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Call for applications – Master of Public Art Studies Program at USC:

Art/Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Roski School of Fine Arts

Call for Applications

Application Deadline for the 2010-2011 Academic Year: March 1, 2010

Director: Joshua Decter

Roski School of Fine Arts University of Southern California Watt Hall 104 University Park Campus Los Angeles, CA 90089-0292 Telephone: 213 743 8540 Fax: 213 743 4563

http://roski.usc.edu/pas

Wim Dries, the new mayor of the city of Genk – where our research group is situated – organized a speech for some leading persons in the factory building of car brand Ford. The factory was the location for an official event of more than 550 persons, an ideal space for a speech about work and business. It is also an important statement by the mayor to bring all these important people to Ford, because there has been some discussions going on about the future of the organisation in Genk.

The mayor used the multitouch table we have been designing/rethinking with Z33 and EDM (University Hasselt) for some years now in the framwork of an EFRO research project, under the name ‘Creating Spaces‘. It was nice to see our table “at work” in this different context.

Participatiewiki is a new Belgian online platform designed to exchange knowledge and practices around the theme of participation. It wants to adress everybody, citizens and professionals, engaged or interested in participatory processes. The wiki – in Dutch – gathers a lot of interesting material, worth looking at and contributing to.

Great initiative by De Wakkere Burger, Sociumi, Stichting Lodewijk de Raet and SoCiuS. We will certainly try to contribute via the design and research of new imaginative and stimulating tools for participatory processes.

More information on the e-culture blog.

9 > 14 FEB 2010
STUK arts centre Leuven – Belgium

http://www.artefact-festival.be/  

In On Gaps and Silent Documents international artists question the absence of documents and data in archives, data banks and memory. What is missing? Has it never been there or has it been removed? Does available information exist that is not looked at, read or used? Archives and data banks are primarily determined by these gaps and silent documents. As Sven Spieker notes, “Archives are less concerned with memory than with the necessity to discard, erase, eliminate.” Creating archives is continual selection. As such, it reveals the priorities and blind spots of the keeper of the archives, his world and his time.

Since the beginning of time, ‘forgetting’ was always the norm. ‘Remembering’ was the exception. In this age of continuously transforming technology and worldwide networks, this balance seems to be shifting. Is it true that in our time, with its excessive storage capacity, everything is obsessively being saved? More and more, we face the question of whether we have the right to create our own gaps, to silence documents and erase our own traces. Privacy, intellectual property and censorship in our digital networked society require different and complex solutions.

On Gaps and Silent Documents uses ‘new’ and ‘old’ media and technologies, such as the Internet, websites, Google, newspapers, texts, books, film and video, photography, music scores, sound, telephones, Twitter, online newsgroups, printers, microfilm, light, computers, etc., to approach this theme from different (sometimes paradoxical) perspectives and question it in spatial installations, presentations and performances.

Artefact is initiated by provincie Vlaams-Brabant and STUK arts centre

TrAIN/University of the Arts London - The Afterlives of Monuments Conference – 29&30 April 2010

This two day conference, including an evening lecture event on Thursday 29 April, brings together leading scholars from within and outside South Asia to create an international forum to debate the status and survivals of key markers in the colonial and post- colonial histories and spaces of South Asia. Speakers consider the ‘afterlives’ of monuments, variously addressing 3 key questions relevant globally as well as locally: what makes a monument, under what conditions does it endure and for whom? They address how monuments have been reinvented and transformed for a succession of presents, for changing audiences and diverse communities. As one identifies, ‘the memorial can only survive through reinvention’.

Architecture, sculpture, popular culture – monuments are multi-dimensional and multi-media, and speakers are from anthropology, art history, media studies, architecture, the museum world, and contemporary artistic practice. The period considered is from 1850s to the present. South Asian examples and settings are contextualised with a comparator of Ottoman monuments to explore the links between the afterlives of monuments and the aftermaths of empires. The conference aims to engage transnational, cross-cultural histories and interdisciplinary approaches, to scrutinise the vast diversity of monuments (and conceptions of monuments) in South Asia in the past and the present, and to test whether and to what extent South Asian examples demand not only a challenge to western paradigms but the creation of new conceptual models and theories.

Speakers include Tapati Guha Thakurta, Zeynep Çelik, Gayatri Sinha, Raminder Kaur-Kahlon, Clare Harris and Adam Hardy.

The conference will take place at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. For a full list of speakers, more information, ticket prices or to reserve seats, please contact e.broer@chelsea.arts.ac.uk