Background: UCIRA has undergone a series of transformations from its inception in 1987 as an Intercampus Arts Program charged with the task of bringing visiting artists to UC campuses to its current incarnation as the only state-wide Multi-campus Research Program dedicated to the support and promotion of arts research throughout the UC system. Each phase in its development has involved an expansion, not just in the level of institutional support from UCOP and in the scope of its programmatic responsibilities and sphere of action, but also of the conceptual framework in which the arts and their role in the world’s largest public research university are defined and understood. With more than 1000 UC artists/researchers currently employed, the UC system is home to the largest group of nationally and internationally recognized artists anywhere in the world. UC is also a leader in interdisciplinary practices linking research in the arts and science, arts and technology, arts and the environment, arts and digital media, and arts and the public sphere. UCIRA is well aware that this system-wide strength requires a centralized support structure in order to promote research excellence, knowledge exchange and enhance the public profile and visibility of research taking place within and across the system.
We envision a UC Institute for Research in the Arts that embodies the following principles and practices:
Our vision of UCIRA takes the current structure of the Institute, its key goals and portfolio of awards as a point of departure. In 2005, UCIRA introduced new awards categories, focusing our funding on Action Research projects, Individual and Collaborative Demonstration Projects and Innovative Residencies. In 2006 we introduced small grants in the Open Classroom Challenge and Undergraduate Action Research categories. In 2008, UCIRA refined its call for applications with the goal of providing a more sustained and comprehensive support mechanism for projects supported by the Institute and to help ensure that funded projects have the greatest possible visibility and public impact. Funding is offered to proposals in disciplinary clusters on a two-year alternating cycle, with Visual Arts Practice and Research, and Emerging Fields funded in the 2008-2009 call; and Performance Practice and Research and Literature funded in the 2009-2010 cycle. In keeping with the mission of the Institute, UCIRA funding is intended to support projects, both individual and collaborative, that represent the most innovative and relevant arts research taking place within the UC system. We continue to have an interest in work that encourages curricular development and innovative resource-sharing within individual campuses and/or across two or more UC campuses, as well as expanded praxis/participation-oriented proposals in which UC faculty and/or students partner as co-researchers and co-learners with representatives from a broad range of off-campus communities, organizations and agencies.
New Programs and Initiatives for the 2009-2014 period: A socially-engaged and interrogative arts research practice is the cornerstone of UCIRA’s vision and mandate for the next five years, with a commitment to developing innovative support mechanisms designed to reflect this vision. Three thematic areas will be piloted during this period:
With an eye to California’s diverse landscape and the often-embattled relationship between its natural and developed spaces, UCIRA will provide opportunities for artists to investigate the radically diverse terrains of the state. Embedding artists within various California institutions and field contexts provides support for arts researchers interested in topics as diverse as agriculture, land and water use, emergent technologies and new forms of knowledge production and practice. New modes of visual and material translation will be encouraged, such as experimental cartography (which provides a critical foundation for an area of work that bridges art/design, cartography/geography and activism), eco-literacy (understanding the principles of ecosystems and using those principles for creating sustainable human communities), and urban pedagogy (bringing together art and design professionals with community-based advocates, organizers, government officials, service-providers and policymakers to create projects that present the possibility for new forms of knowledge production). UCIRA has formed partnerships with the Desert Studies program at the UC Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center, the Art of Regional Change at UC Davis, the UC Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine, the Visual Arts and Public Cultures program at UC San Diego, and the UC Berkeley Institute of the Environment. Through this initiative, UCIRA will also facilitate the means for artists to conduct research within the 36 sites of the UC Natural Reserve System, offering interpretive platforms for arts-centered research as well as opportunities for collaboration with the natural and social sciences. UCIRA will expand upon related partnership opportunities with institutions outside the UC system, such as the Los Angeles-based Center for Land Use Interpretation and F.A.R. @ ASU, a groundbreaking program of the University of Arizona concerned with engaging artists with both the University and the greater community.
