What is research?
What is design?
How do you move from one state to the other? Which methods are used?
How do you teach research [inquiry-methods-implementation]?
Planning ahead we are happy to announce the upcoming ArrayList discussion theme:
Research, Methods, Design starts May 1, 2016
ArrayList series details here: http://arrayproject.com/content/discussion
Subscribe here: https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/arraylist
The purpose of the ArrayList year-long++ series is to connect artists, designers, educators, theorists, producers, activists, and organizers while facilitating critical discussion about foundation level [entryways] pedagogy and context (both inside and outside traditional academic structures). While our focus is on use of media practices, all creative activities necessitate inquiry/process beyond the specific constraints of form/format. This month we talk research, methods, design. Guests have expertise/active practice in architecture and urban ecology, interactive media, education, farming, anthropology, curriculum, community engagement. All teach. As always we hope to engage a wide range of critical perspectives so please chime in with thoughts and questions. Lurkers are welcome. We are happy to help with the subscription process. Subscribers have full access to the monthly archives.
Sincerely, ARRAY[ ] founders
j.duran, Adam Trowbridge, Jessica Parris Westbrook
MAY GUEST THREAD LEADER BIOS
Brendan Albano (researcher, architect, programmer)
Brendan Albano is fascinated by buildings, building performance, performance art, and urban ecology. He works at an architecture firm in Chicago and has taught computer programming to architecture students and worked at a lab as a programmer on building performance simulation related projects. Albano received a BFA in Visual Art, University of British Columbia, 2011 and an M.Arch with Emphasis in Interior Architecture, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2015.
Bonnie Fortune (researcher, teaching artist, Oak Farm Montessori School)
Bonnie Fortune is a multi-skilled teaching artist. Her work focuses on collaborative projects dealing with themes of environmental and social justice. Her art work has been shown at the Smart Museum (Chicago), the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Roskilde Museum for Contemporary Art, and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (Nashville), among other locations. Additionally, she makes public projects for municipalities, such as Bat House, an ecological habitat project for the city of Urbana, IL created in collaboration with Brett Bloom. Her writing is also published with make/shift:feminisms in motion and AREA:Chicago (Art, Research, Education, Activism). Fortune has received artist grants from the Statens Kunstråd of Denmark, City of Urbana, the Gender Equity Council at the University of Illinois, and the Nashville Cultural Arts Project. Her curatorial work around feminist health, EveryBody!: Feminist Health 1969-2009, has been noted by the New York Times. She recently published An Edge Effect: Art & Ecology in the Nordic Landscape (Half Letter Press, 2014) an anthology of edited interviews, essays, and case studies surveying environmental art in Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Fortune currently works at Oak Farm Montessori School in Indiana.
Maria Gaspar (community organizer, School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. She has presented her work at The MCA Chicago, Jane Addams Hull House Museum, the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, the Alpineum Produzentengalerie, and Artspace New Haven, amongst others. Recently, Gaspar was awarded a Creative Capital Award, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Award, the National Museum of Mexican Art Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award, and residencies at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago and Project Row Houses in Houston. She was featured in the Chicago Tribune as Chicagoan of the Year in the Visual Arts in 2014. She is an Assistant Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Gaspar received her MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Gaspar teaches first year research and studio courses in the Department of Contemporary Practices at SAIC.
Katie Hargrave (The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)
Katie Hargrave is an artist, interested in a poetic and quiet activism that can exist within the history and politics of life in the United States. “Each day the decisions, thoughts and actions we make accrue meaning. It is rarely evident and often hard to imagine, but these tiny moments that fill up our past collectively create our current realities. Using archival and community-sourced research, I make artworks that ideally allow the audience to see themselves as shapers of systems as broad as the environment, the historical record, American political thought. We all have power; we all own this history. I create physical and metaphorical platforms in my installations—from newspapers to dinner tables to stages for participation. My process begins with a story, a site, or a question; develops with visits to local libraries, county fairs, and historical sites; and is complicated by interviewing locals and questioning so-called experts. The outcome of my research varies in every project, including fiber, performance, printed matter, installation, sound, and video. Regardless of the media I use, I ask viewers to write their part of the story rather than simply observing. I invite them to become performers having conversations at dinner parties, waving flags, playing games, or planting a tree. Together, we can complicate and unpack the narratives of everyday life and begin to realize that the construction of history is made up of precious fragments that can be reordered in any way we like.” Hargrave is Assistant Professor and Foundations Coordinator at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She received an MFA, from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, 2012.
