Current Initiatives
ART+CALIFORNIA: CALIFORNIA-CENTRIC EMBEDDED ARTS RESEARCH
With an eye to California’s diverse landscape and the complex relationship between its natural and developed spaces, UCIRA’s Art+California initiative provides opportunities for artists to investigate the radically diverse terrains of the state. New modes of visual and material translation are encouraged.
- Los Angeles Urban Rangers: Access UC-NRS: Research in the Expanded Field. The Los Angeles Urban Rangers have developed guided hikes, campfire talks, field kits, and other interpretive tools to spark creative explorations of everyday habitats, in their home megalopolis of Los Angeles and beyond. This multi-year residency places the collective, comprised of artists, historians, geographers and organizers, within the UC Natural Reserve System to assess the potential for enhanced engagement by UC artists with this significant resource.
- Cole Akers and Catherine Liu: Learning from Irvine or the Laboratory of the Ordinary. William Pereira, chief architect of the Irvine Master plan originally envisioned closely grouped commercial, residential, and leisure spaces organized around the new University of California campus, a plan that Pereira believed would “restore the land to the pedestrian.” The subsequent development of the Irvine Ranch has played a critical role in the postwar economic and social evolution of Southern California and, arguably, planned communities internationally. Learning from Irvine will be a site-specific exhibition and series of workshops and panels that investigate the architecture and built environment of Orange County.
- Jeremy Fisher: UC Studio – Envisioning an Ecological Field Station for the 21st Century. Project 1 of Integrated Design: Education in Action [IDEA], a student-lead interdisciplinary design group at UC Berkeley. The goal of the group is to research and apply Integrated Design methodologies with a focus on the built environment and real-world design challenges; this project focuses on the production of design/build studios at a the Blue Oak Ranch Natural Reserve.
- Kenneth Rogers: Off Peak. Off Peak is a collaborative public practice project centered around oil field remediation of the Inglewood Oil Field in Los Angeles, in collaboration with Bulbo, the Tijuana- and Los Angeles-based media collective.
- Kim Yasuda and Seetha Raghupathy: Proximity Research, Isla Vista, CA. Part of a multi-year arts initiative designed to engage the student-dominated community of Isla Vista, this project focused on researching campus/community dynamics through the lens of urban planning, experimental geography and public art. The end result is a dynamic mapping system designed to illuminate social and cultural traffic patterns, as well as to foster partnerships and programming opportunities for a broad array of stakeholders. Using emergent participatory technologies, this local demonstration project is a test-bed for a UC Proximity Research Laboratory, embedding arts research in the areas surrounding the system’s diverse campus geographies and proximities (suburban, urban, agrarian, bordered), and providing new ways to animate California’s complex, post-war development history.
ART+EXCHANGE: NEW MODELS OF VALUE EXCHANGE
Artists have long been involved in creating participatory practices based on new models of evaluating both production and capital. Current economic conditions have precipitated a resurgence of forms of collectivism, exchange and ‘anticipatory’ practices, i.e. those that seek to imagine and address possible future economic and social modalities. UCIRA supports artists from across the UC system as they enter into situated partnerships with collectives, institutions and agencies working to explore new methods of value and idea exchange.
- Beyond Protest: Considering the UC Strike – with Dmitri Vilensky (Chto Delat?) and Brian Holmes. In March of 2010, Dmitri Vilensky and Brian Holmes considered the upcoming March 4 UC strike and its repercussions for the state of California education. Vilensky joined Alejandro Casazi and Harry Reese on March 4 at the UCSB print studio for a ‘print-in’ in conjunction with the UC Strike, and later lead a seminar with the student-run publication WORD: the Isla Vista Arts and Culture Magazine.
- Daniel Tucker: editor, SOTA. UC State of the Arts/SOTA is an irregular publication dedicated to documenting and fostering communication in the arts across the University of California system. Through interviews, Q+A sessions and formal written statements and papers, SOTA brings visibility and connectivity to arts practitioners and their research at each campus across the UC system. In addition to serving as a networking and documenting tool, SOTA is emerging as resource to assist those wanting to connect with their peers and colleagues in other parts of the UC system around pertinent issues. SOTA’s inaugural topic of discussion, “Pubic Ed and the Public Good”, brings together concerns about the value of arts and education with those revolving around an uncertain economic future. See http://ucsota.wordpress.com/.
- Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski: Signal Traffic: Art, Infrastructure, and Geography. In order to develop the multi-year Signal Traffic project, this workshop will bring together leading scholars and artist in the fields of Media Studies, Art, Communication, and Geography to discuss new artistic strategies and conceptual models for thinking about infrastructure and processes of signal distribution, which have long been dominated by fields such as engineering and urban planning. The workshop participants will develop a set of innovative methodologies for the conceptualization and representation of media infrastructures that constitute the key technological sub-structures supporting global culture, including fiber-optic cables, satellites, the Internet, and other data transmission systems.
ART+SCIENCE: RE-NEGOTIATING THE ART/SCIENCE PARADIGM
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 re-contextualize the work of scientists, encouraging alternative investigative methods and oblique approaches to problem solving. UCIRA will support art/science and artist/scientist collaborative configurations designed to facilitate new, hybrid, and fusion models of exchange, co-creation and research practice.
- Victoria Vesna – Bio/Art course – Winter 2010. Bio-Tech and Art, a UCIRA-supported system-wide course offering, was designed to explore how Bioartists use cells, DNA molecules, proteins, and living tissues to bring to life ethical, social, and aesthetic issues of the sciences. Students investigated how bioart blurs distinctions between science and art through the combination of artistic and scientific processes, all the while creating wide public debate.
- Joseph Dumit: Expressing the CAVES: Art & Science in 3D Immersive Dialogue. Expressing the CAVES will bring together 18 artists, computer scientists and researchers to spend a day exploring new models of experiencing a 3D immersive environment, new ways of designing interactions with technology, and new artistic and art-sciences possibilities with it.
- Meredith Drum: Fishing: A Playable Possible Future. Fishing: A Playable Possible Future is a playable narrative documentary concerned with the declining global fish population; a food shortage issue with potential dire consequences for humans and the ecosystem.
- Lisa Jevbratt: The Interspecies Project. A collaborative project with Dr. Toni Frohoff, a Santa Barbara-based behavioral and wildlife biologist, and the dolphins in the Santa Barbara Channel. This project featured an Animal Communication workshop with Barbara Janelle and an overnight student fieldtrip to the Santa Cruz Island Reserve as well as lecture/projects with the Santa Barbara Bird Farm.
- API [Arctic Perspective Initiative]: Marko Peljhan, Matthew Biederman. Arctic Perspective highlights the cultural, geopolitical and ecological significance of the Arctic and its indigenous cultures. API aims to empower local citizens of the North via open source infrastructures, such as data sharing, environmental monitoring, and communications technologies. In collaboration with the communities of Igloolik, Kinngait, Iqaluit, Mittimatalik and Kanngiqtugaapik in Nunavut, Canada, artists and architects are devising a mobile media and living unit and systems infrastructure that is powered by renewable energy sources. The unit will be used by the Inuit and other arctic peoples for creative processes, communications and citizen environmental monitoring while moving, living, and working on the land away from established settlements.