Sunday, April 22, 2007

Festival of Political Emotion

Feel Tank and others

On June 16, the first Saturday of the Pathogeographies exhibition, Feel Tank will host a Festival of Political Emotion at Gallery 400 including a chance to participate in George Bush's daily thoughts about Iraq. The festival embraces a variety of projects with artists on hand to elicit your participation and measure the emotional temperature of the body politic. How do you carry your pile of political feelings? How do you cope with Other People's Baggage? What is to be felt, and what is to be done?

Feel Kit

Feel Tank and others

Feel Tank Chicago presents the Feel Kit, a wiki of keywords on political emotion.

All are welcome to participate in writing the Feel Kit. To receive a registration passcode to participate in the site, send a request to bodypolitic@gmail.com.

Mapping the Body Politic

Feel Tank and others

A series of talks and performances by Pathogeographies participants
Saturday, June 30, 12-6

Micro-cinemas

Feel Tank and others

Feel Tank hosts multiple micro-cinemas between June 15 and July 7 as part of Pathogeographies

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Maldonado-Salcedo Baggage

Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo a.k.a “MalSal”


There is an inextricable relationship between guilt and migration. The sociopolitical implications intrinsic to the unpacking of this guilt becomes manifested and complicated within familial relationships. Within the volatile theater of being "here" but performing "over there," an enduring liminal identity and space is mapped. Displacement (social, political, spiritual, economic, physical and psychological) becomes generational, until becoming borderline criminal. Maldonado-Salcedo embodies the impossible truth and reconciliation attached to an exodus.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

This Dream, This Frequency










Mary Walling Blackburn

Dreams are a kind of suitcase. The historian Mechal Sobel claims that dreams provide an ethical reckoning ground where citizens work out potential reactions to political situations. Charlotte Beradt, in her collection of German dreaming during the Nazi era, found that those who resisted in dreams also resisted in waking life.

For the past year I have been collecting and recording fragments of dreams of soldiers stationed in Iraq. This Dream, This Frequency will use hand-built micro radio transmitters to send the recordings out into several different Chicago neighborhoods. As walkers or drivers navigate a pre-ordained route, they will be able to tune into the station and listen to the dream until they move out of range. What had previously coagulated in the dreaming mind of a soldier is mechanically fed into the ether, the causeway of the public consciousness.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Workshops

BLW

BLW develops public recitations (re-enactments) of significant recordings in the history of radical media – speeches, interviews and so on.

We consider the role of media in radical practices: how do video recordings, or other new media, act as repository for memory and/or vehicle for interjection? How does the act of re-playing activist video recordings both instill the current moment with the spirit of resistance and possibility while, simultaneously, elucidating the impossibility of such optimism now? Can we, through an embodied recitation of radical speech, give this act of “play back” a different outcome?

BLW will conduct workshops to re-enact the 1969 recording of the final interview of Fred Hampton, conducted by the Videofreex in his apartment in Chicago, where he was subsequently assassinated.

Friday, April 13, 2007

A Potter's Story



Theaster Gates

From the pottery wheel, I will sing 3 pieces, one of Dave the enslaved potter who, being shot in the leg, cannot run away from his enslavement. The second piece will be a response to surveillance cameras and third will be singing a series of city planning policies and land use ordinances that seem a direct response to eradicating the presence of non-conforming citizens from the public sphere.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Invitation to public movement


Meredith Haggerty

My work is an ongoing exploration of spaces, the way they affect my self and my own desire for alignment, self control and change that might be achieved through a kind of self consciousness. For Pathogeographies, I have proposed a troupe called Public Movement. Participants should bring habits or movements from structured events such as work or rush hour and recreate them in a new space. The goal is simply to reroute these activities as both internal and external events.

May 18, 5pm: Slow walking in downtown Chicago
June 30: Habit swap

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Corpus Projecti


Lián Sifuentes

An interactive performance installation for an audience of one. Users enter a small space one at a time and encounter the live, physically present body of a woman. They touch the performer's body on illuminated points and she tells them a short story inspired by that body part. To hear a story, a user must make continuous physical contact with the performing body; the performer only vocalizes while the user’s hand is touching her. The user sees animated cellular growth projected before him or her, directly caused by the transmission of the story.

