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Basekamp (Philadelphia):
intersection:
Skype Conversation, date/timing TBD
info:
BASEKAMP is a non commercial studio and exhibition space whose primary focus is to participate in the creation, facilitation and promotion of large scale collaborative projects by contemporary artists. Philadelphia is an example of a city whose visual art-world is currently in the process of self-definition. BASEKAMP sees this as an opportunity to use the city as a home base to invite domestic and international collaborative groups in a joint experiment to develop new models of relations within overlapping art communities. The BASEKAMP TEAM’s participation in critical curating is approached as an interdisciplinary team of artists and not necessarily as curators. A majority of the BASEKAMP TEAM’s cultural involvement has taken the form of exhibition-making, reinventing who-does-what, and reexamining artist roles and relationships. This, in addition to an exclusive emphasis on collaboration, has led the team to hybridize the roles of curator, archivist, artist, and audience in their work — illuminatiing the possibilities of agency and autonomy in cultural co-production.
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BLW, Media Art Collective
web:
http://www.carbonfarm.us/blw/
intersection:
essays, transcripts, video, performance kit
info:
BLW’s work considers how we may imagine ourselves in relation to revolutionary struggle politics today. We develop workshops for non-performers which involve the memorization and public respeaking (re-enactment) of significant recordings in the history of radical anti-capitalist media: speeches, interviews and so on. Our work also includes small group workshops to explore the possibilities for dissent in public spaces that work to normalize the dominance of capital in daily life.
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Common Places Project (Tampa):
web:
http://commonplacesproject.org/
intersection:
mailing materials/collection for installation
info:
common_places is a material resource and an accumulation of collective motivations. common_places begins as a small collection of primary materials generously contributed by numerous collectives; these materials are circulated, providing the basis or pretext for a series of interpretive interventions. common_places is not a group of artists or a project, but rather a plastic infrastructure for learning about, supporting and facilitating collective forms of critical practice. Various divisions have been created and dissolved to facilitate specific projects or to formulate broad directions for investigation. They include: Center for Getting Ugly (dedicated to collective walking as militant research), Division of Radical Giving (cultivating generosity), Council of Peripheral Visionaries (developing possible futures), International Department of Infinitely Small Steps (enacted whenever the materials and related activities hit the road), and Division of Research and Love (study groups, information-sharing, collaborative writing, workshops, presentations and so on).
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DeadTech (Chicago)
intersection:
mailing materials for installation
info:
Founded in 1999, Deadtech is an art and technology center in Chicago, IL USA and has been host to technology-enabled art and artists from across the globe. As of 2006, founder Rob Ray is joined by Chicago artists Alexander Stewart and Taylor Hokanson to help make Deadtech a lot more kick ass – and it is. A few of Deadtech’s goals for 2008 (and beyond) is to be more responsive to the current needs of local and national/international tech-centric artists. A lot has gone down in the art world since 1998 when the first slabs of drywall got put up in the Deadtech space. Contemporary art museums and galleries are catching on – sort of. So, as they continue catch up to what interactive artists needs were in 1998, Deadtech seeks to raise the bar on them (and itself) again. Since 2003, Deadtech has been host to the Chicago Dorkbot. Find out more at dorkbot.deadtech.net. Deadtech is also host to the Chicago_pd meetings. Chicago_pd, started by interactive artist Justin C. Rounds in 2001, continues today as a bi-monthly forum and physical meeting point where artists and engineers can get together, show off some code, have a beer and learn a thing or two. It’s also a great place for those interested in learning about pd can come get advice and installation assistance from people who live and breathe it without an obligatory tongue-lashing.
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Fugitive Projects (Nashville)
web:
http://fugitiveprojects.com/
intersection:
building/shipping a site specific form/sound installation
info:
Fugitive projects is an artist run advocacy, curatorial resource and databank using mobile strategies to connect to audiences around the world. Our ephemeral exhibition have toured switzerland, ireland, canada and egypt as well as venues across the u.S. Involving artists from 4 continents. The fugitives have shaped a new course as an independent mobile artist advocacy and a roaming curatorial collective. Fugitive projects is based out of nashville and is operated by a dedicated group of artists living across the country that serve as the board of directors. From 1999-2004 fugitive projects brought challenging national and international artists to their art center gallery activating nashville’s burgeoning art scene. We closed that venue in 2005 to change our focus. Fugitive projects has always been an artist advocacy, curatorial resource and databank and we have continued that tradition with more focus on ephemeral exhibitions and involvement.
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Graffiti Research Lab (New York)
web:
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/
http://fffff.at
intersection:
box of goods, instructions/schematics for install
info:
GRL is dedicated to outfitting graffiti artists with open source
technologies for urban communication worldwide.
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Guerrilla Girls (New York, Los Angeles)
web:
http://www.guerrillagirls.com/
intersection:
posters, stickers
info:
Guerrilla Girls are anonymous females who take the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms and appear in public wearing gorilla masks. We have produced posters, stickers, books, printed projects, and actions that expose sexism and racism in politics, the art world, film and the culture at large and use humor to convey information, provoke discussion, and show that feminists can be funny. We wear gorilla masks to focus on the issues rather than individual personalities. Dubbing ourselves the conscience of culture, we declare ourselves feminist counterparts to the mostly male tradition of anonymous do-gooders like Robin Hood, Batman, and the Lone Ranger. We try to be different from the kind of political art that is angry and points to something and says “This is bad.” That’s preaching to the converted. We advocate strategies for subversion, transformation, and disarming confrontation through visuals and performative acts.
