School for Designing a Society… and the traces left by it

by Danielle Chynoweth

Thanksgiving, November 26, 2009

We are exploring a pedagogy of desire for four days in a smoggy corner of Milan.

Upon arrival at the location where we will sleep, eat, and teach, we enter a portal emblazoned with the statement Da vicino nessuno e normale, meaning “up close, nothing is normal,” with a broken looking lightening bolt for an icon.

It is a former psychiatric hospital turned youth hostel—a fitting environment for our workshop taught by composers, activists, and clowns.

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City Imagining:

an idea, implemented/able on the scale of a city which:

• offers interesting solutions to common problems
• increases the freedom of city residents,
• decreases power differences, and/or
• helps residents participate in the decisions which affect their lives.

This booklet was compiled by Danielle Chynoweth in 2002 from imaginative descriptions, love letters, false statements, images, and music submitted by 21 people, many of them School for Designing a Society participants.

Download the .pdf (6 MB) in sequenced order for on-screen reading, and/or in booklet form (to assemble, print fronts and backs on legal size paper, then fold in half).

text by Melanie Meltzer and Jacob Barton
film by Rob Scott

How can activism and music composition be resistence AND a contribution? When do either make a difference to society?

When is activism new? When is music new? Composition of activism or sound is new when it resists identity with already-decayed and absorbed activisms/compositions.          Video -WMV | Video -QT

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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.

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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.

Video -WMV | Video -QT

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.

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.

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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.