A Case for Feeling Insecure

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, a performance research collaborative based in Cambridge, MA, will produce “Unmarked Package: A Case for Feeling Insecure” at locations in Chicago characterized by excessive security. Having observed that the Unmarked Package appears frequently in the literature on security and emergency preparedness and in actual reported events that evoke fear and insecurity around the nation, the Institute seeks to use “Unmarked Packages” to test for insecurity in Chicago's public places.

Graffiti workshop and Hip-Hop education

Lavie Raven

Two workshops with Lavie Raven, Prime Minister of Education of the University of Hip-Hop, at Midway Studios. The morning workshop introduces basic skills involved in graffiti writing for community murals; you will produce a mural by the end of the session. In the afternoon, an urban farmer and political organizer present strategies for incorporating the hip-hop arts into education and media production. Both events meet Saturday, May 5 at Midway Studios, 6016 Ingleside Ave., Chicago.

Left Luggage



Material Exchange
Left Luggage

For its proposed contribution to Pathogeographies, Material Exchange offers not an artwork, object, or display—but a service. Material Exchange’s baggage check will be a functioning facility within the space, operating without any intervention from, or dependence upon, the established structures of the gallery. It is our interest to provide an element to the Pathogeopraphies project that will contribute to the organization of a varying and diverse array of contributions (left luggage).

Monday, April 9, 2007

Solo Practice

Edra Soto Fernandez

Solo Practice encounters an open space for narratives by isolating a person playing drums. The drummer delivers a musical interpretation as if he were playing it with a band in real time, leaving silent spaces for an imagined and silent accompaniment. The incompleteness is presented as the subject of the piece. Excerpt: The Star-Spangled Banner (author: Francis Scott Key)

Radical Grandmothers

Bonnie Fortune, with illustrations by Becca Taylor

A new “Free Walking” zine, combining research from two projects, “Free Walking” and the Library of Radiant Optimism. The Library involves researching and collecting books which express an optimistic spirit of self-education and freedom. The Free Walking project (freewalking.org) is an ongoing series of peripatetic investigations and accompanying zine that contain writing about walks, walking, or time spent outside. Radical Grandmothers will feature the stories of, and walks with, Kirsten Dufour and Margit Czenki, both of whom were involved in optimistic self-education and self-publishing movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The zine will also contain interviews with various members of the Raging Grannies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raging_Grannies.

LAUGH

Mrs Rao’s Growl (Anuj Vaidya and Sheelah Murthy)

Laughter is a powerful disruptive tool. In difficult times like these, it reaffirms our connections and helps unite our voices, literally, into one loud and indignant guffaw against larger repressive forces. Reminiscent of the therapeutic goals of the Laughing Clubs in India and the children’s game HA HA HA, the public performance and spectacle of LAUGH embraces many aspects of laughter – release, healing, aerobic workout, community-building, and protest. LAUGH has been performed at the Federal Plaza and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; a backyard picnic; a wedding in Santa Fe, New Mexico; at the Washington Memorial in Washington, D.C.; and at the Haymarket Martyrs Monument in River Forest, Illinois. This iteration of LAUGH will be an extension of Feel Tank Chicago’s 5th International Parade for the Politically Depressed.

Economies of Touch

Sheelah Murthy

The problematic economic and affective exchanges between client and therapist, john and prostitute, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and their constituencies are all explored in this durational deep-tissue massage/performance piece. Clients will be solicited beforehand as well as “walk-ins.” The massages/performathon will take place in a small nomadic shelter inside the gallery, and will benefit the International Rescue Committee, specifically to support health services for sex workers in Southeast Asia.

s*m*a*s*h

Salem Collo-Julin

SMASH

(dollars up || motors down)

SUNDAY JUNE 17
time and location TBA

smash is a public service and a fundraiser for FeelTank Chicago's Pathogeographies events and exhibition.

Tools:

one junk vehicle (beater; drained of fluids and glass popped out. a shell of plastic and steel waiting for impact)
empty parking lot for a few hours
timer and whistle
goggles and gloves
tarps

The Plan:

$5 = thirty seconds. you and the decommissioned vehicle. what would your inner demon do?

$20 = 30 minutes

The public is invited one at a time to do damage
everyone feels better except for the vehicle

Cranky, the Person Lingering With AIDS



Cranky P.W.A.

