In conjunction with the College Art Association (CAA) Conference in Chicago on February 10 – 13, 2010, Columbia College Chicago initiated a student-generated blog to report on the many lectures, panels, events and activities at CAA 2010. This Official Blog of the CAA 2010 Conference provides students representing a cross-section of disciplines from Columbia College with an opportunity to become embedded at the conference and report on events as they unfold. After a competitive selection process, CAA generously provided the students of the blogging team with complimentary conference passes to report, photograph, video, interview, research and comment on events in an effort to broadly record the student experience.
The CAA Conference was quite an experience for me. My days were filled with panel hopping, meeting new people, conducting interviews, and note taking. Running from place to place from Columbia College to Rogers Park for Mess Hall was very tiring, but well worth it. I loved forming new connections and running into old friends like Mark Staff Brandl and Mary Mathias. I was so busy the...
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After their session, Meta-Mentors: Opt Out of Obscurity at the College Art Association (CAA) Conference, panelist Duncan MacKenzie and Richard Holland interviewed artist Mark Staff Brandl for their contemporary art podcast, Bad at Sports. I was lucky enough to capture behind the scenes footage of this quick interview. Mark is a correspondent for Bad at Sports from Switzerland but hasn’t been interviewed on the show until now.
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Mess Hall, a 500 square foot storefront space in Rogers Park located at the Morse redline stop, is best described as an experimental cultural center. It is a multipurpose space, that is sometimes used as a gallery, a meeting space, a place for meals, workshops, and community events. Although it is a small space, it is very versatile and an invaluable resource to the community. During the College Art Association (CAA) Conference, Mess Hall hosted an open house. This open house was a great opportunity for the CAA attendees to leave the Hyatt Regency and see another neighborhood in Chicago. I took a ride to Mess Hall with co-founder Dan Wang and got a little bit more insight on the place...
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...It seems to me that one of the main purposes of this blog was to not necessarily “liven” things up a bit, but rather to reflect on the here and now of the conference. Even though the process of writing and posting blog entries was a bit arduous at times, nowhere else could a ‘hit the ground running’ (or something akin to this) approach to covering this conference have happened...
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Listening to and witnessing developments that are bound to make a change in the future of learning was inspiring. This definitely will bring me back for more and who knows, maybe one day I will be speaking in a panel? I just need to think of some new developments!!
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The open-list on display says I SAID | BUT I WAS THINKING, but sheets with the other prompts, I PRETEND and DEAR YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, were laid out as well for people to respond to. In my attempt to collect the silent subtext of people's thoughts, I offered public (open-list) and private (the web and submission boxes) options to participate. The results were quite obvious. While the content of the open-list was sweet, clever and funny, the web-survey results submitted during those two hours were...
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Well, it's time to wrap this thing up. Not that I've not enjoyed the blogging frenzy of the conference or the hectic game of catch-up during this post-CAA week, BUT... yeah, it might just be time to get back to making art, breathing deeply, and eating warm meals.
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Do you think artists will be more motivated to pursue a PhD if it became the terminal degree for art practice in the US?
I can, of course, only speak from my perspective. As a recent MFA graduate who is in search of a job, I realize that not only am I trying to start a career in the midst of an economic crisis, but I also have to apply for jobs where "PhD preferred" is becoming more prevalent within my field. This is definitely motivation for those of us who are or have just finished grad school and are jumping into the abyss. I would argue that to some extent the PhD is already the terminal degree in New Media.
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Well, after squeezing my way to the front of a packed room, I managed to break nearly all these rules — unintentionally of course! — after I leaned against the temporary side-wall (read: door) finding that my 100lbs had apparently become a force to be reckoned with! While I attempted a stealthy grab of the creaking side door, and donned an innocent, genteel smile on my face, the dirty looks, shaking heads and whispers all funneled toward me. Ah! Just my luck.
