AmeriCorps*VISTA Position at RISD | Public Engagement

Applications due June 1st

RISD | Public Engagement seeks candidates for an AmeriCorps*VISTA position that will run from 30 July 2009 to 29 July 2010. This AmeriCorps*VISTA position is sponsored through the Rhode Island Campus Compact and will be placed at Rhode Island School of Design. The VISTA member will work closely with the director of RISD | Public Engagement to advance the strategic goals of the Office.

Specific VISTA Responsibilities:

Communication
• Developing communication about public engagement across the College;
• Communicating with community agencies about RISD | Public Engagement’s existing work;
• Working with the director to communicate public engagement opportunities through existing student and academic services offices;
• Assisting with the development of content for the Office’s web site;
• Coordinating a weekly electronic newsletter for the office;

Community Outreach
• Building our database of community partners;
• Working with potential community partners to assess opportunities for collaboration;
• Meeting with community agencies to determine how RISD can support existing services and establish new long-term partnerships;

Academic Support
• Assisting with the development of our service-learning initiative;
• Coordinating information for faculty about service-learning resources;
• Coordinating meeting of RISD’s faculty forum on service learning;
• Assisting the development of new community-arts/design programs and coordinating existing partnerships;
• Supporting students and academic departments in the development of new, on-going initiatives;

Extracurricular Support
• Assisting the development of our campus sustainability initiative;
• Coordinating events open to students and faculty that promote community involvement;
• Advising students about possible service programs;
• Assisting the director to coordinate service programs;

Qualifications:
• Familiarity with community-based art and design programs;
• Familiarity with a four-year undergraduate institution;
• Strong organizational skills;
• Ability to communicate across difference and with a diverse set of constituents; a commitment to supporting inclusive learning environments and workplaces;
• BA degree

Questions and Application
Please direct questions and inquiries about the position to Peter Hocking, Director of RISD | Public Engagement – phocking@g.risd.edu or 401-413-0275. A formal application can be submitted at: www.compact.org/ricompact/vista/join.php

About AmeriCorps*VISTA

AmeriCorps*VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) is one of several full time national service programs. VISTA members who are interested in developing lasting solutions to the problems of poverty in America serve in nonprofit organizations and agencies to develop and expand services, strengthen programs and empower low-income individuals. For more information about the program, please visit the RI Campus Compact web site.

About RISD | Public Engagement
The Office of Public Engagement works with faculty, students, alumni, and community partners to connect art, design and scholarship with the public good. Reflecting the values of the College, RISD | Public Engagement believes that public participation is a central concern of a college education. Recognition of one's social responsibility and one's ability to affect public issues is intrinsic to understanding one's role in a democratic society and key to addressing the most pressing questions that face us -- locally nationally and internationally. For more information about us, visit our web site.

Imagination and Wonder in the Face of Climate Change

After viewing Jane D. Marsching's video/sound installation, NOAA Webcam 2005, RISD students in Christopher Ho's Competition, Collaboration, and Collective class discussed the desire to communicate social, environmental concerns with the quest for aesthetically compelling imagery. How, they wondered, do artists walk the line between creative ambiguity and wanting their art to be a call to action?

This essay by Marsching gets to the heart of these questions while also pointing to the ways in which our collective relationship to the reality of climate change has radically shifted over the past five years. Today we are living in a post- Inconvenient Truth age when much of what scientists and artists and activists were struggling to vocalize five years ago is now readily accepted. There is less a need for convincing, or pointing to the problem.

We know the problems - the question as Marsching puts it, is now "how can we put everything we have in service to the act of inspiring individuals, communities, and countries to work for our future?"

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Imagination and Wonder in the Face of Climate Change

Bleak news about climate change barrages us relentlessly. Stories of future disasters, of ineffectual changes, of ever more catastrophic climate models create a picture that many find daunting and off-putting. We have gotten better at recycling, using fluorescent light bulbs, etc., but still, the problem seems so huge, so out of our hands, and getting every more complex, that its easier to turn away or indulge in cynical dystopic visions.

The North Pole is the epicenter of the climate crisis news cycle and data glut. It is our canary in a cold mine (literally), as the effects of forced anthropogenic warming affect the delicate ecosystem more extremely than climates closer to the equator. Melting faster than scientist's predictions can keep up with, the possible effects of the rapidly transforming boreal climate keep us hooked up to the morphine drip of cataclysmic prophecies.

As a result, we are paying attention to the North Pole in ways we have never done before. New technologies have allowed for nearly real time experience of the landscape through webcams and other networked technologies. Advances in engineering have allowed for penetration of otherwise truly remote wilderness as never before: witness the invaluable data found in mile long ice cores carefully screwed out from deep within ancient ice sheets and glaciers. Developments in energy production and travel allow for tourists and scientists both to cheaply (relatively, at a cost of often $25,000 per ticket), quickly, and comfortably sail up to the pole in nuclear icebreakers or subs. This mythical place, which was once our most remote, our most inaccessible landscape, is now almost on our doorstep and irrevocably connected to very real, even quantifiable, daily human life.