Morbid queer thoughts of the Cranky P.W.A., who also shares meditations on radical frivolity, living (or dying) with liver cancer, remembering Michael Bumblebee, and much more. http://crankypwa.blogspot.com

Revolution is an eternal dream

Ferd Eggan

A series of interviews with people who are thinking about the implications of their work for radical transformation of global society: Hank Jones, one of the SF 8, the Black Panther veterans being charged with the killing of a police officer at Ingleside Station, SF, in 1971; gay activist Jeffrey Edwards on gentrification and LGBTQ issues in Chicago; video-bloggers extraordinaires, Ryanne Hodson & Jay Dedman; anarchist/artist/activists Dara Greenwald and Josh McPhee; artist, writer, educator, advocate of Puerto Rican independence and former political prisoner Elizam Escobar, and others. – Ferd Eggan, http://www.ferdeggan.net

Vietnamese Suitcase


Erin O'Brien

A Vietnamese suitcase is a cardboard box. The “suitcase” serves a temporary purpose, unlike the somewhat indestructible western version, made for on-going travel. As I position myself at locations around various cities (federal building, Vietnamese neighborhood and Vietnam memorial), I solicit people to write/reflect on what they think of Vietnam on Joss paper and put the paper in my “suitcase”. After sharing the thoughts/reflections on Vietnam that people record/write onto the Joss Paper, I will burn them on a lunar holiday.

http://www.erinobrien.org

Los Angeles performance: March 2, 2007
Chicago Performance: April 28, 2007
Seattle Performance: Late May, 2007
Washington DC Preformance: Late May, 2007
Burning of Joss Paper
Final performance Chicago: First Lunar Moon in August

Sunday, April 8, 2007

The New Yorkers’ Guide to Military Recruitment in the 5 Boroughs

The Friends of William Blake

As a counter argument to the grinding machine of military recruitment during the Iraq War, fighting in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, The Friends of William Blake, a small collective of artists, writers, and activists, has created “The New Yorkers’ Guide to Military Recruitment in the 5 Boroughs” – a pocket-sized, sixty-page, comprehensive guide to local military recruitment and resources for counter recruitment in NYC. Made in the spirit of The People's Guide to the RNC which they published in 2004, this book is a small part in the worldwide effort for peace & justice. It seeks to inspire hope while provoking conversation, informing potential recruits, and giving activists a new wrench in their toolbox. http://www.counterrecruitmentguide.org

Fifth Annual International Parade of the Politically Depressed

Feel Tank and others

Feel Tank Chicago hosts the Fifth Annual International Parade of the Politically Depressed, on July 4, 2007. Depressed? It Might Be Political!

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Cloud Cover

Laurie Palmer

Cloud cover reflects the modification of our environment from energetic sanctioning of coal power production, unrestricted industrial growth, a car and highway culture, and massive consumption. It also affects our emotional well-being directly -- people living with less light get SAD. But weather systems, like emotions, are unpredictable, and our weather's response to capitalism is not based on a one-to-one linear relation. In this project, the intensity of atmospheric lighting in a windowless room (powered by a photovoltaic array) is regulated by the intensity of available light outside, while data collects, comparing current temperatures with historic averages.

Jimmy Carter's solar panels on the west wing of the White House, 1980, removed by Reagan the day after he was inaugurated. (photo by Bill Fitzpatrick)

I Want to Know the Habits of Other Girls

Dewayne Slightweight

A twenty-minute opera, based on the comic of the same name, performed by Dewayne and four life-size sewn and stuffed “friends” – Gilda Radner, Limbo Tomboy, Gordon Gaskill, and The Great Auntie. At the center of this project is the longing for community, a family of lovers, each person attracted to the idea that one’s happiness depends on everyone else’s: an imagined queer community. How can we strongly imagine things we have never experienced, and use these yearnings, hopes, and desires as a political force?

a beautifully trial and error life

Claire Pentecost

A project that begins with an interesting story, generates an interview, becomes a drawing based on listening, a diagram of empathic reflexivity... not a series of portraits, but a search for pleasurable and non-linear ways of knowing a life, of re-telling someone's story, finding other routes to unfold a case study of desires. How do people determine their own paths of learning, create form from circumstance, end up surpassing themselves? What makes someone care about those things we call political?

