They came, they played...and then they ate

On Wednesday night last week, the Graduate Studies program hosted the Non-Orientation Non-Luncheon Grad School dinner in the CIT Building. The office was invited to create an intervention into the evening, which also included screening of James Bond films and a sitar-tabla performance by local Indian musicians.

One of the things our office has been thinking about lately is the insular nature of the various departments on campus, especially within the grad school. The rigor with which students are expected to approach their studio and class work often precludes some of the risk-taking inherent in working across disciplines and/or collaboratively.

And at the same time, we recognized that this event was going to be held during one of the busiest times of the year for students, so any intervention that took itself too seriously would probably not get too far off the ground.

As such, I proposed that the Office work with students from the various departments to collect unused or discarded materials from the various studios and invite students to play with these materials to build a collaborative, interdisciplinary installation on the 2nd floor of CIT. We chose the 2nd floor in part because it is where our Office is located, but also because the installation would be strategically placed near the bar and desserts!

The collection of detritus was greatly aided by the help of Grad Student Liaisons; one of the side perks of this project was our Office making connections with students and departments with whom we do not normally have much cause for interaction. All in all we gathered materials from all but three of the departments, arranging them by department on tables outside the play room (aka the conference room!)


The only instructions that the students were given were to select an object with the label indicating their department and that as they built into the installation, their object had to interact with objects from a department other than their own. They were given tools reminiscent of elementary school art classes with which to build; the rest was up to their imagination.


And build they did!


At least until the upstairs got so crowded that a group of students coopted the playroom as their dining room, essentially stalling the project in its tracks.

On the plus side, the installation served as a launching pad for many great conversations overheard and instigated over the course of the night around any number of relevant topics including:


* What does the Office of Public Engagement actually do?
* What scares people about working collaboratively? Especially in the context of a project-based curriculum?
* What kind of framework is necessary in order for collaboration to be embraced?
* How can different departments share what they are working on with others in different buildings and sides of campus?
* What classes already exist that ask students to make interdisciplinary artwork?

Earlier this week, I was sent a link to a parallel project that j. morgan puett is orchestrating in Chicago: http://www.deptstore.blogspot.com/ I was particularly struck by the expansiveness of the physical space available for this project. It set my thoughts to spinning...