NEW! UPDATED UCIRA GRANT DEADLINES

NEW! UCIRA/UCHRI Announces 2009-2010 Course Series

Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map,Dry-Immersion Roving Symposium (October 22-25, 2009)

Univeristy of California Continues Support for Arts Research and Practice

UCIRA's current initiatives

Announcing the 2009 Visual Arts Practice and Research/Emerging Fields Grantees!

Co-Director Kim Yasuda heads CAA Panel: Relocating Art + Its Public

UC Institute for Research in the Arts / UC Santa Barbara Arts Research Initiative Artists in Residence

Desert Residency February 13-16, 2009

UCIRA Conference
November 6-8, 2008
UC Riverside

The Container Project

The UCIRA provides grants to arts faculty and students for projects with the potential for significant artistic and cultural impact. We support projects that are innovative, experimental, and risk-taking in their approach to form and/or content. These may include exhibitions, performances, symposia, outreach efforts, and projects that are multidisciplinary in approach. As artistic endeavors of the highest professional caliber, UCIRA projects frequently reach audiences outside the university and involve artists and scholars from around the world. As the only state-wide organization representing the arts on the nine campuses of the UC system, UCIRA also provides information and advocacy for university-based arts education and research.

Summary of 2009-2010 UCIRA INITIATIVE-BASED DEMONSTRATION PROJECTS
Campus-based demonstration projects have been the method by which UCIRA has tested new modes of arts practice and research over the last 5 years. To launch our three new initiatives and exemplify in concrete terms what could be imagined within these frameworks, UCIRA is piloting the following demonstration projects in the 2009-2010 year.

Social Ecologies: California-centric embedded arts research
1. Los Angeles Urban Rangers - Research on the UC Natural Reserve System
2. UCIRA Desert Studies - Dick Hebdige, Project Director

1. Los Angeles Urban Rangers and the UC Natural Reserve System:
Over the next six months, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers will participate in UCIRA’s initiative to creatively explore the possibilities for arts-centered research within the University of California Natural Reserve System (NRS).

Artists in recent decades have increasingly turned to ‘the field’ as a source for primary materials as well as embodied/embedded experience and knowledge, often borrowing techniques from disciplines with well-established field traditions (e.g. geography, ethnography, the natural sciences). The LA Urban Rangers' interdisciplinary makeup and methodology naturally affiliates itself to such a site as the NRS – particularly to its potential for cultivating crosspollination among practitioners from a range of fields as well as for promoting experimental and expanded forms of learning. (Biologist Joseph Grinnell’s original vision for the NRS, after all, was that it provide the grounds for a new model of integrated scientific working-thinking.)

The group's mission is dedicated to the investigation and interpretation of everyday environments, as well as to breaking down fictions of any clean split between the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural,’ making the NRS is an especially intriguing and appropriate site for their work. Not unlike the National Park Service (from which the ranger figure derives), the NRS aims to (p)reserve a collection of intact ecosystems, or “vignettes of ideal nature,” in the words of UCSB environmental historian Peter Alagona. Unsurprisingly, heavily inhabited and/or developed areas (e.g. urban conglomerations, the Central Valley) are excluded from the system, raising provocative questions about the kinds of assumptions (e.g. about wilderness versus the city, the field versus the laboratory) that the NRS has embodied and perpetuated as it has operated in the past and present.

Los Angeles Urban Rangers (www.laurbanrangers.org) members include: Nicholas Bauch: a practicing cultural geographer and a doctoral student in the UCLA Department of Geography. Sara Daleiden: an artist, curator and organizer who focuses on participant experience through the creation of identity systems and interventions within the city. Therese Kelly: an architect, author, and editor. Her work explores the intersection of our natural and urban environments, conceptions of nature, and public space. Ron Milam: with over eleven years of successful experience in the nonprofit sector and consults for sustainability-oriented nonprofit organizations. Jennifer Price: a freelance writer and environmental historian. Emily Scott: an artist and educator whose work, within and outside of academia, explores intersections between art, geography, and the environment. Sara Wookey: an artist, choreographer and creative consultant
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2. UCIRA Desert Studies Project directed by Dick Hebdige In January 2009 the UC Institute for Research in the Arts launched the Desert Studies Project, an interdisciplinary arts-centered initiative based at UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Graduate Center. Desert Studies combines hands-on research conducted at various locations dispersed throughout California’s 25,000 square miles of ultra-arid lands. We are committed to a ‘bi-focal’ approach that links locally grounded site-specific arts-centered projects to that larger range of social, environmental, cultural and political issues that together have taken the deserts of the earth from the margins to the forefront of attention in debates in the public realm, the arts and sciences on the future of our planet. There are currently several UC student/faculty projects now under way in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts stemming from the two UCIRA-sponsored ‘dry immersion’ roaming workshops held last year. For information about the Feburary 2009 event, click here and for information about the October 2009 event, click here.

