negotation play that involves multiple global business interests with livestream from Iceland.
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Marcos A Munoz Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, 2016, MIT Lifetime of Practice Lifetime of Practice is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style comic book which aims to act as a supplement for an introductory calculus course. The style of the piece is deliberate in its attempt to take away some of the narrative power traditionally held by the teacher by giving it to the student. In this regard, there exists hope that the student might find for themselves a chance to become invested in the material as well as to develop their critical thinking skills. The piece also codifies color as a way to address its politicization in Asbru. The piece uses color to guide the reader through elementary calculus concepts (including rate of change, limits, and continuity) while also touching on the contemporary (and alluding to the historical) use of color on both Asbru and the former military base.
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Hannarae Annie Nam Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, 2015, MIT The Speculative Bubble The economy is an amalgamation of invisible transactions, but it affects our lives on every level, especially after an incident like the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The goal of this project is to experiment with giving tangibility to an economic bubble. Before the burst of the bubble, represented by a large weather balloon, pedestrians in the nearby area are invited to add air to it. Whoever participates last will have their names written on a white board. This will be repeated until the bubble bursts. When it does, it will reveal a radio playing a voice performance of the Federal Reserve emergency meetings during 2006-2008. The ultimate aim is to juxtapose the sentiments of before and after an economic crash - hopeful, excited sentiment versus growing uncertainty, and finally devastation and chaos, all in the form of a voice performance.
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Magdalena Ewa Rembeza SPURS Fellow, DUSP, MIT SA+P; MArch PhD Hidden Community The project “Hidden Community” is an interactive photo installation that emerged from a field trip to a former NATO Base in Keflavik, Iceland. The objective of the project is to bring knowledge about American soldiers and their families from the former base to connect them with the MIT Community and its “hidden” military linkages. The work results in an video piece, documenting the way of discovering the content of an exhibition and its possible exploration by a flaneur. The idea of a project is strongly connected to “flanuer surprise:” discovering the past in order to understand the present. The site of the installation is an MIT building 9-0050 also known as “ Massachusetts Roofs and Tunnels Hackers” space. The photos and materials are organized in the files that refer to former soldier’s files. The exhibition space enables speaking back to the site in Iceland (military bunker) and brings a specific atmosphere of experiencing the unknown. An important element of the installation is building knowledge about place thanks to learning about its community.
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Emily Royall Master of City Planning, 2015, DUSP, MIT SA+P Skúmaskot
Though it’s said to have a negative connotation (as in “a suspiciously dark corner”), skúmaskot can also refer to a cozy darkness. This work is a journey-based interactive installation and sonic experience exposing themes of cold-war and contemporary era surveillance Skúmaskot & the healing power of whale symphonies.
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Zoé Schreiber Bachelor of Arts, 2015, Sciences Po Paris Exchange Student at Wellesley College Memory Wall Memory Wall is a responsive video trigger system that stores my impressions of NASKEF (Naval Air Station Keflavik), a former NATO military base in Iceland. Organised in a grid, Memory Wall’s content reveals itself when activated by the viewer’s touch. The footage, which references the history and Cold War fictionalisation of NASKEF, unfolds through time and across the space of the wall in a aleatory and non-linear way that is influenced by the frequency, position and timing of the viewer’s connection with the piece. Memory Wall acts as an interactive memory bank of perceptions, a personal archive of the site with which the viewer can engage. I am interested in the process of transmission and in the performative qualities of recounting and receiving information. That the forms that the recounting of this information and impressions take are dependent on variables related to the parameters and degree of the viewer’s engagement with the piece is also of interest to me. Memory Wall is an experiment in forms of delivery and knowledge-production, of modes of experience and exchange.
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Vero Smith Master of Design Studies 2015, Harvard GSD Checkpoint 2.0 This project addresses broader concepts of gatekeeping in addition to the phrase “the tyranny of education,� a term one of our Icelandic hosts used to describe the swift departure of the American military from Asbru. By recreating the checkpoint our creative collective occupied in Iceland, I seek to mirror the story-collecting experience we fostered on base. To this end, I have constructed a mobile and abstracted version of the checkpoint, which will function as both a coffee cart and as a means of making the divide between campus and city, educated and uneducated, more visible.
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Young Joo Song Master in Design Strudies, 2016, Harvard GSD Soundwalk This project aims to establish the virtual 3D model of Asbru. The installation consists of large scale projection with sound, recorded during the visit. Memory often depends solely on one part of the senses, and I focused on the sound. The virtual model is built with basic form and only few buildings, highlighted with red, are accessible. Once inside, the space is empty and black, and sound starts to play.
