by Danielle Chynoweth
Genoa rises up from the sea, a chaotic surface of bricks and stone and tangled streets holding several thousand years of memory in the arc of its harbor.
Our first stop is AutAut - a squatted space claimed by protesting students earlier this year, shortly after our discussions with them last November.
by Rob Scott
I spent a day taping the wierdo champion Chu-uck D as he provided a spanarchist perspective on our little town of Urbana-Champaign. Over the course of the day, several locals received an exposition of da (not the) crucial artz, complete with an arted flyer. Can’t decrypt the deadpan? We were being silly in our seriousness.
For six months, the school’s office has not sent any garbage to landfills. Organic waste is composted, glass/paper/plastic are recycled, but everything else is now turned into “trash balls”. Trash is shredded, wrapped in plastic bags, then encapsulated in cloth, or painted cardboard/canvas. Pictured is a red sweater trash ball, and a gray trash-buckyball. Other variants including trash blocks, a fun-unlike-soccer ball, and a party ball (!) are now spreading throughout the building. Click for a larger image >>
The Health Care Design Intensive is ongoing at the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore and Mark and Danielle have posted some descriptions on a blog here.
Many thanks are due for the new translations of the website. The Spanish is by Andres Lizcano who encountered the School in Italy; the German is by Thomas Fischer came as composer-in-residence from Hong Kong last fall. The Italian is by Cristina Finotti, our ‘transistor’ from Milan. Faye Joohyun Sung created the current Korean version (version 2.0 from Eun Ah Park forthcoming!) The French is by Kyra Shaughnessy. Yay.
Thanks to all who have worked on this, and if anyone would like to contribute another translation, contact us!
The School for Designing a Society Fall Semester 2008 culminated in a night of performances and shared projects at the La Casa house where several participants have been residing.The theme/title was “Choose your own…” borrowing from the stucture of “choose your own adventure” novels. You can read the set list, after the jump.
Our Italian comrades Ginevra Sanguigno, Patrizia Mainardi, and Cristina Finotti organized a one week course entitled “Re(x)sistance” — making a play on words where one could read “resistance” or “re-exisistance”.
Amongst the snow-capped mountains of Pruno di Stazzema, in the Lucca region of Tuscany, there was a one-week project of doing the School for Designing a Society in Italian.
We created neologisms using parts of Italian and English words. Before the week was over, Cristina made a presentation on “Transistance” (Translation + Resistance). She spoke of times/places at which the transposition of ideas from one area of human language to another. For instance, the fashion show in Milan where the mysterious designer Serpica Naro debuted — “Serpica Naro” is an anagram for “San Precario” which in Italian would mean roughly “Saint of Precariousness” which refers to “precarious labor,” a term applied in particular to the exploitation of cheap labor — in this fashion show there were designs to expose the plight of migrant laborers, and to emphasize the body shape of pregnant women, thus exposing the stereotypes that oppress the workers upon whose labor the fashion industry rests. Today, Serpica Naro is a political movement that fights against exploitative working conditions.
Cristina had us chop up fashion magazines to turn the fashion models into puppets for little anti-commercial puppet shows. We debated the issue of culture jamming.
A puppet master named Mariano Dolce paid us a visit, in which he described his 30+ years practicing puppetry in Italy, primarily in Reggio Emilia. Mariano first got involved in puppets during the Vietnam War, and he recalled stories of going from hospital room to hospital room, inspiring debates betwee the patients by using puppets to bring up political issues, such as the legality of divorce (which was an issue in Italy at that time). He went on to work with mental patients and children in an area of Italy renowned for its system of childhood education. See: The Hundred Languages of Children.
Particularly interesting was Mariano’s way of describing the constraints of the medium of puppetry — such that the puppet medium has it’s own language and its own field of potential.
Thursday evening we performed in the nearby town of Pietrasanta. We used a mixture of Italian and English scripts, and pieces which relied on gesture and non-linguistic acoustics. The below video provides a grainy glimpse of one piece, in which a sequence of faces and sounds were performed before the bubbles burst.
Video -QT
by Toney the Pomeranian/Lhasa-Apsa mix.
The haitus in blogging on the general state of the School for Designing a Society has been a product of more tangible benefits of life with actual humans. Here are some things that have been going on…
Elizabeth has zoomed in on the absense of fun in her life thus far. Formulations fruit explosively from her “Funnyfesto” and Information Theory applied to fun (=measurement of potential that things could have been fun). Also, Elizabeth loves bike tattooing when bike abandoning in/on NY.
Danielle went to the Gesundheit Institute and facilitated the whole Health Care Design Intensive. Apparently, she is a super-hero.
Susan’s impatience with drained brains straining to grasp the concepts and high-falootin’ text is countered by Mark’s attentive eyeballs. Cybernetics deficits make less interesting talking and more frustration.
There have been drop-in drop-outs. Keith’s belt for example.
JiSu remembers her friends, and their time together, through photographs of the food they shared.
Elections dominated discussion the first week of November. Bobbi has shaky mental health. Andrew is working on Herbert Brün data, and is writing songs in a 17-tone scale for the Cüm Büs (a Turkish 12-stringed banjo-like instrument). Eun Ah is interested in grinding nature in order to create pigment.
Ryan Strandjord from Minnewood and Kelsey addressed the issue of socially-conscious film. Phil wears warm-ups and Kord’s hair hangs. Steven hurled insults at U.S. imperialism.
The wiki is spreading around like a happy virus.
Watch out for the cause-and-effect words everyone on earth and throughout manipulative history.
There was a request for “direction” in the group of the whole — Bobbi followed up with an under-the-radar statement of her preference for a multi-directional path.
Dahni is the youngest, and most fatigued.
