The Sponge HQ has its first graduates. To mark the moment the space was thoroughly spring-cleaned, cake was baked and lemonade brewed with honey from the 2012 bees. A new hive, built by Eric Stepp, has been installed and awaits its next generation of occupants. In the stillness of transition we opened our doors as part of an Anderson Gallery Open Late and Richmond’s First Friday.

The past semester has been all about action beyond the space and these shores, with Hope heading to Sweden for the European Academy of Design Conference, for which Julia Hundley produced a fleet of cast foam sponges. Bundles of those forms returned felted, neatly labeled in distinctive cursive scripts and bringing home the energy and echo of these distant participants. Such exchange was also evidenced in Doha for the Tasmeem Middle East Art & Design Conference – ever more context to the evolving practice and pedagogy of the Sponge HQ, rooted so firmly back here at VCU.

Tonight there was a take-away thanks to sponge-on-sponge printing. Be it a tube, vase or antler sponge, folks went home ready to scrub with freshly emblazoned T-shirts too. On the floor Clare van Loenen’s hand-crocheted rug to gather on for the ongoing needle felting of the remaining sponge forms and plenty of continuing conversations. On screen the documentary, ‘Queen of the Sun’.

So to the bidding of farewell to the original sponge monitors 2011 to 2013 – Coleen, Julia and Riley. Whatever reef you attach to may it be part of an inspirational journey. We salute you!

Hope Ginsburg with graduating Sponge HQ monitors S. Riley Duncan, Coleen Billing and Julia Hundley and participants Colleen Brennan, Patrick Carter, JoJo Houff, Gavin Foster and Clare van Loenen. Photos by Joshua Quarles.

Back at the Sponge HQ this past Friday night we got to re-create the MoMA moment with relics and tales from Prototype for Preserving the Phylum Porifera. Performing live casting with polyurethane sponge molds, bouncy ’til cured and ready for more needle felting. Under debate – future experiments on environmental alternatives. While on the Adirondack chairs, focused felters jabbed deftly as lavender wool meshed with these fresh sponge forms.

At the heart of the space lay relics from our MoMA mission – a central plinth, filled with felted bee-boxes and assorted sponges and on our bright green walls, underwater shots of Captain Don’s reef. On screen the new video absorbed guests.

The HQ hive had ceased to buzz after multiple stresses – building work and a slight location shift for them. So Hope harvested and it was a fabulous sight – oozing, golden honey glowing in the evening lamplight and large chunks of striking geometric honey-comb heaped in buckets. Folks got to taste it all straight from the hive.

On the side, a joint potluck with Portrait as Community students and curators, Michael Lease and Yuki Hibben; their exhibition was right next door.

Tales were shared and the prototype evolved…

All thanks, as ever, to the team at Anderson Gallery for this inaugural Open Late. From the Sponge HQ – Colleen Billing, Colleen Brennan, Patrick Carter, Lindsay Clements, S. Riley Duncan, Gavin Foster, Hope Ginsburg, JoJo Houff, Julia Hundley, Joshua Quarles and Clare van Loenen.

Photos by: Gavin Foster (top) and Ameigh Schwarz (bottom)

So the Sponge HQ got to relocate to New York this past week. Crammed in a van we absorbed passages of sponge biology, sounds of incisive needle felting from the back seat and much music. Momentum built as we neared the struggling, post-Sandy city. With tense focus we unpacked straight into MoMA and the vast open studio space of our host, Mildred’s Lane. Out came our distinctive pops of color, landing as Hope’s felt rug was unfurled and bright bee boxes found their place. Our materials were seriously mixed, from natural sea sponges – our conceptual starting blocks – to their lurid foam evolutions and glowing bronze and beeswax casts.  At hand – giant balls of burnt orange and deep lilac wool.

Children swarmed in, utterly intent on needle-punching sponge forms and, like the best fairy tales, someone’s thigh got pricked.  Our story continued on screen, looping with shots of the HQ’s beehive, neon tetras and gushing water – immaculately edited and scored, of course. Everything connected – not just the living, breathing turtles wallowing in the Mildred’s Lane interior and the Reggio Children’s reef scene – we had dive visuals too, which included Kalymnos, Greece – the sponge stores now bereft of native samples and forced to import from the Caribbean.