On Tuesday, February 16th, UCIRA Desert Studies Project Director, Dick Hebdige will give a talk at UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center as part of their Oil + Water series, entitled: Desert Studies: An Art-Centered Initiative (Tuesday, February 16 / 4:00 PM / McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB).

From March 5-7, 2010 UCIRA and the UCR Sweeney Art Gallery will present visual, performative, and cultural work produced by participants in the Dry Immersion Roving Symposium held October 22-25, 2009. Work will be presented in two locations – at the UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center in Palm Desert, and at the JT Getaway Ranch and The Palms in Wonder Valley. Installations, sculptures, site-specific work, performance art, sound art, and literary readings will take place in and around these locations. Click here for for a full schedule and map of events.

Social Technologies: new models of value exchange
1. Chto Delat? Residency – Part I, Beyond Protest: Considering the UC Strike
2. Daniel Tucker - UC Arts Communications/Networking Platform
3. UCIRA Think Tank Community with Stephanie Smith

1. Chto Delat Residency, Part 1 - Beyond Protest: Considering the UC Strike
Chto delat? member Dmitri Vilensky will be in residence in California from February - March, 2010 for a period of initial research at UCSD, UCLA and UCSB in partnership with the participant-run Public School in Los Angeles and Occupy Everything. Chto Delat's main area of focus will be the upcoming March 4th UC strike and its repercussions for the state of California education. Vilensky's initial residency period is timed in conjunction key Southern California events and discussions concerning the strike: a public lecture at UCSD by critic, cultural theorist and activist Brian Holmes on February 25 - Intellectuals and Social Movements: Doctrine - Debate - Defense - Invention - which is part of the UCSD Visual Arts Department's Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Public Culture in the Visual Sphere; and events planned and coordinated via the Public School and Occupy Everything including the February 27-28th Continental Drift, a nomadic seminar organized collaboratively between Brian Holmes and DIY spaces. Brian Holmes and Dmitri Vilensky will be in conversation at UCSB on Tuesday, March 2nd, 12-2pm in the IHC's McCune Conference Room (6th floor HSSB).

Chto Delat? group members will return in Fall 2010 for a period of student-led reflection and to produce a publication based on the research and events surrounding the strike in collaboration with Los Angeles based Journal of Aesthetics and Protest:

Chto delat/What is to be done? is a collective founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod (see full list of participants on the web site - www.chtodelat.org) with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. Since its inception, Chto delat has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper on issues central to engaged culture, with a special focus on the relationship between a repoliticization of Russian intellectual culture and its broader international context. These newspapers are usually produced in the context of collective initiatives such as art projects or conferences. The name of the group derives from a novel by the Russian 19th author Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and immediately brings reminiscences of the first socialist worker's self-organizations in Russia, which Lenin actualized in his "What is to be done?" (1902). Chto delat sees itself as a self-organizing platform for cultural workers intent on politicizing their "knowledge production" through reflections and redefinitions of an engaged autonomy for cultural practice today.

2. Daniel Tucker - UC Arts Communications/Networking Platform
UCIRA is dedicated to the development of new and effective models for networking and alliance-building among artists and researchers throughout the UC system. Addressing the system's lack of a coherent forum for arts writing, publication and documentation UCIRA seeks to develop a networking space outside of the academic conventions of conference convenings that helps to facilitate an ongoing reflective space for both work and discourse. Over the next year, Tucker will be working with UCIRA staff to embark on an effective print/web context for networking and documentation of the artistic research emerging from the UC system.

Daniel Tucker will bring his experience working on similar projects for arts organizations such as AREA Chicago, Creative Time, Chronicle Books and the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture to inform this work. Additionally, his experience as a communications consultant for university departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, will assist him in the specificity of the academic environment.

3. UCIRA Think Tank Community with Stephanie Smith
UCIRA has initiated the opportunity for the hosting of system-wide open courses in partnership with the UC Humanities Research Institute (www.uchri.edu) Among the first courses, ThinkTank, presented by CEO Stephanie Smith, is an open and accessible forum designed to mine the online field of social networking, posing questions to a new generation of technology users while creating innovative ways to come together, share information, collaborate and have fun - all resulting in new and innovative forms of community both online and off. This 10-week 'New Community' multi-generational think tank led by Stephanie Smith will look at new digital communities and why they matter to this and future generations of network users.

The two month online-offline workshop is open and free to the public as well as students, staff and faculty, system-wide on Fridays 1-4 pm at UC Santa Barbara between January 15 - March 12. Up to 4 units of grad/undergrad credit also available to UC participants.