Cheap Art For Freedom

CAFF Collective

We intend to investigate the production of bad feelings by "misusing" public spaces (for example, loitering, carrying boomboxes around, etc). We will make maps and objects that will allow others to participate in these activities and solicit others to make maps of their own; maps will be posted and solicited in a variety of media. Our initial solicitation, or "suitcase," will be "worry lines": clothes lines erected in public places that invite people to air their dirty laundry by writing down worries and pinning them to the lines.

A number of events invite participation. First: Sat. April 21 outside McCormick Center on the lakeshore path in the p.m. (during Green festival) Others: TBD

Suitcase Project: ORD-BEY-ORD

Charlotte Sáenz

This Suitcase Project arose out of my intense sadness and anger during last summer's war in Lebanon, as I wondered whether bombed bridges & roads could lead my loved ones to safety. It is an attempt to connect my communities here with my communities there--a simple idea that led to many unexpected connections, emotions, and challenges. For some of the participants it was just an exchange, for others a fragile and momentary connection, yet others took it as an opportunity to express their own emotions, in letters and packages prepared with much thought and care for a stranger over there.

Love is as strong as death

subRosa

A participatory feast with the theme of Love is Strong as Death, addressing the concept of "political love."

Theodoreau

Andrew Dodds

Part of an ongoing series of works exploring the links between Henry 'Walden' Thoreau and Theodore 'Unabomber' Kaczynski, two 'historical' figures who loom large over America's understanding of itself. Their lifestyle choices in remote, cabin home is mirrored in the political acts that both expounded, though for very contrasting reasons. For Pathogeographies a 'discursive', relational space is to be created in which group participation will be encouraged.

www.andrewdodds.com/artwork/lifeinthewoods.html

Listen and Feel

Dan Wang

As a return of the long dormant Selections series, I will be playing and speaking about songs having to do with politics and feelings, including feelings of Anxiety, Depression, Apathy, Impatience, Irritation, Sorrow, Paranoia, Righteousness, Confusion, Inspiration, Ecstasy, and maybe even a little Outrage. This will be a listening party/presentation of recorded music presented in two sets: Part 1 will be about twenty songs, maybe more, mixed in with my commentary; Part 2 will be just music for the rest of the evening without commentary. The presentation will include a mini-set of songs from artists who came out of Chicago's South Side. A free pamphlet text assembled to accompany the event will be made available.

Hyde Park Art Center
Monday, July 2, 2007
6:30 PM - 9:30 PM

Ritual Guerilla Mummification

Kali

The Guerilla Mummification Kit is a variation on our Home Mummification Kit.
While the latter features everything needed for a traditional approach, the former provides only wrapping materials such that it is better suited to extemporaneous freeform mummifications. The wrapping materials are quite varied: aluminum foil, string, tapes of various kinds, festive wrapping papers and ribbon, cellophane, etc. We will seek out subjects for mummification such as fried chicken, gas pumps, and furniture. The process will be recorded by a before and after photo, as well as by brief musings in a diary/sketchbook.

please see: http://www.kaliartifacts.com

Friday, April 6, 2007

Carried Baggage

Jennifer Hines

I am interested in the idea of the figurative baggage we carry with us when we leave home. Our "suitcase" can carry physical items, but also sentimental, emotional, and psychological items as well. I would like to collect responses from passerby in various places in Chicago and ask what they feel they always carry with them when they travel away from home. The responses will be written by the passerby on a piece of paper, then collected in a vintage suitcase. After collecting the responses, the suitcase will be available for others to read the reponses, thereby allowing people the opportunity to glimpse how others feel, creating a more intimate connection between people.

Data collection occurs on Memorial Day weekend, May 26-28

Drawn Lots


Drawn Lots is:
Regan Golden-McNerney
Juan Juarez
Michael K. Julian
Jeremy Lundquist


Drawn Lots is interested in starting a dialogue concerning how people feel about their hopes for owning land and/or a house/home.

We will be interacting with a variety of communities to gauge personal responses to property.