Interaction was plentiful – yes, some 98 folk stopped by to chat, potter and savor our HQ honey. We made friends, brewed tea on a braided rug (thanks Fritz Haeg) and lived the gestalt – trans-disciplinary and cross-generational, multi-sensory and impressively multiplied. It all happened and we gave gifts – a bronze sea sponge and our best ephemera  - all now safely archived.

We’re keeping going and are back in Richmond to proliferate more prototypes for the phylum porifera on Friday 30th November between 5pm and 8pm. Come and join us.

May 2, 2011: Kristin Kaskey calls; her hive has split and Eric Stepp and I are invited to retrieve the swarm. The bees are hanging from a low tree branch on the Caskey/Malinoski homestead. Eric and I arrive and the bees have ascended to a branch 40′ in the air, over a ravine. We race across Richmond for an extension ladder. Engineering, acrobatics, Eric climbs the tree, creates a pulley system slung over an above branch and scales the tree higher than the ladder will go. The branch that carries the swarm is severed and suspended. Kristin, Lulu and I steer the limb with a rope from the ground. Together, we land the swarm. I move the colony, still attached to a piece of the branch into Eric’s temporary top bar hive box. We breath. I go back into the hive box with a bee brush and gently extract the branch. We know we’ve captured the queen because the workers are marching into an unfamiliar house. It’s dark outside; I head home; Eric takes the bees to his house to acclimate to the temporary hive and we plan to bring them to the Sponge HQ the following weekend.

SPWS’ Natalie Campbell and Heidi Neilson seriously brought it at the HQ this morning. Well…serious in a manner of speaking.  Those two have timing that would cut it in comedy; all were riveted.  With a new lease on print/design/collaboration and the seduction of high nerd-dom, I…we…applaud SP and say, thank you, THANK YOU for coming to town.

More to come on P-PAL, People for Pancakes at Lectures. We are organizing

.

Hurricane Irene blew through the HQ yesterday, starting just off the coast of Florida.  Guided by SP Weather Station’s Heidi Neilson and Natalie Campbell, VCUarts Art Foundation students sent wool, sand and floral snow up the East Coast, moving the weather about 1/2 cm. every ten seconds. Energies held aloft by the meteorological tunes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Etta James, the group kept time to Heidi’s countdowns between shutter clicks (we love you Dick Clark). At about 8PM the storm blew over  and Dexy’s Midnight Runners brought the house down.  Eileen, Irene, whatever.

Tomorrow, over pancakes, we’ll show you what we did.  Come by at 11AM; the coffee’ll be hot.

Sponge HQ presents:

WEATHER MASS MOVEMENT (Parts 1 & 2)
Public Screening and Lecture and Pancake Breakfast

with

SP Weather Station
Natalie Campbell & Heidi Neilson
in collaboration with VCUarts Art Foundation Students

Saturday April 21, 11AM
907 1/2 W. Franklin St.
Anderson Gallery, 3rd floor

During a workshop at VCUarts April 19-21, SP Weather Station (Natalie Campbell and Heidi Neilson) will collaborate with students in Hope Ginsburg’s Time Studio course to stage Weather Mass Movement, a collectively constructed time lapse animation of Hurricane Irene’s progress along the Atlantic Coast from August 20-29, 2011. This is the first in a planned series of stop-motion videos illustrating changes in the sky that take place over time. Following the student workshops on April 19th, SP Weather Station will present photos and video of this work-in-progress and discusses past works by SPWS and its collaborators that find new ways to represent or reflect upon weather data and unseen natural forces.

spweatherstation.net

Poster design by Riley Duncan

Other Pedagogies & the Phylum Porifera
Sponge HQ
October 20-21, 2010
With presenters: Larissa Harris, Dr. April Hill, Christopher Lee Kennedy, Tse-Lynn Loh, J. Morgan Puett, Christo Sims, Caroline Woolard.
Morning anusara yoga with Catherine Brooks.
Lunch feast prepared by Joshua Quarles.
With photography by Andrew Brehm, videography by Nikolai Noel and assistance by Andrew Brehm and Theora Kvitka.
Sponsored by VCUarts for the Curiouser conference.

