School for Designing a Society

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.

by Jacob Barton

I want:
A group of more than 10 people playing udderbot (and its relatives), as an ensemble that meets regularly in Urbana.  A group of people, of various ages, who rehearse and become able to (very tightly) perform a repertoire of miniature performances.  These will begin as very elementary things, things which teach those playing to play udderbot.  These will have theatrical, whole-body and/or whole-group aspects;  constitute a choreographed counter-friend to the marching band.

The group to be able to perform in the guise of “marching band”, as well “concert choir”, and other guises will be added as wanted.  I will seed the group as organizer and teacher, and gradually will make the whole thing as susceptible to collaboration as we can bear.  The members of the group, as well as anyone else interested (unconstrained by physical geography), take up the invitation to compose pieces for the group to perform, with an emphasis on little bits, miniatures, tiny things to try out and repeat with ease and variety.

Not to think of composing or performing in a way that allows anyone to treat it as an exclusive or elitist activity.  (This may require some ontological adjustment!)

This project informed by an assignment by Herbert Brün:
The Art of Instantaneous Remembering.  Try and project an event you care for, as it happens to you, into an imagined past, so that you can simultaneously experience the event ‘now’ and ‘once upon a time’.

You, if you are interested in affecting or being affected by the project, make a change to the Udderbot Wiki.

by Mark Enslin

Even if you don’t have health care, you have a health care system. And if your health care system is not providing health care for those who need it, or for you in the way you’d like, doesn’t that call for change of health care system? This question was the starting point for the 4th Health Care System Design Intensive offered by Susan Parenti, the Gesundheit! Institute and the School for Designing a Society, and held at the site of Gesundheit’s future model hospital in rural West Virginia August 6-11.

The instructors and guest presenters offered design tools and inspiring examples of humane practice — from Neil Shulman’s demystification for children, to PK Beville’s Second Wind wish fulfillment for elders, to Rebecca Trotzky-Sirr’s work with barrio clinics in Venezuela — plus reports and problem workshops from the participants themselves. Design groups gathered and elicited specific desires from each and fostered deep discussions, connections and friendships to be continued. Ideas were sparked and problems clarified, with frequent doses of hugs and lots ideas about how to change the system.

by Ostrananie and the Xatets

How can a human describe a three-week period of indescribable stuff being tried all the time and the weird results of that? At the Summer School for Designing a Society…

We cleaned the bathrooms with hydrogen peroxide and vinegar. Rob said “vaffunculo” all the time. People skinny-dipped. Danielle talked with a shaky voice about escaping city council. Elizabeth shaved her head in stages. Terra sang an Appalachian folk song for a circle of people holding hands.

Kwami claimed the basement as his lair. He held court there in the evening to show things. During the day, we made a vibeosphere. That means we made paintings almost everyday.

Bobbi learned about hearts being vaginas.

Ginevra, Patrizia, and Cristina continued to formulate their “Educare al Desiderio” project which returns this November to Pruno, Italy. They are using our School proposal which has now been translated by Cristina. Ginevra introduced us to the idea of “schifo clown”.

Change of State presented their performance projects at the 100-year-old Opera House in Marlington, West Virginia which seemed kind of like a ghost town in some parts.

Dario Solina and Kwami K. Kwami have decided to start a magazine to document the projects started by “alumni” of the school. “Ideas Mazagine.” Hopefully that works out — many of the crazy ideas from this School go unrecorded and that is a shame.

Ash says she is starting a clown club when she gets back to college. Almah describes herself as a hummingbird in human drag. She is also an alchemist. Maria Olga is spending a month in California working for a new non-profit that helps Guatemalans living in limbo in the U.S., then she is headed to Guatemala City to start a Psychology practice in the evenings from her living room. Christine is going back to Germany – she and her brother and a few friends are going to build a house and live in it together. Samara wants to start her own community. Pissed off that on the first Saturday during the school there was no weekend outing planned, she was “so bored that she spent all day making cardboard animals”.

We ate too many carbohydrates and not enough protein. Susan Parenti told me to get over my parents and take on corporate America. I told her I would keep it in mind. After the fact I did think about it. It is good advice and I’m sure I needed to hear it, but no one ever gets over their parents. Not really. I told Mark Enslin and he said had I asked her if she was over hers.

The best talent show was Betsy. She was interesting and self-conscious. I held her face during the Love Fest that Patch Adams conducted and told her that I loved her. I meant it. She kept turning her eyes away and I kept getting her to look back at me. She cried.