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What an invigorating couple of days...for myself as well as the other couple thousand attendees. And it's funny to think, walking through the streets of downtown Chicago, you just might have missed its occurrence entirely.
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Blogging also afforded me the unique chance to be in the presence of and interact with artists whose works I’ve marveled, historians whose words I’ve cited and professionals who are responsible for creating the platform upon which African Americans and women in the arts stand. If only I had a personal stenographer to follow me around with a laptop and endless free-time, the readers of this blog would have had access to the endless interviews, write-ups and minute observations that I noted and gathered during this CAA experience!
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Before the conference I would tell people that I was going to be apart of the blogging team and they would all respond the same way. They would congratulate me and then they would always follow up with asking what is the CAA? I would fumble with my words and paste something together that didn’t really fit. After the experience I’m proud to say that I was apart of it.
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As the excitement of CAA comes to a close and we’re all recovering from our exhaustion, I am thankful for this opportunity to write, reflect, and comment on all I have seen and heard during my first CAA conference. Having the opportunity and responsibility as a member of the Columbia College student blog team, I found myself with a greater focus, intensely listening, considering how everything I have heard may influence my own thinking.
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I took a drive with Columbia College adjunct faculty, Dan Wang to Mess Hall during the College Art Association Conference (CAA). Dan, a co-founder of Mess Hall told me more about Mess Hall on the way to Rogers Park. Mess Hall is an experimental cultural center; at times it functions as a space for a gallery, a workshop, meetings, and other events. Mess Hall carries many identities, however it is still very much rooted in the arts.Read More ...
7. Live cinema presents a broad range of performers. How do you think this diversity affects perceptions of the medium?
There are various schools and genres that fit within the live cinema context. For example, the tradition of visual music performance and the creation of various color organs and performative projection systems go back hundreds of years. I find the diversity of technical, conceptual and disciplinary hybrids really liberating. I suppose one negative is that the casual observer might see one or two performances and assume that all live cinema is reflected by a very limited set of aesthetic approaches. In a very real way much of the art world is not particularly savvy about the distinctions between a club VJ set and other kinds of live cinema performance. The background images performed in nightclubs, concerts and raves is often flashy but mostly full of empty calories, it does little to further the medium or suggest the real sophistication attained by leading practitioners.
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Mess Hall, a 500 square foot storefront space in Rogers Park located at the Morse redline stop, is best described as an experimental cultural center. It is a multipurpose space, that is sometimes used as a gallery, a meeting space, a place for meals, workshops, and community events. Although it is a small space, it is very versatile and an invaluable resource to the community. During the College Art Association (CAA) Conference, Mess Hall hosted an open house. This open house was a great opportunity for the CAA attendees to leave the Hyatt Regency and see another neighborhood in Chicago. I took a ride to Mess Hall with co-founder Dan Wang and got a little bit more insight on the place...
Read More ...
The open-list on display says I SAID | BUT I WAS THINKING, but sheets with the other prompts, I PRETEND and DEAR YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, were laid out as well for people to respond to. In my attempt to collect the silent subtext of people's thoughts, I offered public (open-list) and private (the web and submission boxes) options to participate. The results were quite obvious. While the content of the open-list was sweet, clever and funny, the web-survey results submitted during those two hours were...
Read More ...
7. Live cinema presents a broad range of performers. How do you think this diversity affects perceptions of the medium?
There are various schools and genres that fit within the live cinema context. For example, the tradition of visual music performance and the creation of various color organs and performative projection systems go back hundreds of years. I find the diversity of technical, conceptual and disciplinary hybrids really liberating. I suppose one negative is that the casual observer might see one or two performances and assume that all live cinema is reflected by a very limited set of aesthetic approaches. In a very real way much of the art world is not particularly savvy about the distinctions between a club VJ set and other kinds of live cinema performance. The background images performed in nightclubs, concerts and raves is often flashy but mostly full of empty calories, it does little to further the medium or suggest the real sophistication attained by leading practitioners.
Read More ...