For a full set of images, click here.
Presenter and participant bios are here.
For the complete program, go here.

Preparations for the event Other Pedagogies & the Phylum Porifera, are sweeping through the Sponge HQ. This inaugural one-day Sponge workshop and follow-up panel welcomes participants from Curiouser, the 2010 joint MACAA & SECAC conference at VCUarts.  Slots are still available. Click here to register.

The Workshop:

In Other Pedagogies & the Phylum Porifera, Sponge participants will engage with artist-thinker-researchers that are reinventing school, classes and knowledge transfer. And since discipline-bending and biological metaphor are encoded in the Sponge project itself, we’ll hear from two biologists who study this porous phylum and we’ll travel to a sponge research lab at the University of Richmond to see our model creatures up close.  Prior to this day of absorption, those interested in boosting respiration can elect to join an early-morning yoga session.

The HQ is thrilled to welcome visiting-participants from the fields of art, digital media, education and biology. For visiting-participant bios, click here.

Larissa Harris will introduce students to Pragmatism, “America’s only contribution to philosophy.”

Dr. April Hill will host the group at her University of Richmond lab where she will make a brief presentation on her research and invite us to peer through a microscope at freshwater sponge growth.

Christopher Lee Kennedy will present the School of the Future, an ongoing project about what a school could be. In July 2010, School of the Future opened as an intergenerational free school in Sgt. Dougherty Park, Brooklyn. We asked the community around the park to share their learning needs, and in response artists and people proposed classes and experiments that reacted to these “deficits”. In the process of exploring the possibilities of school, we aim to become a body of unschooled and educated teaching students. Now that our first “semester” has commenced, what is the future of School of the Future: some thoughts, examinations and collaborative dialogues.

Tse-Lynn Loh will discuss the major research focus of her doctoral research, which is to determine if overfishing causes a trickle-down effect on coral reef communities, by releasing palatable sponges from being grazed, which in turn frees the sponges to compete with corals for space on the reef.

J. Morgan Puett will present Mildred’s Lane, a long-term experiment in large-scale project ,research and event based practices with a living museum and an educational institution attached.

Christo Sims will introduce terms such as communities of practice and peripheral participation and organize his session around imagining learning innovations in those realms.

Caroline Woolard will begin her presentation with a short barter exercise, after which she will introduce OurGoods.org and Trade School, two experiments that allow social, environmental, and aesthetic rationales to drive exchange behavior. Group discussion about subjective equivalence, individual motivation, and participatory economics should follow.

Catherine Brooks will conduct an optional one hour yoga session at the Sponge HQ on the workshop morning at 8:30AM. Please bring a mat if you have one. Community mats will be available.

Joshua Quarles will bake, simmer and roast a delicious, healthy lunch in the Sponge HQ.

The Panel

A Report from Sponge: Other Pedagogies and the Phylum Porifera

Panelists: Hope Ginsburg (Chair), Larissa Harris, Tse-Lynn Loh, Christo Sims, Caroline Woolard and Participants from the Other Pedagogies and the Phylum Porifera Sponge event on Wednesday 10.20.10.

A Report from Sponge: Other Pedagogies and the Phylum Porifera will focus on emerging strategies for knowledge exchange. The panel itself is an example of such a project, as it will be generated by the preceding day’s Sponge event, organized in conjunction with the Curiouser conference. Conference participants from Wednesday’s event, along with visiting-participants will relay gathered information about the Pragmatists, the effects of technological media on education, and experimental projects such as Mildred’s Lane, Trade School and OurGoods. A marine biologist will be on hand to put us in a biomimetic frame of mind.

Participant slots for Wednesday’s event are still available. To register, please go here.

Other Pedagogies & the Phylum Porifera is funded by VCUarts for the Curiouser conference.  Thanks go to Amy Hauft, Andy Kozlowski, Peggy Lindauer, Holly Morrison, Dawn Waters and Ashley Kistler.