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Kristopher Swick Bachelor of Science in Architecture, 2015, MIT SA+P Asbru Enterprise Park Redevelopment Proposal GEI Development presents an exciting new redevelopment proposal for Asbru Enterprise Park, near Iceland’s Keflavik International Airport. Today, the Enterprise Park sits largely vacant, with many of the existing buildings unused and little pedestrian traffic. We have developed a modular system of innovation spaces unified under rolling green “turf” rooves. The modules can be aggregated as more investment enters Asbru and reconfigured to serve as greenhouses, data farms, warehouses, labs, garages, etc. The future of Asbru is at our fingertips! 26
Ty Turley PhD in Economics (University of Chicago, 2013) Assitant Professor, Brigham Young University Visiting Scholar, Poverty Action Lab, MIT Department of Economics Trader Economists use lab experiments and lab-in-the-field experiments to isolate and study one element of human behavior at a time. I personally use these experiments for my research, having designed and conducted games for people to play that measure parameters of interest to me. For this project, I will be running a lab experiment designed to replicate bubbles while trading in an induced value market. I am using the lab protocol designed by Dufwenberg, Lindqvist and Moore (AER, 2005). I will conduct the experiment at the MIT Behavioral Research Lab (E19). The experiment will show how bubbles arise naturally based on human tendencies to speculate and overerstimate returns. Participants in the experiment will learn how they compare to other traders, in order to increase awareness about the truths of human behavior that lead to such tragedies as the housing bubble and subsequent bubble burst in Iceland (and elsewhere) in 2008-09. We will take participants’ portraits and assemble a histogram of the distribution of speculation using their portraits.
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Koharu Usui Bachelor of Science in Architecture, 2015, MIT SA+P Take a Break Many public spaces are just waiting to become inviting social spaces. The portable popup bench is a way to explore the possibilities in the urban landscape.
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JURY
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Arindam Dutta, Professor in Architecture at HTC, MIT Arindam Dutta is Associate Professor of Architectural History. He is the Director of the History, Theory, Criticism Program in Art and Architecture, as well as the SMArchS Program at MIT. Dutta has been the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Getty Fellowship, in addition to numerous research grants and awards. Dutta’s articles have appeared in the Journal of Society of Architectural Historians, Grey Room, the Journal of Arts and Ideas, and Perspecta. Dutta is the author of The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility, (New York: Routledge, 2007), and has edited A Second Modernism: Architecture, MIT and the “Techno-Social” Moment, on the postwar conjuncture of architectural thought and linguistic/systems theories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
Gisli Martein Baldursson, Urban Planner, LOEB Fellow at GSD Harvard A city councilor and television talk show host for over a decade, Gísli Marteinn Baldursson has been a key figure in putting sustainable urban planning on the political agenda in Reykjavík and Iceland. Concerned with the increasing urban sprawl and related problems of air and water pollution, traffic congestion and public health issues, he has devoted himself to the improvement of his city by writing, speaking and building consensus for re-densification and smart planning. As chairman of the Committee for Environment and Transport, Baldursson introduced Green Steps for Reykjavík, which outlined measures like recycling, public transportation and bicycle-friendly streets. In a contentious political environment, all political parties endorsed his Bicycle Master plan, which has significantly contributed to a tenfold increase in bicycle commuting over 10 years. He believes the recently-completed municipal plan for Reykjavík, which he has worked on since 2006, will be a turning point in the development of the city. 34
Rebecca Uchill, PhD HTC’15, Postdoc research fellow at CAST, IT Rebecca Uchill is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology and HTC. An art historian and independent curator, her research has been awarded fellowship support from the Social Science Research Council, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the New England Society of Architectural Historians, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. Uchill has worked in various capacities at institutions including the Decordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the List Visual Arts Center, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Mass MoCA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Abrons Arts Center. She was formerly program committee co-chair for the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art. She is co-founder of the event-based-research/curatorial collective Experience Economies. She has produced projects with Tania Bruguera, Theaster Gates, Ernesto Neto, Tea Mäkipää, Atelier van Lieshout, Mary Walling Blackburn, David Levine, spurse, and others, focusing on interdisciplinary encounters between artists and scholars of the sciences and humanities, often outside of gallery environments. Rania Ghosn, Professor in Architecture at MIT Rania Ghosn is partner of Design Earth and assistant professor of architecture and urbanism at Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture + Planning. Her work critically frames the urban condition at the intersection of politics, aesthetics and technological systems - be they energy, trash, or farming. Rania holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a Master in Geography from University College London, and a Bachelor of Architecture from American University of Beirut. She is editor of New Geographies 2: Landscapes of Energy (Harvard GSD, 2010) and co-author of Geographies of Trash (Actar, 2015). Some of her recent writings and projects have been published in Journal of Architectural Education, MONU, Thresholds, Bracket, and Perspecta. 35
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WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO
Nomeda Urboniene, Research Affiliate Madeleine Gallagher, Media Associate Seth Avecilla, Fabrication Associate John Steiner, Media Associate Jim Harrington, Facilities Manager Marion Cunningham, Administrative Officer Andrew Barosy, Financial Assistant David Roberts, External Consultant Peter Moriaty, External Consultant 39
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