Throughout history, artists have created new forms of collective practice that enable them to work and operate in the most difficult and challenging economic and societal conditions. From the historical avant-gardes – with their systems of innovative and integrative educational, research and presentation models, through the productivist period in Russian constructivism, which created methodologies for art, life and societal integration on an unprecedented ideological and philosophical scale, to collective post-war visionary efforts such as Black Mountain College, the Situationist International and the conceptual art and art/life movements of the 60’s and 70’s – to current open source/open knowledge systems enabled by the network paradigm shift in the 90’s, artists have created participatory practices based on new models of evaluating production and capital. Current economic conditions have precipitated a re-emergence of such forms of collectivism, exchange and ‘anticipatory’ practices, i.e. those that seek to imagine and address possible future economic and social modalities. UCIRA will establish opportunities for artists from across the UC system to enter into situated partnerships with artists, artists’ collectives and other agencies/ institutions in these and related areas of inquiry in order to explore new methods of value and idea exchange necessary to navigate a rapidly evolving 21st century environment. UCIRA has begun exploring possibilities for situated exchange with various artists collectives and non-profits, among them the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (Los Angeles) Public Architecture (San Francisco) Chto Delat (St. Petersburg) and the arts-centered, community organizing project, AREA of Chicago.
Artists generate unconventional and imaginative knowledge systems that emerge from aesthetic reflection and risk-taking processes. Their creative energies and skills can be used to catalyze, visualize and recontextualize the work of scientists, encouraging alternative investigative methods and oblique approaches to problem solving. UCIRA will support a rt/s cience and a rtist/scientist collaborative configurations designed to facilitate new, hybrid, and fusion models of exchange, co-creation and research practice. This will take place through targeted partnerships and program funding via UC science centers and focus on the public presentation of collaborative research results. Outreach to a public understanding of science through the arts, and a public understanding of the arts through science, has been a missing link in public education in the U.S. for a very long time. UCIRA will support the investigation of new collaborative models through several partnerships: with the UCLA Art/Sci Center, a premier hub for the presentation, aggregation and reflection of Art/Science based work, and with other UC–based art/science centers including CalIT2 at UCSD and UCI, the CNSI (California Nanosystems Institute)at UCSB and UCLA, and both the Marine Science Institute and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB. Integral to this particular initiative is the fact that UC faculty appointments in digital and media arts over the past fifteen years have created unparalleled strengths in connecting the arts to science research. UC has created a premier, international program in art and technology with a network of faculty drawn from across the globe that now constitutes the most important center for new media research in the world. This UCIRA initiative and its proposed Art/Science connection will foster further development of the digital arts and pioneering work in new technologies in California. Given the ubiquitous presence and innate capacity of technology to link communities, UCIRA should encourage the use of new technology to connect artists on UC campuses in virtual collaboratories and global networks, yielding a more effective means of research dissemination.
UCIRA State of the Arts Conference
We will continue to host the major, annual conference organized by UCIRA: State of the Arts. This conference addresses practical and policy issues confronting artists, arts administrators, and educators. At the same time, it challenges and moves beyond conventional academic conference formats by showcasing new work in the arts and new approaches to arts education. It serves as a forum for presenting the results of numerous UCIRA Arts Research initiatives, combining elements of arts festival and conference, and bringing together UC artists, policy makers, and arts educators with the broader public. This conference serves as a prominent public face of our UC programming.
UCIRA Organization and Structure
UCIRA will continue under the Directorship of Kim Yasuda (Professor of Art and current co-Director of UCIRA) and Marko Peljhan (Associate Professor of Art and Media Arts & Technology and current co-Director of UCIRA) as well as in its affiliation with both the UC Santa Barbara Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, whose school has a strong tradition of supporting innovative research in the arts, and interdisciplinary configurations between the humanities, sciences, engineering and social sciences. The UCIRA Policy Board provides a critical link to the multi-campus network through its membership of 18 scholars and administrators from each of the 10 UC campuses with 4 additional positions on the board reserved for advisors from outside the UC system who are well-respected experts in the field and whose involvement connects the work of UC artists to expanded regional, national and global discourses. The talents of Associate Director Dr. Holly Unruh, and Program Coordinator ZouZou Chapman also serve UCIRA. Unruh holds a Ph.D. in Art History from UC Santa Barbara and has taught Art History and Cultural Studies at the University level. She has been active in developing University-Community partnerships through her work with UCIRA, the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission, and the Santa Barbara Cultural Development Foundation. ZouZou Chapman is an award-winning practicing artist who studied art formally at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia where she graduated with a B.B.A. in Marketing. She has an extensive background in arts administration including curatorial and exhibition management, development, and programming.
