As mentioned in class last Wednesday, your next project is to develop the archives for the ELO festival works. I showed you the ELO Conference & Festival website and asked you to explore it as well as the recently released Electronic Literature Collection 3. I will be posting the list of the festival’s artists and works next week.

Happy Spring Break!

A reminder that class is being held on Wednesday, March 2 at Terminal One. I will be driving from campus to the site as soon as my faculty meeting is over. I will see you all there no later than 3:30. Docent training will be first on the agenda.

Here is the list of appointments scheduled for our Student Conferences 29 February-2 March. We will go over your assignments and talk about your mid-term grades:

Monday, February 29, 2016

10        Travis Lane
1030    Haley Zach
11        Jessica Smith
1130    Neita Faris
12        Nic Stevens
1230    Keely Bitton
130      JJ Johnson
200      AJ Schock
230      Amy Roberts
300      Kayleen McDonnell
330      Madeleine Brookman

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

10        Ellen Najera-Hohlbein
1030    Justine Hanrahan
11        Chris Hurley
1130    Bernd Hoffman
12        Anna Hixon
1230    Collin Hill
130      Cindy Roadifer
200      Natalie Hendren
230      Austin DeClerck
300      Dan Ellertson

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

1130    Eli Campbell
12        Shane Staub
1230
1          Serena Devera-Taualo

On Wednesday we will start with the four student presentations on the chapters in our book. Then we will work through the planning for the exhibit:

Design: We will review the color palette of the space and make sure all of the elements we introduce works within the constraints of the existing color palette of the room

Layout: We will name the rooms and sections so that we have a common language with which to refer to them in our materials and to visitors

Signage: We will check the didatics in order to ensure we have all that we need for helping visitors to the exhibit

Operations: We will go over the set up of the exhibit, including painting and touch up of walls and pedestals, moving equipment to space, food and beverages available to visitors, tech support, internet connection and imaging computers

Promotion: We will review the promotional plan, including social media campaign, contact with CMDC supporters (alums and organizations), website update, and media contact

We are but a short time away from launching the Game Changers exhibit. I am trying to finalize plans for your site visit to Terminal One for tomorrow, February 16. In the meantime, here are tasks that need to get done:

1. Finalize all signage and get drafts to me. I need to approve them and then send them on for approval by the Port of Vancouver, which oversees Terminal One.
2. Identify tables that Terminal One is lending us for the exhibit and move them into our space. They will need to be cleaned up and covered. We need to decide how best to make them look good for the show and have them fit with our aesthetic
3. Find out if Terminal One has a stage that we can use. If not, we need to rent one. The Operations team can go online and find potential stages and get me the information.
4. Finish the catalog. This means that all homework relating to the games you have been assigned needs to be completed and completed at a high level of performance. We cannot make a catalog if the information is incorrect or poorly written.
5. We need an aesthetic for the show. To date, I have not seen one. Obviously our color scheme is driven by our website, but how will these colors work in the space? What other elements can we add to make the space fit our vision? Have some fun with this idea. Be creative!
6. Speaking of space, the space will need to be punched up. We will need to touch up walls with paint. Please ask tomorrow if we can get access to the cans of paint for the walls. The space will also need to be cleaned up. The Port plans to do some heavy cleaning, but we will need to follow this up with our own fine tuning.
7. We also need a plan for how we are moving 23 iMacs, five mobile device stands, and all of the other equipment to Terminal One on March 1. We also need to know whom among you will show up to help that week. The shows opens on Friday at 10 a.m. This means everything needs to be ready the night before.

Also, I want to thank all of your who got your research completed on time and done so very well! Learning how to conduct independent research is an important aspect of college, yes. But many of you will find out that you will be required in your jobs to do some sort of research. If you did not turn in your research or did it poorly, I have written you a personal note asking you to get busy:)

In his essay, “What to Do with the Contemporary?,” Joao Ribas points out the irony with the term “contemporary.” What is the irony?

How does this statement connect with the previous essay on mediation?:
“Curatorial work––meaning the production of exhibitions and related discourses––is being shown through [the history of art exhibitions] to operate in a critical state of ‘in-betweeness'” (96).

What distinction does the Museum of Modern Art make between the terms “modern” and “contemporary?”

Read Giorgio Agamben’s comments about the term contemporary (page 108). What is your response to his views?

What is meant by “curatorial responsibility” (113)?

What do you think is the ethics of curating?

Thanks for the rousing class discussion over the notions of “exhibition” and “mediation.”  Here is a link to a website called Sedef’s Corner that shows images of exhibitions from the 18th and 19th Centuries. If you have visited art museums or galleries, you will notice a marked difference between how works are shown today and how they were displayed in previous periods.

Art exhibition, Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1748- 1890. From http://www.sedefscorner.com/2011/03/salon-different-artistic-styles-from.html

A special thank you Kate who captured the words that you all provided in our talk about personal goals for exhibitions. You said that exhibitions should “incite” the following responses:

• Aesthetic
• Educational
• Emotional
• Introspective
• Engagement with the Unknown
• Interest in reproducing the experience
• Curiosity
• Persuasive
• Call to Action
• Desire to Pull Together a/the Community
• Passion
• Reflection
• Engagement with the Sublime
• Cerebral
• Innovative
• Immersive
• Preservation/documentation
• Motivation

You should be thinking of how these ideas can be applied to Game Changers.

According to Filipovic, what is an exhibition, and why is Graciela Carnevale’s 1968 exhibition considered one?

What should an exhibition “incite”?

“The ephemerality and lack of absoluteness of an exhibition might be its most important features” (78). How does a statement like this one fit well with digital media exhibitions like the ones we are doing in this class?

What does Susan Sontag means when she says, “Art is not only about something; it is something” (79)?

Explain this statement: “To propose a reading of an artwork is different than to claim to know what that artwork ultimately or definitely ‘means’: the artwork” (80).

What is Lind’s general perspective of the Museum of Modern Art’s approach to “mainstream museum education” (85)?

What is “[c]ollective spectatorship” (87)?

What is “didacticism” (88), and why does Lind not like it for museum education?

What can social media offer “experience-based guided tours and workshops” (89)?

Don’t forget to choose a game to research for Game Changers. Madeleine has made a page on our website with all of the links you need.

We will take a look at previous exhibits that we have mounted. Visit the curation section of http://nouspace.net/dene. There are numerous exhibits sites to look at. Pick 2. Be ready to talk about your observations.

Finally, your first inventory will be due NEXT Sunday night. So, make sure your curated Word Press site is ready.

Here are the questions for Wednesday’s class:

1. What is your general take on Chus Martinez’s chapter, “What Is Art?” Does it provide you with any new insights about art?
2. Look up some of the contextual elements found in Martinez’s chapter. Who is Franco, for example, and why would he have exerted such influence upon the writer?
3. Check out Hegel and Danto. Who are they? What is their relationship to art?
4. Finally, what is the overall tone of this chapter?
5. In regards to Chapter 4,”What about Collecting,” what does Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy say about collections?
6. Google the Guggenheim Bilboa. Look at images of the building.  What kind of art do you expect to see exhibited there?  Compare it with WSUV’s gallery located next to the cafeteria in the Administration Building. What kind of art would you see shown there?  Why the difference? (Think beyond money and costs).
7. Chong Cuy asks the question, “Could a collection of contemporary art remain contemporary?” (65). What is contemporary art? (hint: look it up). Based on your findings, how would you respond to this question?