Artists + Environments web exhibition launch

Today smudge studio launched a web exhibition of its recently completed project entitled: Artists + Environments: Generative Practices and Conversations.

The project began with a three-week long web event in March, 2009. smudge studio orchestrated a collaboration among 16 artists, art educators, museum educators, and media designers whose works address natural, built, and virtual environments.

Collaborators used a blog to experiment with and creatively respond to five gestures (drawn from the Walker Art Center's "Elements and Principles of Today's Art') that shape contemporary art: hybridity, time, space, performance, and appropriation. Each week, moderators kicked off the conversation with provocations. Moderators included Bill L. Fox, Susan Rotilie, and Colin Robertson.

On March 26, 2009, we took the results to graduate students in Penn State’s School of Visual Arts “Web 2.0 Pedagogies” class, taught by Karen Keifer-Boyd. There, Karen and her students helped design the web exhibition during a charrette facilitated by smudge.

You can view the project's press release and description here.

You can experience the exhibition, along with documentation of the design charrette, on ExtremeMediaStudies.org (click on "web exhibitions" or "web exhibition: generative conversations"). You'll find video, interactive image and text "echoes," extracted themes, and contextualized text excerpts from the conversation's flow.

We invite you to creatively appropriate the web exhibition for your needs as artists, teachers, and museum educators. Please pass it along. Let us know what you think and how it's taken up.