Key Achievements of the 2005-2009 period:
In 2005, the UC Santa Barbara campus was successful in its bid to host UCIRA. Since that time the Institute has launched new initiatives each year aimed at furthering its reach and mission.
Year 1: In the 2005-2006 year, the UCIRA co-Directors visited each of the UC campuses to inventory and evaluate individual arts program strengths and needs, recognizing the distinction they bring to the system wide arts profile. The Institute’s advisory board was expanded with comprehensive campus representation and the inclusion of 4 non-UC experts, and new awards categories were developed, extending the vision of arts practice as research and integrated arts programming system-wide.
Thirteen awards were made that year in the revised grant categories, among them the ACM Interdisciplinary Digital Media Arts Exhibition (UCSB), Young Caesar: New Directions in Contemporary Opera (UCI), CALIFEST Hip-Hop Theatre Festival (UCR), the Lui Velasquez (Tijuana)/UC Residency Program (UCSD), Food Forever (which led to the major international conference Bioneering: Hybrid Investigations of Food, UCI), and the SoCCAS/ Southern California Consortium of Art Schools annual conference and exhibition (UCLA).In Spring of that year UCIRA organizee the first State of the Arts conference at UC Santa Barbara with a thematic focus on Action Research in the Arts; New Collaborative Models, Partnerships and Residencies; Building Research, Housing the Arts; and Cross-Cuts: Art/Science/Technology. California Lawyers for the Arts Director, Alma Robinson, delivered the Keynote address. Local community program co-organizers included the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Isla Vista Arts. Conference events showcased major new projects, including the international mobile technology lab, Makrolab, by artist Marko Peljhan, Open Container, a shipping container re-use renovation into sculpture by UCSB art students, film-screening of Rancho California by artist John Caldwell and a site-specific collaborative performance, The Monument Project directed by MacArthur award-winning playwright Luis Alfaro.
Year 2: 2006-2007 began with the publication of the proceedings of the first annual State of the Arts conference. UCIRA co-Directors continued the practice of campus visits and commenced work on many of the goals and priorities that emerged out of those conversations, such as the facilitation of greater connectivity and coordination across and between campuses, establishing mechanisms for information-sharing and the creation of a promotional platform for arts programming throughout the system, and offering expanded and more flexible residency opportunities for UC faculty and visiting artists.The 2007 State of the Arts conference took place at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive with a focus on the digital arts. This provided a broad umbrella under which to consider the digital mediation of performance, space, sound and other embodied practices. In 2007 the UCIRA Undergraduate Action Research grants were introduced to support arts and cultural projects with the capacity to have a significant impact on campus/community life. UCIRA also launched the Open Classroom Challenge, a grant line that grew out of a classroom demonstration project Open Container – a class taught jointly by Professors Kim Yasuda and Dick Hebdige. In this course, students transformed two shipping containers into a modular dwelling unit. A third container served as exhibition space for the proposed design prototypes. The course was a research and studio exploration of the transportable and residential mobility of container culture. UCIRA then offered 3 grants of $5000 each to facilitate equally active research experiments at other campuses, with a focus on projects that engaged creatively with real world issues in the classroom that expanded and transformed the teaching/learning environment.In total, UCIRA funded 23 projects this fiscal year, including the UC Berkeley “Continuous City” Project, Galleon Trade (UCLA), Who’s Hungry? (UCLA), Compass 2007: New Art from the University of California's MFA Programs (UCR); and TRANSITOry PUBLICO | PUBLIC TRANSITorio/The Political Equator II (UCSD).
