2008 Updates

SAMPLE MINILAB SESSIONS

ORIENTATION MINI-LAB: SIGHTS, SOUNDS, AND AIR OF PLACE

Taxi, bus, or walk-and-talk to the local sites that offer delegates the chance to immerse themselves in the Ghanaian environment and engage in discussions, artistic performances and other forms of expressing the outsider/insider ways of seeing the environment, personal artistic process and philosophies of practice in order to create group dynamism. The whole tour group will then break up into 4-6 per group to continue the dialogues, further explore the environment, and harness resources for en situ practice. Each breakup group will be led by one of the mini-lab session leaders such as convener, speaker, and provocateur. Every participant is encouraged to produce a piece of art that can be exhibited in a gallery setting, as a way of testing the possibilities of the locally-sourced art materials.

SOUNDING THE LANDSCAPE (AMPLIFIED GHANA GEOGRAPHY)
Convened by: Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, University of Washington, Bothell) A multimedia in(ter)vention organized around mapping noise in soundscape of the Accra land that links the arts and the environment. The five-part workshop will use a digital platform that enacts a small range of the "amplification geography". Drawing from Surrealist games, Fluxus event scores, the Anna and Lawrence Halprin RSVP cycles, and digital systems of scoring, we will engage in a research method and an artistic practice for encountering noise in its many guises and its potential for transposition into new forms. We hope to set into motion a digital and off-line theater of change that revises our relationships to the discarded, worn out, the useless, or the often unattended to: that is, to noise. Bring your dance, performance, and storytelling skills because this tracking will allow us to hear, to respond to, and move with that which we do not typically hear. Open to students, publics with mobile and other technologies, scholars, artists, innovators, and designers.