Earthbound Readymade: Milroy

Earthbound Readymade: ChiFrank

 

Future RIME partner?

I hope so! Visited the museum over the weekend. <3

Who do we want to be?

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/nov/27/detroits-young-gentrifiers-face-a-daunting-task-in-buying-500-homes-evicting-poor-residents

Over the past several years, EbM has spent a lot of time discussing this issue, how our project could be be harmful to the sites' communities. We hope this is never the case, but every install carries the risk of  gentrification in it.
We have looked at Detroit properties since the start of EbM.
We have opted against purchasing a property in Detroit in large part because we are not a mature enough organization to address the complex issues and responsibilities of building there. It is a site where, I suspect, we would need to live, to engage day to day, in order to feel certain that our installation wasn't more harmful than beneficial to the community.
Speaking of which, last week we were offered three properties in Chicago. The properties consist of six city lots total. They are not fully contiguous. I am going down to look at them this coming weekend. I will post photos here for everybody.
The issue these lots raise is similar to the issue lots in Detroit would raise, they are in community where a sited artwork will need far more support and engagement than any previous installations. For any project by EbM to succeed on these lots, we will have to change as an organization.
I think this is probably not a bad thing. We have talked a lot over the years about incorporating and trying to become a more traditional arts/culture business. We have not done so, I think, because our simple, amateurish approach is fairly fulfilling while remaining free of too many obligations and responsibilities. It has been fairly risk-free. If we move forward with these properties, that will have to change completely.
RIME is already pushing us in the direction of this change. If we accept these Chicago properties, we will experience a much greater, much higher pressure change.
We are truly blessed to have such difficult choices to make! :-)

Earthbound Readymade: Phase Transition

I was just out walking to a train. Leaving the house a heavy, cold rain pelted me. As I walked I could feel the air grow colder, the rain grew heavier, thicker. I looked at my jacket, put out my hands to catch the rain, to see if it was the slush it felt like I was being hit with. It was not. It was fat rain drops, each feeling and looking a touch asymmetrical, but none anything more than water in that moment.
A few moments later, despite the fact that I was looking to the best of my fallible ability to see the phase transition, I was walking in a snow storm. There was no moment when rain and snow seemed to share the sky, but there was no moment of noticeable transition, either. There was that sense, a visceral sense beyond the conscious, that sense that makes up magic, the miraculous, the sublime, that sense that something unnatural, something beyond the physical realm we inhabit, has occurred and you were a part of it, but your senses weren't fast enough, sharp enough, to catch it.
It was a perfect moment.
I do not ever want to capture that moment, I do want to someday share it.

Once upon a time I drove a tractor. I was not creating a new mind-shattering installation for EbM. I was, however, dreaming of creating one.
And now, I have said installation in the calendar for 02017.
Yes, this weekend I spoke with the mighty Adam Blue




and, as well as bringing his organization, AVA, onboard with RIME for our inaugural, experiment in 02015, he has agreed to host an EbM installation on his family's property outside Lebanon, NH.

A good weekend was had by all.

Black Cinema House

Last weekend I had the pleasure of visiting the Dorchester Art+Housing Collaborative run by Theaster Gates' Rebuild Foundation. Kelly and I are both enamored of collective living spaces. Visiting the apartments on Chicago's South Side, the building site of the future connected arts center, and the Black Cinema House was a delightful afternoon of beautiful renovation, social investment, and inspirational conversations. The work Rebuild is doing in the MidWest is a profound inspiration to me as EbM and RIME move forward. They have partnered with the Chicago Housing Authority to re-imagine an empty residential project as mixed-income housing focused around a community arts center. They are fostering a number of cultural institutions in concert with this collective housing experiment: The Black Cinema House; The Listening House; The Archive House. Each is an important institution on its own. The strength and breadth of the vision Rebuild brings to a place is phenomenal. Rebuild and DAHC, they don't know this yet, are two of the local Chicago organizations I hope to get involved in RIME in 02016.

Speaking of which, in two weeks, on November 16, (and again on December 7) I will be going back down to the Black Cinema House for Kinosonik.

"In collaboration with Chicago Film Archives and Experimental Sound Studio, Rebuild Foundation’s Black Cinema House presents KINOSONIK, a pilot project of live music/sound performances with cinema. Two pairs of collaborating sound/music artists, selected by ESS, will each spend 4 to 6 weeks studying and working with several short films selected from CFA’s extensive vault. The artist pairs — Tomeka Reid & Olivia Block and Marvin Tate & Joseph Clayton Mills — have been selected because of their substantive and exemplary artistic accomplishments to date, their commitment to risk-taking exploratory approaches to sound and music, their long-standing experience in collaboration, and their interest in integrating their various sonic approaches with moving image.

