In Fall 2005, Art Interactive is conducting a nine-week-long experiment. We have invited artists affiliated with Glowlab, a network of psychogeographers, to use the Central Square neighborhood as the site of their research and fill the exhibition space with the results of their investigations.
PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY, a term coined by the Situationist International in the 1950s and appropriated by contemporary artists, is used to describe projects that produce affect in relation to the geographic environment. Rather than making maps in the traditional geographic sense, these artists utilize maps and geography to conduct located experiments with (among other things) people, trash, bikes, clothes, the sky and the gallery space itself. Often making use of mobile technologies and existing in the hybrid spaces of the Internet and the physical world, their projects produce new understandings of location and identity as shifting, fluid, singular and irreducible.
Nine weeks of public walks, talks, tours, workshops, concerts, group bike rides, and other ways of exploring the Central Square neighborhood. Each weekend of the festival, different Glowlab artists will be present to lead participatory public events inside and outside the Art Interactive space.
During this festival and exhibition curated by Christina Ray, more than twenty artists will research the effects of the urban environment on emotion and behavior by leading a series of public events.
Each weekend of this unique festival and exhibition, several Glowlab artists will be “in-residence” at Art Interactive to lead interactive public events in the neighborhood. These include a wearable trash workshop, a laughing bike tour, a lesson in text-messaging the sky, and an informal conversation with a suitcase .
While artists lead projects in the neighborhood’s public spaces, the gallery is transformed into a working lab complete with video and web-based works and project documentation in the form of maps, photos and other materials.
Artists: Brian House, Gesa Henselmans, and Jesse Shapins, D. Jean Hester, Dave Mandl, Emily Conrad and Marc Parees, Holly Tavel, Jessica Thompson, Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki, Kabir Carter, Kevin Bray and Sharilyn Neidhardt, Lee Walton, Morgan Schwartz, Sal Randolph, PIPS, Toby Kim Lee