Year 3: 2007-2008 Campus-based demonstration projects have been the method by which we test new modes of arts practice and research; they have lead to new system-wide grant lines, established relationships with arts institutions, both local, national and international; have modeled new ways of making community connections, and have moved the arts into the center of community dialogues. With the receipt of an Imagining America Critical Exchange grant (UC Santa Barbara/Auburn University), this year’s demonstration projects were focused on container architecture and re-use, an area of interest in 2006-2007 which was expanded nationally and into the local community through local educational partnerships. UCIRA launched its mobile arts labs – an ongoing community project that converts shipping containers into 'mobile arts labs', takes those labs to schools and community centers to provide arts experiences for underserved youth, and employs professional artists in residence at each site. The culmination of the year’s focus was an 2-day international conference, The Traveling Box: Containers as the Global Icon of our Era, hosted at UC Santa Barbara in conjunction with the Center for Work, Labor and Democracy. Proceedings of the conference are forthcoming from New Press. In the 2007-2008 year UCIRA also received several grants from the Redevelopment Agencies of the City and County of Santa Barbara for a City-wide arts sustainability study and re-granting program, and a façade-makeover for an Isla Vista business (undertaken by a UC Santa Barbara Art class). 23 grants were awarded in this cycle, among them We are Stardust (George Legrady) – created in software that allows for 3- D visualization of data gathered by NASA scientists through the infra-red Spitzer Orbiting Telescope; the GreenScreen Environmental Media Program (UCSB); Strong! (Julie Wyman, UCD) and the residency of Pauline Malefane, opera star of the South African film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (UCB).
Year 4: 2008-2009 A third system-wide State of the Arts conference which focused on the theme Demonstration took place at UC Riverside in November, 2008. Featured speakers included UC Arts Deans in conversation about the future of art in the Academy, Bruce Fergusen of F.A.R@ASU, and Clementine Deliss (Future Art Academy, Edinburgh College of Art). UCIRA also hosted a special technical assistance workshop focused on changes to the Institute’s grant lines. In February, UCIRA launched a new residency program aimed at connecting artists with the University of California’s many resources, including the Natural Reserve System. In collaboration with the UC Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center, UCIRA hosted a four-day residency in the Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center in Palm Desert. A second low-residency workshop followed at the UC Santa Barbara Coal Oil Point Reserve. UCIRA Directors also met with representatives from the Mclaughlin Reserve, Quail Ridge Reserve and Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve to explore the potential of artists to engage and interpret their research through residency at these sites. In addition, UCIRA worked with the UC Santa Barbara Arts Research Initiative on 3 programs exploring innovations in teaching and learning through artist residency. At the 2008 College Art Association conference in Los Angeles, UCIRA co-Director Kim Yasuda lead a panel, Relocating Art + Its Public, which focused on a key area of concern to UCIRA in the coming 5-year period: Social Technologies, new models of value exchange. This panel examined how, through unofficiated means, artists themselves are developing and negotiating their own configurations of public engagement, creating new venues for the circulation and presentation of their work while addressing their audiences in more direct and innovative ways. Several UCIRA key partners were invited to participate in this panel including Christina Ulke of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and Daniel Tucker of AREA Chicago. 2008 also saw UCIRA testing urban pedagogy as a research methodology. Professor Kim Yasuda completed a multi-year initiative, the Downtown Pardall Corridor Renovation, a public art program supported and funded by the County Redevelopment Agency, which engaged students in a community design process and series of demonstration projects that served as a test site for student-artists to investigate their role within the University and its situated relationship within the youth-dominated, suburban community of Isla Vista. UCIRA has recently secured special initiative funding for a year-long designer/planner in residence who will continue to work on issues specific to the locality of Isla Vista under the auspices of the California-centric embedded arts research initiative. Resident planner Seetha Raghupathy will begin a year-long appointment in May, 2009. A Harvard Graduate in Urban Planning trained in housing/planning issues in India, Boston and South Africa with a commitment to public and local/regional community design, Seetha will oversee the evolution of University-Community design partnerships that will investigate the township of Isla Vista as a particular case study for the initiation of a series of affordable housing workshops and projects. These regional forms of project demonstration launched at UCIRA's UC Santa Barbara campus hub provide tangible case studies that are modeled and disseminated through our system-wide network to foster new forms of research that expand the arts into new disciplinary configurations.