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InCUBATE-Chicago (Chicago)
Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and The Everyday
web:
http://www.incubate-chicago.org/
intersection:
materials, video, instructions
possible SOUP/microgrant program TBD
info:
InCUBATE is a research institute and residency program based in Chicago, IL, dedicated to challenging the structures that support artistic production. By treating arts administration as a creative practice, they build alternative funding and organizational models for collectives and individual artists. These experimental models include the Sunday Soup Granting program and the Person-in-Residency, which invites creative research in all formats. Most recently, InCUBATE’s research has manifested in a traveling exhibition highlighting artists’ practices that address issues of arts funding and support in the U.S. Their goal is to continue to conceptualize new possible situations, document these innovations, and make this information available to everyone.
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Mess Hall (Chicago)
intersection:
posters, books
info:
Mess Hall is an experimental cultural center. It is a place where visual art, radical politics, creative urban planning, applied ecological design and other things intersect and inform each other. We host exhibitions, discussions, film screenings, brunchlucks (brunch + potluck), workshops, concerts, campaigns, meetings (both closed and open) and more. Mess Hall is NOT a not-for-profit. We do not have tax-exempt status. We are not a 501C3. We don’t want to have to follow a structure required by the government in order to work together (i.e. having a Board of Directors, etc.). We don’t need to register ourselves or add any additional layers of bureaucracy outside of our group and can function very effectively on our own terms.
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Paintallica (Washington and everywhere)
web:
http://www.paintallica.com/
intersection:
cooler and padded mailer, contents TBD
info:
Don’t be fooled though, we don’t give a shit about your art, your politics or your whiny, black-horn rimmed, Prada-wearing ass. We are Paintallica.
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Patrick Lichty for The Yes Men and RTmark
web:
http://www.patricklichty.com/
http://www.theyesmen.org/
http://www.rtmark.com/
intersection:
video/sound/posters
info – the Yes Men:
The Yes Men provide identity correction services through the infiltration and impersonation of big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.
info – rtmark:
(R)TMark is a strategic organization with an emphasis on economic, political, and social paradigms. We receive project ideas from internet users, then lists them. Each listed project has its own discussion list (linked from the project). When a project requires a bit of funding to be accomplished, sometimes investors will step up to the plate and offer their help. Even more often, people will offer non-financial help or feedback. Anyone can post a project idea in the New Projects Workshop, where it may receive some feedback before being posted. Alternately, you may send them your project idea directly. Unlike corporations, which have absolutely no limits to what they will do in order to bolster their financial profits, we will never promote a project that is likely to result in physical harm to humans. That is our only ethical compunction. (R)TMark also has pragmatic, bottom-line limits – supporting DoS attacks these days might well be counterproductive, destruction of physical property is likely to get one branded a terrorist, and other excessively illegal behaviors are also likely to be problematic – but these are shifting, and can change with the times and laws.
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TEAM LUMP (Raleigh)
web:
http://teamlump.org/home.html
http://teamlump.org/links.html
intersection:
painting schematic with installation/execution instructions
info:
Team Lump is an artist collective that has been actively collaborating for over a decade. The group began as an outgrowth of the Raleigh, North Carolina project space Lump. Bill Thelen, founder of Lump, curates artists into the collective, and the team fluctuates slightly on a project to project basis.
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Temporary Services (Chicago)
web:
http://www.temporaryservices.org/
intersection:
reading materials
info:
Temporary Services is Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. We are based in Illinois and have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998. We produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us. The best way of testing our ideas has been to do them without waiting for permission or invitation. We invent infrastructure or borrow it when necessary. We were not taught this in school. We try different approaches, inspired by others equally frustrated by the systems they inherited, who created their own methods for getting work into the public.
Temporary Services started as an experimental exhibition space in a working class neighborhood of Chicago. Our name directly reflects the desire to provide art as a service to others. It is a way for us to pay attention to the social context in which art is produced and received. Having “Temporary Services” displayed on our window helped us to blend in with the cheap restaurants, dollar stores, currency exchanges, and temporary employment agencies on our street. We were not immediately recognizable as an art space. This was partly to stave off the stereotypical role we might have played in the gentrification of our neighborhood. We weren’t interested in making art for sale. Within the boundaries of “what sells,” artists often carve out tiny aesthetic niches to protect, peddle, and repeat indefinitely, rather than opening themselves up to new possibilities. Experiencing art in the places we inhabit on a daily basis remains a critical concern for us. It helps us move art from a privileged experience to one more directly related to how we live our lives. A variety of people should decide how art is seen and interpreted, rather than continuing to strictly rely on those in power. We move in and out of officially sanctioned spaces for art, keeping one foot in the underground the other in the institution. Staying too long in one or the other isn’t healthy. We are interested in art that takes engaging and empowering forms. We collaborate amongst ourselves and with others, even though this may destabilize how people understand our work. Temporary Services seeks to create and participate in ethical relationships that are not competitive and are mutually beneficial.
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6+
web:
http://www.6plus.org/
intersection:
materials
info:
6+ is a self-organized collective which invites women artists from different cultural backgrounds to work together. We seek to develop a supportive, creative network of women artists through a practice of direct engagement – including exhibitions, publications, and community collaborations. We explore different possibilities for artistic cooperation across great distances, both geographic and cultural. For the past three years, 6+ has been working with emerging and established Palestinian women artists, developing an exhibition which traveled throughout the West Bank and in the US. We have also been working in collaboration with young women from the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in the Occupied Territory of Palestine.
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SEED
intersections:
hunter gatherers, handlers, site specific – negotiators, artists, designers
info:
Launched in 2005, SEED began as a loosely organized artist run collective with a studio, research projects, experiments, programs and initiatives in Chattanooga, TN. Our mission remains to push the boundaries of creative practice and expectations in the South, invent opportunities, develop connections for our projects, and be an educational resource for our community. Our motivation is art.