Structured as two mini-residencies, the pilot program results in two live performances by each pair, one at BCH and one at ESS. For audiences, it promises to be a rare and deeply engaging experience of live sound with cinema, given the unique and sophisticated talents of the artists, and their commitment to rigorous improvisational and compositional approaches."

Earthbound Readymade

Art and magic

Earthbound Readymade

Fall accessorizing, spotted by Kelly Evonne Pembleton. A spectacular EbR that lasted a single day.

Hooray Forever!

One of EbM's greatest supporter's and best friends!
Phil's got his own library!
http://www.monroemonitor.com/2014/09/09/monroe-library-hires-new-managing-librarian/

Introducing EbM's RIME!!
From the initial proposal, which is moving along splendidly:

RIME is a way to bring disparate communities together and foster learning about one another through an exchange of traveling exhibits. The idea is modeled on the practice of many larger museums, who use traveling shows to promote awareness of their institutions and their missions outside the local community, and to draw local museum-goers back by exhibiting work from other communities.

Earthbound Moon (EbM) believes that hosting such an exchange between smaller local museums – those that enliven communities across America and the world – will benefit the missions of the participating museums and increase the impact of our own mission: to create connections between disparate communities, to inspire deep time thinking; to participate in creating a global perspective; and to create common spaces for discussion worldwide. Traveling exhibits from smaller museums can foster connections between diverse peoples and varied historical eras, through the shared language of visual history, oral history, traditional and contemporary art, and personal passion.

Such traveling exhibits, however, make incredible demands on institutions: they must invest in logistics, packing, and shipping; and they must provide space and insurance. For these reasons, it is generally only larger museums that participate in this practice.

EbM is engaging five institutions in an initial one-year program which will serve as the proof-of-concept for growing RIME. Each institution will create a traveling exhibit to share with the other four institutions. These will include not just photos and text and small objects framed and vitrined, but at least one tablet device with headphones, so that slideshows, videos, audio, and other media may be exhibited. We hope to eventually engage larger institutions and galleries (such as the Smithsonian, The Met, and universities) in this process, creating an avenue for discussions of history and culture across communities.

To make this feasible for participating organizations, EbM will create five small museum-quality crates which will be hinged inside so that they can open out to become the exhibit. This will limit the space and time required of host museums in displaying them. To save on shipping, each institution will receive (or build if they have the resources) a crate which will remain on their premises. Shows will consist primarily of flatworks and small objects which can ship in stiff envelopes and small boxes from institution to institution.

EbM will work with participating institutions to photograph, photocopy, and present their exhibit with the crate. We will also help mount and secure the exhibit inside the crate in such a way that the works can be removed and shown outside the crate’s confines if an institution has the space and time to hang a show. In the first year one of the areas we are most curious to explore with the five participating institutions is how to minimize the space participants must make available for traveling exhibits while maximizing the amount of material and the quality of each show. In an ideal world each institution would be able to show each show in the chosen configuration of the creating institution. Space considerations make this unlikely. To that end it is likely we will ask institutions to be flexible in how their exhibition is shown.

There will be no cost to participating museums apart from providing exhibition space, and staff time to prepare exhibits and manage shipments. Eventually, EbM hopes to be able to cover our costs by charging larger organizations for participating in the exchange. To begin with, however, we are confident our budget can cover many years of participation for up to a thousand organizations.

EbM requests that for the initial year, participating museums agree to their exhibit traveling for the whole of the year. And that they show the other four exhibits over the course of the year, approximately one every third month, exhibiting each show for four weeks. No shows would be mandatory for institutions, of course, should they find any material objectionable. Amenable institutions will be asked to sign a non-binding contract stating the size of the show, the time to be displayed, and their intention to provide an exhibit of their own. The contract will specify that the non-profit organization, EbM, takes on liability and insurance costs.

We hope that the first shows will ship in march 02014 and install in April 02015. The shows will be de-installed and shipped anew in May 02015. In June they will be prepped and installed in their new site. They will open again in July 02015. This pattern will proceed with the shows proceeding around the country in a round robin with the third show opening in October 02015, the fourth in January 02016, and the fifth and final show of the series opening in April 02016.

