INTERVENTIONS
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PETALUMAGIC: What makes the magic?
Cities are made of physical and social constructs. Given a chance, they can turn into vibrant, creative, inclusive, and productive communities. With more imagination, they can even aim for utopia.
Co-creating in the community with the community: Petalumagic was designed to bring together artists and individuals of all ages and backgrounds to create a collaborative project that conveys the fantastic, idealistic and practical ideas, and fantasies and dreams that we have for our city. The eighteen panels were created over the course of a day and then combined to form a symbolic window, opening into an imagined city with its neighborhoods, makers and dreamers.
Cities may attain beauty through dazzling works of art but it is when they can bring us together that ultimate transformations can be achieved.
• 18 transparent panels were laid flat on tables
• panels were pre-taped to define drawing areas
• color markers were supplied
• previous drawing skills were not required
• 11 panels each had a letter from PETALUMAGIC
• themes for each letter were listed nearby
• 7 panels had no letters or themes .
project website: »streetalk.space
StreeTALK: What is your dream city? is a community co-creation, a participatory installation of passersby commentaries and drawings on the future of the city. A street corner is restaged as a space of convergence for Palo Alto citizens, workers, and visitors.
StreeTALK key concerns were introduced in a panel organized by the Institute For The Future. In part inspired by the research-oriented philosophy of IFTF, StreeTALK is also a design experiment in which we are exploring the dynamics of creative control. In both city planning and individual creations, we enter into a set of relationships where the contextual demands are often too great to allow the free flow of solutions. Cities can be as inherently dysfunctional as they appear extraordinary.
Framed by a basic set of rules, passersby are invited to address a simple prompt. The ensuing responses become a conversation rooted in the intersection of thoughts, ideas, concerns and suggestions. Our Palo Alto street corner turns into a lively universal agora. The final piece will stand as an information tree and surely an unpredictable collective artwork in its own right.
Today more than ever, merging walls, people and play is an invitation for our imagination to further revitalize the urban fabric and make it more organic.
project website: »streetalk.space
"What did you talk about at your last meal?"
Dinner Conversation is a collaborative installation by Erik Adigard + Ross Altheimer (with 500+guests) For the CinqueMostre exhibit at the American Academy in Rome, until February 27
Dinner Conversation is set at the convergence of multiple paths: the privacy of the American Academy as it encounters the streets of Rome and the passing of minds from around the world, but also the paths of things, ideas, concerns and languages. As such it becomes a universal space.
Dinner Conversation along with Leonid Tsvetkov’s Everyday Downfall explores the significance of common place object categories and their interferences with spatiality: macro vs. micro landscapes, and static vs. dynamic environments—the petrified shadow of things past, and the fleeting moment of a meal. It is an instance of consumption rooted in cultivation, harvesting, preparation and economics—the expression of a life cycle whose duration is meant to relate concerns from the past with the emotive momentum that drives us into the near future. The meal and its topics are the basis for our very next day.
Dinner Conversation stages a meal by collectively scripting its dialogical dynamics. It does so not by associating table-set and dinner guest but by associating table-set item and conversation topic in a way that objectifies the latter. Each object then stands for a symbolic guest that invites all visitors to participate.
Dinner Conversation was inspired by the Rome Sustainable Food Project whose culture and values exemplify contemporary concerns of landscape, politics, design and art.
»project website