technology in the arts | Verge Arts Group

Artful Agilists is a group multimedia exhibition intended to demonstrate one of the intrinsic rewards for working in an Agile way: bringing more of ourselves to work. The success of this demonstration rests on the vulnerability of respected Agile practitioners sharing who they are as creative art makers and practitioners. It is scheduled for Saturday, February 21, 2015 in the Agile Leader Hall, a virtual space in Sococo .

Fractal Cylinder, Artist Dan Gries (middle)

The venue is the online home of Bill Krebs’ Distributed Agile Study Group. Offering workshops to help Agilists gain fluency in virtual worlds, this is a global community of practice for what Fast Company columnist Scott Anthony calls “associational thinking.” Associational thinking is defined as the ability to make surprising connections. Members are co-present in the Agile Mindset across distance, methodologies and domains.

Here is the rationale behind the exhibition:

During the Industrial Revolution, people in the workplace distinctly separated what we think of now as “art” from “technology.” Though engineers held the well-oiled machine in high esteem, it was in a realm far from the bright ornaments with which the Victorians populated other spaces. Thus efficiency was divorced from beauty. Engineering was divorced from craftsmanship.

We suffer when we reinforce this false split while trying to accomplish knowledge work. The boundaries hurt because they no longer apply.

As Agilists, we want to hone our aesthetic senses and re-integrate art and technology. This is one path to healing the wounds of an inhuman workplace. We seek to apply artfulness to our roles as makers and users of technology. We also respect and promote art’s function as an embodiment of culture.

Artist Robert McDougal, Yale

This is an online gallery where you can interact with the viewers in real time. If you’d like to participate, here’s how:

MANY THANKS to Lyssa Adkins, Doc List and Paul Sutton for their early commitment to participate,

to the members of New Haven Artful Agilists for their continuing on-the-ground inspiration,

and to Esther Derby for providing valuable insight and moral support.

Intrigued but not yet ready to contribute? LEARN MORE about the platform of Sococo and check out Elinor’s mentor Lee Devin, co-Author of Artful Making and The Soul of Design.

The Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona has established a prize to recognize and promote “public space that is at once public (open and universally accessible) and urban.” In highlighting the “relational and civic aspects of the typically urban space, it differs from other initiatives that are focused on the figure of the architect, and from awards given for landscape-centred projects.”

http://www.publicspace.org

A recent discussions on the Technology in the Arts group on Linked In spurred me to explore links to a project called Rebel Cities. It details recent work by a French sociologist building on Henri Lefebvre’s work on “the right to the city,” urban regeneration, and the shaping of social interaction through urban planning.

The topic of the discussion was “Are Virtual Worlds Dying or Evolving?” started by Tessa Kinney-Johnson, COO & Founder of SpotOn3D in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. I told her I see virtual worlds evolving into powerful tools dedicated to creative problem-solving, with inputs for citizens to co-dream with local officials about the shaping of their places. The gamification of urban planning makes good sense given the shortening loop between customer feedback and innovation in other spheres of development.

I also see artists lending their skills to the design of virtual model worlds so that people who do not see themselves as “creative” can still be participants rather than spectators in crafting the design and master narratives from which their urban world(s) are constructed. The focus is urban – because the city, with its layers of shared meanings – is psychogeographic realm set apart, a distinct kind of human invention.

These virtual worlds would, in essence, become cognitive maps or “protozones.” That, is urban zones-in-the-making that might exist – and even become fully-realized – in psychogeographic terms first, not by planners, but by people who then hire the planners – who maybe then need to subcontract artists – to make them occur in actual fact.

http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.evans/psychogeog.html

The situationists dreamed of an urban life in which public spaces were injected with new life, enriched meanings, and unscripted social interactions through participatory play. The group PublicShape is dedicated to Winston Churchill’s notion that “we shape our public spaces, therefore our public spaces shape us.”

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Publicshape/297062620349581

Welp, artists, gamers, citizens, planners…we can do that now!

Calling Artful Agilists

ProtoZones

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