And yet, the long rich history of Western exploration of the far north is still a part of our anxiety over the disappearance of its age old climate. The images, lectures, lantern slides, poetry, and journal entries picturing the far off lands fueled deep desires to experience and conquer. To the culture that produced so many people willing to throw themselves at this harshest of terrains at ever greater expense and national pride, the north pole was our farthest north, spiritual summit, heroic destination, most extreme landscape on the farthest edge of the world. Its vast tracts of land and sea and ice existed beyond our borders of representation and understanding, yet were pictured as sublime frontier, filled with the supernatural or paranormal, a place outside of the normal vagaries of life, where even our shadows, footprints, and breath act alien to us.

"What may not be expected in this country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities forever." — Mary Shelly, Frankenstein, letter from Walton, explorer to North Pole

But, Shelly's Frankenstein lecturing about the quest for glory on the way to the North Pole is now Al Gore on an elevating platform gesturing towards complex graphs of temperature fluctuations. The technologies of communication deployed by science, industrialization, and geopolitical concerns picture this territory now. What was once considered a wilderness foreign to our Western culture is now a harbinger of our future and so has become part of us. The natural, the technological, and the production of data are no longer in conflict, but exist in reciprocal need.

The north pole, once a mythical land of unreachable sublime wilderness, is now at the heart of scientific data predicting calamity. How do these disparate pictures resolve or oppose one another? Can we turn our doom-filled prophecies into catalytic responses? Can the power of imagination and wonder provoke us out of exhausted cynicism toward visionary engagement?

What is the opposite of despair, of disaster, of death? Elaine Scarry, in her groundbreaking book The Body in Pain, makes a claim for the power of imagination to push the world towards creation, while pain (or the fear of pain?) leads towards destruction. In the nineteenth century, Western explorers of the Arctic took with them on their ships as much of Western culture as they could, including sets of silver, libraries of great literature, and smoking jackets. They also brought trunks of costumes with which they performed the popular theater of the time upon the ice during the long winters of darkness when they were trapped in the ice in subzero temperatures with little hope of survival. These extravaganzas were a necessary focal point for a crew deeply suffering and filled with doubt. Harnessing the power of wonder allowed them to take a journey out of the dark cold and into other fantastical worlds with humor and spectacle.

This story became the basis for Arctic Then, a series of images of vaudevillian performers enacting uncertain tableaux with detritus of our urban communities and set upon 3D visualizations of digital elevation models of ice caps and glaciers from around the world. The images put the glaciers in the place of the explorers of yesterday: starving, endangered, with little hope. There is so little that we feel we can do to save them. Perhaps yoking the power of imagination on their behalf can create a rift in the immense sea of complex uncertainties of responses to the climate crisis.

Arctic Listening Post

I have researched, mapped, and explored the North Pole for the last five years through Arctic Listening Post, a collaborative, interdisciplinary digital media project. Through this project, I created a pair of video installations that imagine the future of the North Pole over the next hundred years: Rising North and Future North Ecotarium.

Rising North, a nine-minute large scale video projection pairs a very economical and meditative color field visualization of the change in temperature at the North Pole over the next century with a larger than life operatic voice singing in aria form the prosaic news headlines from Google news on the vernal equinox of March 21, 2007: reports of kiteboarders surfing over the pole to watercolor classes offered in North Pole, Alaska to endless accounts of changing climate data. How can we make sense of the climate change predictions in the news? How do we absorb scientific information into our everyday lives?

Future North Ecotarium imagines our future in the next hundred years after irreversible climate change. Created in collaboration with visionary architects Mitchell Joachim and Terreform Studio, the three-minute stop motion animation images our response to a three meter sea level rise over the next century. Massive migrations of urban populations will move north to escape severe flooding and increasing temperatures. Many areas inside the Artic regions will warm up significantly, making their occupation newly desirable. Real estate values will shift to privilege far northern climates formerly imagined as the edge of the earth. The reality of hundreds of millions of people relocating their respective centers of culture, business, and life is almost incomprehensible. In this animation, entire cities float away from their flooded moorings and meet in a new North, re-imagining the entire surface of our planet in the future.

I am often asked, what is the point? Or, more directly, can aesthetic experience or art make any real difference in the face of such a huge crisis? What does looking at (and listening to) art do to effect change? Beyond pointing to the long history of art used to revision crisis in the service of change, I call upon the power of our imagination in partnership with our intellect and our activism as the key trio in a global consciousness shift that is necessary to slow and ameliorate the human causes of climate change. Instead of prioritizing one approach over the other, the question should be: how can we put everything we have in service to the act of inspiring individuals, communities, and countries to work for our future?

Notes from Chicago

Note: This blog posting is LONG overdue. My desire to keep a daily blog report during the Janaury 9-11th Art and Activism retreat was more than a little overly ambitious. Not only was the retreat incredibly intense and full, but it took me a good couple of weeks just to let all of what happened sift through in my brain...so here is a condensed version of the report back.