Randall Szott (researcher, farmer)
Randall Szott conducts mystic experiments in divination (writing), conjuration (design), evocation (aesthetics), transmutation (cooking), illusion (philosophy), and enchantment (regenerative agriculture) in a small grey house in a small Vermont town. He was a merchant mariner for nearly a decade and now is the Chef and Farm to School Coordinator for a tiny village school. Szott is currently developing a ten acre parcel of land into a functioning agroecological system and as a possible site for ongoing seminars in #soilpractice + #socialpractice. He holds an MFA in art critical practices from The Ohio State University, an MA in Interdisciplinary Art from San Francisco State University, and a BA in Liberal Arts with a philosophy minor from the University of Central Florida.
Brad Tober (designer, educator, and researcher)
Brad Tober is a designer, educator, and researcher whose work investigates the potential relationships of emerging code-based and interactive visual communication technologies to both design practice and pedagogy. His practice-led research entity, the Experimental Interface Lab, is characterized by a speculative approach to design that recognizes that forms of and methodologies for contemporary practice that spans design and technology are best developed through flexible and exploratory processes. Brad holds an MDes from York University (Canada), a BFA in graphic design from the Savannah College of Art and Design (USA), and a BA in mathematics from the University at Buffalo (USA).
Jeff Thompson (artist/designer, programmer, Stevens Institute of Technology)
Jeff Thompson (jeffreythompson.org / @jeffthompson_) is an artist, programmer, hacker, and educator based in the NYC area. He received his BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and his MFA from Rutgers University, and is currently Assistant Professor and Program Director of Visual Art & Technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Thompson has exhibited and performed his work at venues including the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheldon Museum of Art, the Taubman Museum of Art, SITE Santa Fe, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Jersey City Museum, and the Weisman Art Museum. Recent commissions include Abandon Normal Devices, Brighton Digital Festival, Rhizome, Turbulence, and Harvestworks. In addition to his studio practice, Thompson curates exhibitions through Drift Station, a curatorial collaboration that mounts international, experimental exhibitions.
Adam Trowbridge (designer/programmer, Channel TWo)
Adam Trowbridge is currently considering and researching the potential for inhumane interfaces to promote conceptual awareness of computational and critical thinking.
Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall (Design Anthropologist, scholar)
Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall is a design anthropologist, researcher, academic leader, writer, and educator. She holds a PhD and an MA in Anthropology from Stanford University [1994–1999] and a BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College [1990–1994]. Tunstall is interested in human values and design as a manifestation of those values. Tunstall observes that design translates values into tangible experiences and asks others to consider what their values are. In a Design Matters interview with Debbie Millman, Tunstall describes some of the motivations underlying her research and practice. She is trying to use design and design technologies to make values more tangible and apparent to people and believes that design is not all about mass consumption and unbridled capitalism. She suggests values like equality, democracy, fairness, integration, and connection are values that, to some extent, we’ve lost and design can help make those values more tangible and ultimately express how we can use them to make the world a better place.
Meredith Warner (artist, Think Tank that has yet to be named)
Meredith Warner is a multidisciplinary artist who recently relocated to Vermont from Philadelphia. She is a founding member of the Think Tank that has yet to be named-- a collaborative practice that initiates research, conversations, and explorations of contemporary sociopolitical issues in the places where they occur. Meredith's practice is embedded in the places she lives through the study of place, landscape, site, material & community.
Jessica Parris Westbrook (graphic designer/developer, Channel TWo)
Jessica Parris Westbrook is a graphic designer and media producer interested in learning, information, experience, and misbehavior.
