Hello to all of our classmates in Leslie Hill, Helen Paris & Ryan Tacata’s Practice Based Research in the Arts course from Stanford Online / NovoED.
Blueberry Blintz
This week Christa Forster, Katrina Schaag, Michael Masucci, Misha Penton, Rebecca Longworth and I formed the “Blueberry Blintz” team for our small group interactions in the course. About 1150 students turned in the Week 1 project, so it’s great to have a small group! Still, while the limit of 6 seems about right, we did want to invite a few others to interact with us, and a few other others asked to join.
Community of Artists
I think Leslie, Helen & Ryan have made it clear that creating a community of artists is a real focus in our journey these 10 weeks. And that’s very much a focus for me too. In another 3 weeks “Studio West” opens with the promise of a more immersive way to interact with colleagues and consider each other’s work. Meanwhile our NovoED team journals are pretty decent. But they could be even more interactive and graphically robust. And while having them online but closed does make sense from a privacy perspective, as a Free Culture zealot I’m often more focused on Publicness.
So for a robust, public interaction platform that can include more than 6, we’ve chosen to launch this Practice Based.Re/search site. If you’re one of our classmates and would like to post here, just leave your info in a comment and we’ll add you as an author. If you’re not in the course but find anything here interesting, by all means chime in with any comments, questions, or insights you may have.
Hello My Name is…
For new classmate-authors joining, please do a little post and say HI! You can list anything you like. Links to your own website or blog or LinkedIn, Facebook, twitter, etc are great. And to get the conversation rolling, perhaps you’d like to post your Week 1 First Person / Third Person description project. We’re doing a bit of feedback on these on the course site this week, but that focuses on 6 single-pass comments from random classmates. Here we have the chance to be in dialog about each other’s ideas.
And so the adventure begins!
Here’s my Week 1 Proposal:
MEXICO CITY, 1968
FIRST PERSON
I propose an Avatar Olympic Games. I invite avatars in any virtual world to contribute events and ceremonies to a 48-hour games. Your events may be based on “real” Olympic events, or wild improvisations on the idea of Olympic events. My own investigation is to examine the resonance between Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina & Yekaterina Samutsevich in 2012, and Tommie Smith, John Carlos & Peter Norman in 1968. Your contributions can explore issues and concepts from a vast range of ideas at the intersection of art, sport, culture, and geopolitics.
THIRD PERSON
21 years before Nadya Tolokonnikova was born, Tommie Smith stood on the Gold Medal platform for the 200m Run in Mexico City. His action that day was one of the simplest, most enduring acts in civil rights history. Now on the eve of the homophobic, surveillance-based Sochi Games, Vanessa Blaylock Company calls on avatars many-worlds-wide to join in a 48-hour virtual Mexico City Games. Our initial investigation is to examine the resonance between Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina & Yekaterina Samutsevich in 2012, and Tommie Smith, John Carlos & Peter Norman in 1968. Avatars are invited to add events in the virtual worlds of their choosing and investigate additional art, sport, and cultural issues.
Opening Ceremonies: 5pm GMT Friday 6 December 2013
Closing Ceremonies: 5pm GMT Sunday 8 December 2013
