Welcome to the Generative Conversations web exhibition.
In spring 2009 smudge studio orchestrated a collaboration among 16 artists, art educators, museum educators, and media designers whose works address natural, built, and virtual environments.
During the three-week long web event entitled: Artists + Environments: Generative Practices and Conversations, collaborators experimented with and creatively responded to five gestures (drawn from the Walker Art Center's "Elements and Principles of Today's Art') that shape contemporary art: hybridity, time, space, performance, and appropriation.
On March 26, 2009, smudge studio took the results to graduate students in Penn State’s School of Visual Arts “Web 2.0 Pedagogies” class, taught by Karen Keifer-Boyd. There, Karen and her students helped design this web exhibition during a charrette facilitated by smudge. (View a slideshow from the charrette here.)
You can view the project's press release and description here.
An echogram of 3 km of ice and the underlying
landscape, made with radar from a Twin Otter plane
flying over the ice fields of Antarctica, superimposed
with the echocardiogram of the pilot.
During the charrette with students at Penn State, we imagined:
How might we give Generative Conversations a dynamic image of itself?
The three charrette groups developed three poetic metaphors for the web exhibition design:
echo: in a generative conversation, one person sends out ideas that propagate in multiple directions and then come back changed by others in the conversation.
cultural hybridity: contemporary artists who are responding to natural and built environments work not only across media and geographies--but also across social and cultural difference.
ecotone/riparian zone: as a rich and vibrant zone of interdisciplinary exchange, artists + environments resembles an ecotone (a transition area between two adjacent ecological communities) or a riparian zone (the interface between land and a stream).
We used the students' ideas to shape the exhibition that follows.
We poetically pair image and text to create echoes, resonances, and productive juxtapositions. We link text excerpts back to the Generative Conversations blog to create an ecotone between the exhibition and the blog, and echoes among the collaborators, their work, the cultural contexts they are working within, and the emerging field. You can follow text links to explore their broader contexts. Each section that follows is composed through a theme derived in relation to the idea of cultural hybridity--artists and institutions taking up one another's ideas, tools, processes, histories.
Scroll right to explore the exhibition. Click and scroll the small images to create echoes. All text and images are interactive.
video above: students at the Penn State charrette explain the concept of the echo