Our research will feed into Google image searches which will in turn serve as a resource for drawn versions of these attitudes towards ownership.

drawnlots.blogspot.com

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Singing Melancholia

Megan Ransmeier

You say: I feel like there is no hope.
We sing: I feel like there is no hope,
IIIIIIIII feel liiiiiiiike there is noooooo hoope.
I feeeeeel liiiiiike theeeeeeere iiiiiiiiiis
nooooooo hooooope. Ifeellikehereisnohope.
You: Make sound on our arms with whatever you have.
We: Make sound on eachothers arms with whatever we have.

This group activation of object, phrase, and each other will be taking place in multiple public spaces and invites all who are interested.

First public version of project occurred April 14th at 2pm at the Water Tower in downtown Chicago.
Tentative future dates: April 28th and May 12th

Monday, April 2, 2007

Re-Dressing New Orleans

Carole Frances Lung

After my most recent stay in post-Katrina New Orleans, I realized a tool for rebuilding everyday life in the city of New Orleans is commemorating the loss. With this in mind I will implement the portable garment reconstruction unit (a bike powered portable sewing machine) and ride from FEMA trailer to FEMA trailer in Gentilly neighborhood, asking residents to describe a lost garment, then I will rebuild the garment and leave it with them. The artifacts of the project: portable garment reconstruction unit, fabric remnants, patterns and suitcase with blue tarp reproductions of the garments will available for engagement during the exhibition.

The project takes place May 15-June 13, New Orleans, LA in the Gentilly neighborhood/8th ward.

CrossPollinNation

Andi Sutton

In CrossPollinNation, I will conduct two city walks, from 6 - 10 miles, one in Boston and one in Chicago, both reflecting the race and class changes of the city neighborhoods that the routes pass through. I will carry 2 suitcases filled with heirloom squash seeds and planting materials (squash are notorious for their cross-pollinating tendencies.) When someone on the street offers to help me carry the suitcases, I will plant a squash seed for her/him to cultivate. The suitcases will lighten as more people offer to help. Both walks end when I reach a cultivation site where people I encounter along the way will be able to plant and tend to their seeds together for the rest of the growing season.

Boston dates: Sunday, May 20th, starting at 11AM in Harvard Sq., Cambridge and ending whenever I reach the end of the bus route in Dudley Square, Roxbury.

Chicago dates: ca. June 21-25

URL: http://www.bittermelon.org
(The National Bitter Melon Council)

Sunday, April 1, 2007

Launch 2007

Maria Perkovic
Derek Erdman
Launch 2007

Launch 2007 is a quiet, public intervention that involves inserting messages attached to objects into the everyday experience of Chicagoans. The collaboration involves the participation of people we have yet to meet, in and around Chicago, through personalized messages attached to hundreds of helium filled balloons, business cards and mini parachutes. An archive of responses will be created to form an invisible solidarity.

Renaming Bush Street

Amber Hasselbring, Jerome Grand

Renaming BUSH Street
is a survey that will take place on Bush Street in San Francisco. Playing on the mistaken association of the name Bush Street with our 41st and 43rd Presidents, the survey will record how passersby feel about the nomenclature of this street. The survey is purposely framed on highly contested presidencies to elicit affected responses, which indicate how we define and construct our shared political and cultural ideologies in the urban environment.

Wednesday May 2, 7-9 a.m. Bush & Battery

Tuesday May 8, 3-5 p.m. Bush & Powell

Saturday May 19, 5-7 p.m. Bush & Fillmore

Friday May 25, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Bush & Presidio

http://art-eco.org/renamingbushstreet/

Once a Day

Rachele Riley
Once a day

Once a day is a web-based artwork that maps an online landscape of concepts associated with stylized violence. Automated searches are carried out daily. At the intersection of six searches, the collected images, text and video will be recontextualized. New narratives of text and moving images will build each day to tell the story of a shifting landscape of caution, hope, silence and sensibility.

http://www.racheleriley.com

In Search of Lost Memory

Kristoffer Ardena
In Search of Lost Memory

This public intervention consists of found photos (mainly dating around the civil war till the fall of the Franco dictatorship - the time of Spanish Diaspora) that I found in dumpsites, flea markets in Madrid, Spain. At the time these photos were made Spain had a considerable emigrant population, as a recent immigrant to Spain I wanted to somehow link the experience of displacement by searching for clues as to the whereabouts of the people and places in each photo. The project consists of making flyers in the typical Lost-and-Found style to search for people in the photos or anyone that have any relationship to it.