A telling moment: the last morning of the We Want More retreat one of the members of the Just Seeds Radical Print Collective announced to the group, “We keep talking about how to open this group to others, but I have no idea how to invite people to join us when we can’t even define what this is.” And really, what was this? A gathering of 80 plus artist-activists interconnected by one or two-degrees of separation? A retreat to reflect on the ways in which our shared and divergent practices are or are not making a difference in the social movements with which we align ourselves? An opportunity to connect around our commonalities, support one another’s efforts, and strategize for how to get more from ourselves?

Yes, We Want More. But exactly who are we, and what is the more that we claim to want? After three days of on-site investigation and two weeks of post-retreat reflection, these questions continue to bounce around my brain, delightfully unanswerable.

Filled with a burning urgency to figure something out, a small subset of the group spent the final hours of the retreat attempting to lay out some possible guiding principles.
We believe in:
- Arts* as open-ended experiments in imaginary, libratory, future possibilities of being;
- The orientation of arts’ work within social movements;
- Arts as forms of visual and performative languages in opposition to commodity form;
- Aesthetic cultural work against ALL hegemonies;
- Arts against oppression;
- Art that articulates possibilities for an unwritten future.

* The group presented these principles with the caveat that the words “art” or “arts” were both equally problematic. Ditto “value”. (Words are so hard!)
We agree to uphold these principles in our creative practice and acknowledge that, in many cases, IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING!

While the seven people in our small group enjoyed the mental and linguistic experiment, after presenting to the larger group, we chose to abandon any further efforts to carry these principles beyond the walls of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Whether the result of our discomfort around setting out definitions for the larger group or our resistance to speaking for those who did not choose or could not attend. Poof! (Thus I am recording them here as a reminder of our hard work, despite the utterly inconclusive outcome).

There were plenty of other undeterminables and moments of organizational meltdown – much of which focused around the question of who we were and who we were not. How to address the lack of diversity in the group became one of the hot spots of the retreat—looking around the room, the we represented was overwhelmingly white artists in their mid 20s to late 40s (it was curious that the brown people in the room didn’t seem to quite meet the group’s desire for diversity, as if somehow we were equating diversity with the presence of black people) The 80 one minute presentations reflected overlapping interests in performance, installation, occupation, food, street spectacle, mapping and creative discourse. Tune an ear to the conversation and the language floating to the top was that of university-educated, middle to upper class, anti-capitalist rhetoric.

It wasn’t until after the retreat that we (by which I mean the Providence representation of me, Andrew Oesch, Jori Ketten, and Micah Salking) asked our selves the question, “What if these elusive others that kept being evoked chose not to attend because they were just NOT interested in having this kind of conversation, participating in this academic, activist discourse?” It is important to remember that the same language that inspired many of us to respond to the initial invitation may have been a detraction to others who may be joined in similar struggles. I don't want to say that the language we use is good, or bad, but simply to point out that the ways we communicate matter to how our events/projects/etc. are perceived by others.

Beyond the fascinating meta-experience of trying to identify “what happened”, there were also direct take-aways that, yes, are even MORE questions. Here are a few that I sent to Steve Lambert (see earlier blog posting) the day after I returned to Providence.

- We talked a lot about imperfect models of slow burn strategies that offer resilience for groups that are in it (ie social change, mutual aid) for the long haul. People really responded to the model of the church (or temple, or mosque … lots of discomfort there too from a largely areligious crowd) as a model for building support systems that are intergenerational, ritualistic, with multiple points of entry.

- Conversely, what are other ways of talking about spectacle that do not carry the same, potentially vacuous, connotations? Celebrations? Radical sites of participation? I haven’t come up with anything yet, but I am wondering how to reframe spectacle versus the concept of slow-burn tactics that came out of the conference.

- People talked a lot about art being embedded in activist movements, which reminded me of your [Steve and Steve] How To Win presentation in which you talked about thinking of art as only one part of a larger strategy. My question then is whether artists are ready to step out of their leadership roles to both show up and in effect “be of service” to larger social movements. At the same time, I don’t like the uni-directional relationship implicit in “service”. Basically, can artists be humble?

- I keep coming back to the question that was raised at the How to Win talk about whether there are subversive art practices that do not need to employ the masters tools. Smaller, less sensational acts - what role do they play? Especially given that when you look at the ways in which social change is often a process of small incremental shifts in patterns and habits based on relationship building with these larger flash point moments. So the small is important, as is the intimate, but in what ways?

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I am still waiting to hear back from Steve on his response. But in the meanwhile, the We Want More group has continued to move its thinking beyond the retreat and towards two upcoming events. The first is the radical urbanism The City from Below conference to be held in Baltimore March 27th-29th. Its organizers position the conference as follows:

"In cities everywhere, new social movements are coming into being, hidden histories and herstories are being uncovered, and unanticipated futures are being imagined and built - but so much of this knowledge remains, so to speak, at street-level. We need a space to gather and share our stories, our ideas and analysis, a space to come together and rethink the city from below."

The other flashpoint will be the US Social Forum in the summer of 2010. A number of people at the conference were excited about building solidarity between the arts and cultural producers and the amazing groups activating for this national event. And so, onward with all the desire and ambiguity that can be conjured.