Stephanie Smith is a hybrid technologist with expertise in both spatial and digital architectures and their relationship to human interface. Her expertise as the current Founder/CEO of a technology startup company (WeCommune.com) allows her to bring real-world, non-academic knowledge to this task. Smith has also been an academic (design instructor at SCI-Arc), and a consultant to large corporations including Motorola, Coca-Cola and Reebok. She has led think tanks, seminars and research projects for much of her 15-year career, beginning at Harvard where she was project leader of Rem Koolhaas’s ‘Harvard Project on the City’.

Integrative Methodologies: re-negotiating the art/science paradigm
1. UCIRA / Bio-Tech and Art systemwide course with Professor Victoria Vesna - Winter 2010
2. UCIRA / ARI (Arctic Research Initiative) Arctic Residency - Spring 2010

1. UCIRA / Bio-Tech and Art with Professor Victoria Vesna - Winter 2010
Through UCIRA's commitment to support art/science and artist/scientist collaborative configurations that facilitate new, hybrid, and fusion models of exchange, co- creation and research practice, the system wide course offering, Bio-Teach and Art with Professor Victoria Vesna, is designed to explore how Bioartists use cells, DNA molecules, proteins, and living tissues to bring to life ethical, social, and aesthetic issues of sciences. Students will investigate how bioart blurs distinctions between science and art through the combination of artistic and scientific processes, all the while creating wide public debate. Explorations into the history of biotechnology as well as the social implications of this science will be part of the course content. 4.0 units available to UC participants. Fridays, 10:00am - 12:50pm with Professor Victoria Vesna, Ph.D. (UCLA) Office hours: Mondays, 3-5pm or by appointment on skype Email: vv@ucla.edu

Dr. Victoria Vesna is an artist and chair of the department of Design | Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts. Vesna's work can be defined as experimental research that connects networked environments to physical public spaces. She explores how communication technologies effect collective behavior, and shift perceptions of identity in relation to scientific innovation. Her theoretical work deals with the history of art & computing, society and bio/ nano technology, database aesthetics. Her research is affiliated with the UCLA Art/Sci Center, a premier hub for the presentation, aggregation and reflection of Art/Science based work.

2. UCIRA / ARI (Arctic Research Initiative) Arctic Residency – Summer 2010
Residency Opportunity
UCIRA Integrative Methodologies Program

The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA - www.ucira.ucsb.edu ), in conjunction with the Arctic Perspective Initiative (API - www.arcticperspective.org), is pleased to announce a new residency opportunity for graduate and post-graduate researchers from the University of California to travel to the Arctic for a period of up to 2 weeks in August 2010.

Residency proposals are sought from graduate and postgraduate researchers interested in working with an international team of collaborators on the setup of participatory environmental sensing, aggregation, distribution and communication in the Arctic.

Up to 8 positions will be available for researchers with art/science/ technology-related proposals. Joint proposal from media artists and designers, filmmakers, writers, geographers, anthropologists, ecologists and hybrid, transdisciplinary practitioners are also encouraged. We are interested in practitioners and researchers who are able to integrate and work in teams as well as those interested in documenting the process, and further investigation/expansion of local findings.

Work emerging from the residencies could lead to a continuing involvement with API in future years and may be presented along with API projects at the Ruhr 2010 Cultural Capital of Europe project in the Phoenix Halle in Dortmund from June to October 2010.

How to apply: Please send a 3 page project proposal, cover letter and work samples (if appropriate) to:
UCIRA Attn: Integrative Methodologies Program
6046 HSSB
University of California Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara , CA 93106-7115

Deadline: April 1, 2010

Funding amount: Researchers chosen to participate in the residency will be expected to cofund their application at the rate of $1500.00 All other expenses will be covered by API and UCIRA.

About API:
The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a non-profit, international group of individuals and organizations working to bring the urgency of problems emerging in the Arctic to wide public attention: the changing cultural landscape of the region, the potential for new intercultural dialogue, conflicting economic and territorial interests, ecological problems, climate change, and the effects of ecological changes on the life of the Inuit and other circumpolar peoples. We work to promote the creation of open authoring, communications and dissemination infrastructures and to empower Arctic peoples through open source technologies and applied education and training.

Our initial project was to construct mobile, habitable living and working units which can be used to live on the land away from settlements for periods of up to two weeks, all the while remaining connected through communications technologies such as live video streaming and data connections. The units will be powered solely with renewable energy sources, and will leave virtually no adverse ecological footprint. Through these units a number of activities can be pursued; scientific monitoring, filmmaking and editing, sustainability hunting, environmental assessment, and technology research. The first prototype is scheduled to be delivered, and tested during the summer of 2010.

About the UCIRA Integrative Methodologies Initiative:
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.

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 art/science and artist/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, 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 will be a key priority.