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DodoLab is a collaborative, nebulous “organization” that stages interactive seminars that ask its participants, “What are the barriers to adaptation and change?” The question is posed in as many ways as it is answered through a variety of participatory projects. (Full disclosure: I traveled to Montreal with DodoLab as part of their involvement with WEEC5.)
What’s interesting about DodoLab is that it is never one thing, one project, or one idea, which fits well with their interest in adaptation and change. What links all of their projects together is their dependence on participants to supply data or share experiences. There is no “final product” with DodoLab, just new evolutions of ideas, questions and responses.
Read their About page for a list of DodoLab values. You can read what DodoLab is, and what DodoLab isn’t. And on the latter’s list? DodoLab isn’t just an art project.
DodoLab is a great example of how relational art can be collaborative, educational and investigative.
This entry was written by , posted on October 24, 2009 at 4:46 PM, filed under Research and tagged collaboration, dodolab, education. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
There’s drawing, there’s painting, there’s sculpture, installation, illustration, performance, video, netart… and then there’s relational aesthetics. Relational artwork doesn’t exactly have a style, and it isn’t really a medium. What “relational aesthetics” describes is artwork whose completion isn’t realized until the audience steps in. It’s a broad definition, but for a good reason: relational artworks can take many, many shapes, incorporate many other styles and media, and even have different types of audiences (such as audiences who are aware of the piece as artwork, and audiences who aren’t aware an artwork is being presented).
The term “relational aesthetics” was coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in the 1990s to describe artworks like Jens Haaning’s Turkish Jokes (1994), where the artist “uses a loudspeaker to broadcast jokes told in Turkish on a square in Copenhagen… He instantly produces a micro-community of immigrants who have been brought together by the collective laughter that inverts their situation as exiles.” (Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Relational Aesthetics.” Participation (Documents of Contemporary Art). Ed. Claire Bishop. New York: The MIT, 2006. 162. Print.)
So why does tinygrants only want to fund relational work? Primarily, I think it’s an underfunded and undersupported method of art making, possibly because it is so broad, difficult to pin down, and can in fact be disguised within the realm of more “traditional” methods of art making. But also, I think that great, unconventional and unexpected things can happen with relational work, and that’s what I’m inspired to support. You can read more about the logic behind the impetus here.
I’ll be sharing more examples of relational work, in case people need some kickstarting for their applications.
[Image: Jens Haaning, Turkish Jokes, 1994. Image from skor.nl.]
This entry was written by , posted on October 21, 2009 at 12:58 PM, filed under Research and tagged collaboration, jens haaning, nicolas bourriaud, participation, relational aesthetics. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
A couple of new things here at tinygrants.
First, there is a new email list that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be notified when the projects that tinygrants awards funding to are taking place. I’ll also send a monthly update so that you can see how the entire tinygrants project is coming along. If you’re not a fan of email updates, please consider adding tinygrants to your RSS reader. You can find the link here.
Second, I added a feedback forum that is powered by UserVoice. Click the feedback button on the left side of the window to leave a comment or suggestion. I’d love to know what you think is working or not with the project and/or website. The great thing about UserVoice is that I can update the progress of your suggestions. The format works well with the transparency I’d like to maintain with tinygrants.
This entry was written by , posted on October 17, 2009 at 1:11 AM, filed under News and tagged collaboration, email, feedback, rss. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
