Occupational Art School Node #1

JULY 11, 2012

[INTRODUCTION]:

Today we will begin both a conversion and/or "point of origin" phase of OwA/OAS. This post will be added to for the next several days (once installed in this illustrated text, click "READ MORE" link to stay up-to-date on changes, as a bug in Squarespace causes edits to not appear in truncated main page blog posts), to reflect, summarize or represent the organizational trends and features our node has been developing over the past several months, leading to our OAS Node #1 launch. Many exchanges of many types have been undertaken in or through both actual and virtual environments to shape our platform, including conversations, exhibits, performances, data transmissions, shared archives or links. Our process has been informed by research, experience and theoretical positions. Input has come from many sources. The methodology has been "open disciplinary." Several texts have been offered as precursors [See "Soul of Occupy" and "Enough" series, as well as essays for OwA projects "Wall Street to Main Street," "Low Lives: Occupy!" and "CO-OP/Occuburbs"]. The Spatial Occupation @Hyperallergic residency was extremely helpful at a critical time in facilitating key emergent connections among some players in or of our OAS Node #1. Some explanation of how our node has formed will inevitably occur as we move forward, since the mode of the node will consist in part of a (transparent, apparent) practicum. OAS is emerging from OWS and OwA, and our relationship to the movement is fairly complex. As we begin, OAS is situated as an iteration and rejection of OWS arts & culture trajectories, simultaneously. We hope to offer some dimensional solutions to perceived or perceptual problems that OWS A&C exposed, derived of mainly ideological frames [IMHO-pjm] that may or may not, or should or should not apply to Occupational Art as we commence to conceive and manifest it. There are many, and multi-directional, oppositions to our undertaking. Fortunately and/or unfortunately, art and artists, we can see, prove that difficult creative environments are not always effective in crushing free expression. 

 TODAY'S SESSIONS

Session 1

• Gallery Visit: All Things Project [at the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village]
• Exhibit: Hologalactic
• Artist: Eric Leiser
• Curator: Samuel W. Kho
• Facilitated by: Susan Joyce [Fringe Exhibitions]

Short description: Artist-directed guided tour of "Hologalactic," followed by discussion and pizza at John's of Bleecker Street with Eric and Samuel. The talk covered a range of topics, including Eric's doing an OAS workshop on holography, and Samuel doing an essay and presentation on the subject of the art and the spiritual, as reflected in the programming at All Things Project, plus an exploration of the history of the Neighborhood Church. 

Session Two 

An OAS planning session with Jeremy Bold [original OWS Arts & Culture, Revolutionary Games, Novads, etc.]

Topics included:

• Jez's forming OAS Node 0
• A networked performance of his moving images later this month
• 4D digital imaging and painting
• Potential affiliations with other "schools" emerging from OWS, such as Freedom University
• Visionary praxis
• Usage of online tools for creating a content network 
• The Holodeck Prototype
• Exhibit opportunities in conjunction with "Time Is the Only Object" at SLAG
• Exploration of new street art in Bushwick
• Economic models, alternatives

[Image by Jez Bold]

[NOTES]:

Two weeks ago, at the end of June, I sent this out to a short list of friends/collaborators/occupiers to invite their participation in an informal email/phone-enabled "vision/mission" session. Here is the text: 

Hey all,
this is my starter transmission for the rebooting of Occupy with Art, after we celebrated our nine-month birthday...

it's a kind of vision statement

I would like to convert OwA and our website into a node for the Occupational Art School. It's my idea that I will start to form "classes" here in Bushwick in July. I see the conversion to be 

• a grassroots artist organizing tool 
• a means by which OwA can become sustainable
• a way for us to collectively and individually develop means to support our work/networks 
• the establishment of a production collective for generating shows, "games," actions/interventions, documents, archives, etc
• an inside>outside interface for revolutionary, democratic and dimensional art
• a means by which we can promote ideals and principles for art/artists/artistic purpose that we can believe in
• more.

At this point we have an extensive set of potential participants. we have learned that people (including ourselves) have varying degrees of ability for participating... this project will provide a way for us to mobilize people at their own levels; be a source of info on what those are; and produce clear results (art & art events, etc) that are attractive

I would suggest we platform OAS on 

• spirit-mechanics
• dimensional vision (4d)
• compassion and care for each other
• respect 
• kindness
• fierce determination
• endurance

It seems obvious that the nature [topography/culture/people] of this project to begin with will be international and local.

The operational start-concept is that each of us is a lead-artist of our own collectives. As a meta-collective, we will seek ways to provide support for each other in our various endeavors; in a slight adjustment of mission, OwA will serve as facilitator for our network'd & solo productions; document our progress; share our experiments and ideas; invite others to join; be a clearinghouse for technique and theory.

The e(n)ducation or e(n+1)ducational structure will encourage mentoring, mediums skill or craft, use of all available technologies, dedication to good assessment of progress and potential "success" on the basis of helping any "student"|"teacher" 

• to find her or his "best" artistic gift
• making space where that person can apply the gift successfully
• account for both history & creation (that one needs a bit of clarification; basically respect for one's particular background/vision/skills/craft/traditions > support for invention/genius 
• rational progressive development attaching to more responsibilities through the process (sound expectations)

I'm going to stop there - just to open it up to feedback... In a fairly short period of time I would like to open this up to a bigger set of perspectives and contributions. 

