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

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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.

As of August 27th, 201, the Sponge HQ is launched. The opening was hivelike with multiple and multidisciplinary goings-on. On the projection screen was  Imago Dei, a video by Matt Flowers with sound by Stephen Vitiello and Molly Berg with Joshua Quarles.  A video of Max Goldfarb and Allyson Strafella’s bees was tucked into Max’s Hive 05, a customized top bar beehive with an infrared security camera.  In April, a hive of bees will move in and their busy labors will be broadcast to an adjacent monitor.  Joshua Quarles made a new composition called Hexagonal (click to listen)  for the hive, which includes a track of Max and Allyson’s bees.

The walls of the space (painted in bright colors that can only be described as stimulating) are hung with banners that were designed by David Reinfurt for Center Sponge at MIT in 2009 and used as a set for the Sponge Felt mittens and boots at the Makers Market at Socrates Sculpture Park that same year.  Sponge felt items punctuate the space, including a letterpressed piece of felt from the I Am Amen show at the Austin Peay State University in 2010.  Much was done to transform the raw, white space and to embrace the very classroom-like, mocha-chip colored flooring. Eric Stepp built a library platform and shelf in the corner window.  This makes a lovely observatory for the chimney stacks and rooftops of Franklin St.  From that platform, visitors will also be able to observe the bees entering and exiting the building this spring. Another flight of Eric Stepp’s steps now leads to the “office”.  The unstoppable Jessica Dodd designed not only the stair platforms, but the desks and tables in the space as well.  Matt Spahr’s Indo-Board, which was made for the Water & Sound Sponge at Solvent Space in 2008 has become an essential component of all project-related environments.

The HQ houses a fully functioning feltmaking studio and wool dying area and the intention is to make much felt here between now and mid-March.  At the opening, Jessica Dodd, Katie Connor and Olivia Gibian, all clad in coveralls, conducted a live feltmaking demo.  While Katie and Olivia showed visitors how to lay out roving for a rug, Jessica “skirted” the fleece of a sheep named Charlotte (who lives at Spring Hills Farm in Northeastern PA.) Also installed in the space are project artifacts, documentation and ephemera from the Spring 2010 class, Colablablab, which round out the art-meets-science exploration that is ever-present in Sponge.

A grateful shout-out for their contribution to the opening goes to Antonia Fisher Duke and Jonathan Vassar of Jonathan Vassar and the Speckled Bird who used their legendary hosting skills to welcome visitors and assure that all came off without a hitch.  And fellow bandmate, the aforementioned JQ, took care that all were properly fed and hydrated with white bean and arugula salad and a case (or two?) of chilled white wine. Chris Edwards (my parking hero) was also in attendance, completing the Speckled Bird roster.

As with any undertaking, infinite thanks must go to the people who gave of their energy to make the thing happen.  Here I would like to extend enormous gratitude to Ashley Kistler of the VCUarts Anderson Gallery for giving the project a home.  Ashley should have a blog post of her very own. Ashley should have a blog of her own. Here, she will have a paragraph of her own.

Michael Lease and Traci Horne, also of the of the Anderson Gallery must be heartily celebrated, for without their attention, patience and belief in the project, the HQ would still be an empty white room with scary Venetian blinds. I mentioned many in the installation crew already, but three cheers go to: Joshua Quarles , Jessica Dodd, Katie Connor, Olivia Gibian and Andrew Kotsch.  Eric Stepp transformed the heck out of this room and the world should see another carpenter with his artistry and mastery. Terry Brown stepped up to shoot the opening with about 53 seconds of advanced warning and made images fit for posterity. Tim Dalton managed all of the printing and signmaking (huzzah!) and John Henry Blatter offered crack technical backup.

Funding for the Sponge HQ was provided by the VCUarts Dean’s Faculty Research Grant.  And additional thanks go to the VCUarts Art Foundation Program and Elissa Armstrong and the Department of Painting & Printmaking and Holly Morrison. As per always, without the miraculous ministrations of Chris Costello of Art Foundation, the Sponge HQ would be a glimmer in my eye.

The Colablablab instructors (along with myself) were Dr. Edward Crawford and Dan Carr.  Dr. Donald Young, chair of the VCU Biology Department was a behind the scenes steward. Participants, or “colablablaborators”, whose work is on view, are: Andrew Schmidt, Ashton Hudgins, Hyunji Lee, Jessica Dodd, John Gustafson, Katie Connor, Marilyn Li, Michael Horton, Olivia Gibian, Rebecca Henderson and Ross Iannatti.  The Sponge Researchers, who dovetailed with that class, were Andrew Kotsch, Beranger LeFranc and Vreni Michelini.

Theora Kvitka boldly signed on to be the Sponge HQ Coordinator and it is to her that I owe thanks for seeding the ground for this blog, which is off the ground thanks to her round of incisive preliminary posts.

Sponge is a project of co-artists, collaborators, visiting experts; in short…PEOPLE.  I am sure there are those who lent their energy to this launch who I have failed to mention.  I hope they will forgive the indiscretion and feel ever welcome at the HQ.

For a list of Sponge HQ happenings, please continue to visit this blog and also keep tabs at the Anderson Gallery site. Visitors are welcome to inspect, hang out, lounge, read, and listen on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons between 2 and 4pm.  Please do stop by.

Click here to see more pictures from the opening as well as other events at Sponge HQ.

To read about the opening in the Commonwealth Times, go here.

Sponge HQ opening press release.

Photos by Terry Brown.