I personally have almost no interest in using any GA processes in this effort, based on my experience over the past 9 months with them. Over the past 30 years I've worked out very effective systems for generating highest quality art outcomes. I think all of you can say the same, relative to your own stuff. I say that based on watching you do what you do. 

Much respect  

The reach-out garnered a couple dozen replies, some of which were profound. Jez Bold's in particular - outlining his ideas for OAS Node #0, pointed the discussion in radical directions in terms of media and imagination, relative to time and experience. Chris Moylan and James Andrews provided a degree of pragmatism that afforded our brainstorming with a good foundation of realism, addressing not only organizational and economic concerns, but also useful references to other successful and sustainable models already operating in the domain. 

The importance of the archive to our undertaking was in short order reinforced by JB:

I believe that beginning with specially designated activities (for example, the philosophical/political/literary discussion sessions that Richard and I have experience designing and hosting) we could scale up the activities of these archival spaces into a network that I would be proud to call the Anarchives: an exploratory archive that any person of any ability is invited to participate in, consisting of a networked collection of people and artifacts that are free to interact with each other.  This node would be a community archive for anyone in the area who wants to contribute to documenting the life, activities, thoughts and art of people in the local area.  And it would be linked to the network of nodes through the Occupy With Art/Occupational Art School website, the Occupy Map, and other metadata resources that can help document and connect each node (person, space, activity).

As was the question of siting the program. The consensus seemed to point to a virtual/actual configuration or array. I pointed out that we already had online components in place. Both the OwA nexus site and the Occupational Art School Tumblr established for the Co-Lab (Austin) project were pegged to locate some of the essential activity getting started. 

Chris and others suggested disciplines and media (like the graphic novel medium) that had been under-supported by Occupy in reaching demographics vital to the expansion of the movement going forward. Big Ideas like JB/Richard's "Sensatorium" and "Holodeck Prototype" seemed ideally suited to collaborative or collective production. Naturally, a number of voices brought up the question of funding for these projects and initiatives. At this early stage, those concerns were set aside, although the alt.economy for art and artists being developed through the CO-OP project was mentioned. 

Several successful types of alt-schools are now emerging as viable and promising in the domain. James pointed to Trade School, but the spectrum of nodal or franchise or subscription education architectures is broadening at an amazing pace. Starting with say, Mark Allen's immensely successful Machine Project as a point of reference, we can also look to programs such as 3rd Ward, Intercourse, the OWS Summer Disobedience School, Freedom University and many others that are demonstrating that many approaches are possible for serving a wide range of "students" and "teachers" who are finding it more and more difficult or untenable to commit to the establishment academic tracks, for a variety of reasons, from the ideological to the economic. 

Alex and others who provided exemplar inputs, like Shane Kennedy and Ambrose Curry and the Revolutionary Gamers in general, showed that liberated actions and activities, barely recognizable as "teaching," might function as the "best practices" for our school design. The DisciplineAriel project and others, like Mark Skwarek's Augmented Reality combines, suggest that modular production enabled by network tech/electronics offers those tracking collaborations or participating as open-invite new-users in collective projects a means of learning that's low-impact, and fun/easy. 

Repeatedly, conversations touched on the principles of openness and mobility, but also on exciting dynamics with respect to immediate reach among potential collaborators, teachers, students and content developers of all creative flavors. Social media tools plus additive (n+1) tools like WIKI, CMS, fast dispersion -servs like REDDIT, elegant whiteboards like Pinterest, and other share-utilities offer a rich platform of options for us to sample, explore and apply. 

CM raised questions about our attenuation to OWS. Currently, given the nebulous but still potent if mysteriously individuated (if not in some aspects invisible) mass of Occupy, we have to suspend the definition of our relation with the movement, not because that is desirable, but because it is determined by the dynamics of the movement itself. Issues of identity and our interface with media (and potential participants/users) therefore for now remains in flux. For our BETA phase, this may serve to our advantage, by not limiting our developmental parameters. For those of us who were more or less integrated into OWS over the past 9 months, detachment from certain programmatic constraints feels refreshing, if bittersweetly so. 

To wrap up this section of the notes, let's look at JB's vision for Node 0:

I'm so glad this pluralogue is going on. Maybe we could plan a meeting when I can plan a Skype/in-person in where we can come together on some of these ideas.

I don't think I can help answer the question of how to locate OAS, except perhaps to say that I would it to operate on a decentralized basis, but one in which we maintain some conections digitally, and some network of names. (Does the network of networks itself need a name? I dunno. Maybe just call it The World...hahah). I assume we'll be operating kind of using our own expenses, tho it might be a nice model to practice tracking our use of funds publicly, which will be especially necessary if we want to get grants.

How do krystal-images relate to Occupy? The following is an excerpt from a longer piece that I hope should succeed in bridging the K-scope Xp-eriments to Occupy more generally:

...I want to live in the upper levels of human dimensions! Crystals awoke my eyes to unseen possibilities, new-found opportunities, beautiful visions of alternate realities. How can we understand Liberty Plaza without it?

This place was a giant crystal monad through which thousands of visions of society were compacted. And over 2 months, this process produced a group of people so dense and massive, that they turned the world upside down. What was impossible was suddenly very very real! And the people who looked thru that K(aleidoscope)-scope had their entire worlds un-adjusted.

It was tough, awkward at times, but we all learned a lot thru this experience. And the only way it will live on is if we tell this story. And even the stories are starting to revolve around the same points now. Why else would we still be interested in talking to each other about it? It's like we discovered that we all had a secret affinity for something that we didn't really know was possible before...