As of this writing, we have three organizations signed up: two in America, one in Sicily. We are in negotiations with two other institutions, and expect to introduce you to the participating organizations in November.

In mid-02016, we hope to expand the program, and host a website where all participating museums may post those exhibits they have available to travel, and choose which exhibits they are interested in displaying at their institution. Exhibitions that have special space needs or presentation needs will be be able to participate in this way, without forcing uniformity on all participants in the program. Institutions will be able to cherry pick the shows that are best for them, be it for cultural or practical reasons. The goal is to have enough participating organizations by Fall 02016 that we can ask each participating museum to agree to host three exhibits a year, without excluding museums who have space or mission restrictions. 

I think that will be about a million museums!!! 

Earthbound readymade

I adore these fog fountains scattered around Chicago. They are definitely unintentional art

Thinking tonight about how to marry EbM with such ideas

http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/wolfsonprize

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of the city, and about the rural/urban divide. Barring catastrophe, humans are likely to continue amassing in larger and larger conurbations - megacities. The commonly dystopian view of these future communities need not come true. How to imagine a megacity, however, that isn't dystopic, is a challenge. Imagining one that isn't even more philosophically divided from the smaller communities that remain outside their pull than ours are today, is perhaps even harder.
This year's Wolfson Prize revisits a response to this issue that arose last century, the garden city.

Still Talking About The Future

I also believe we will need to program our FluxusFleet to mimic the behavior of creatures under a microscope. Recorded by our fleet of low-orbit DaDaDrones, we will craft human-scale recreations of microscopy. Imagine seeing this on the highways of New Mexico...

Speaking of Not Driving in the Future

On one of our van trips, using autopilot scripts, I intend for EbM to commission artists to choreograph our convoy of artvans to interpret these historic artworks:

Speaking of the future

A topic often discussed at EbM is the future of transportation.

Our works are geographically separated in a way most institutions are not. We do this in part because we are building an arts organization for the future, one where these distances are not a limitation.

To that, this article from the Economist (admittedly, there are any number of articles from The Economist and just about every other magazine that I could have cited here) points out the most obvious way that our disparate sites may be temporally closer for human travelers within the next two decades.

"With increased connectivity between cars, driver aids will become much more sophisticated. A connected car would, for instance, receive not just information about a hazard detected by its own sensors, but also alerts from a vehicle farther along the road or around a blind corner.

Connectivity can also help provide more real-time information about traffic hold-ups, beyond that already provided by satellite-navigation devices. The addition of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication (V2I) takes things further still. Whereas the connected cars in Ann Arbor can change the timing of traffic lights, a combination of V2V, V2I and automated driving could do away with traffic lights completely."

These vehicles when moving on interstates may be able to travel safely at much, much higher speeds than we currently can. A weekend visit to Welcome, Rainbow Warriors, Horizon, and William Leavitt's as-yet-unnamed 02015 install in Moffat, CO might be a relaxing  vacation with the family, instead of the grueling 18 hour trip it might be today. Pods of connected/automated cars, or an automated Land Art van, may make the trip realizable comfortably in a single day.

I daresay, that in the lifetime of most readers of this entry, EbM will host a day-long bus tour of those four sites, replete with artists/performers on the bus to participate in discussion, lead tours of the sites, and host local art engagements onsite.
A weekend-long trip may include the many local museums participating in RIME by then.

Lee is in Lubbock!

Lee is on mission to Texas, to interview people of Bledoe about "welcome"

Carson is on Mission to Elmira NY.  For ?????? Mystery/surprise! Hello Elmira!

Clown Motel

Perhaps we will stay here one day...https://roadtrippers.com/blog/americas-scariest-motel-is-haunted-by-hundreds-of-clowns

The new book is here!

EbM at Anish Kapoor's Cloudgate

Rainbows in Springtime

A new image of Rainbow Warrior in Moriarty, NM from Travis Somerville via twitter ---->

#RainbowWarrior shot on 4/12/14 #MoriartyNM pic.twitter.com/DOvnBEbY2W

— travis somerville (@feltsuit) April 13, 2014

For You with Love, EbM

ART WITHOUT LIMITS : FARTHER REGIONS --> Call for Proposals <--

The Texas Tech University School of Art Serial Experiments in Artist-Curated Micro-Exhibitions presents Art Without Limits : Farther Regions Curated by Carson Murdach in collaboration with Earthbound Moon.

Artists can get discouraged and their art-making interrupted by practicalities like deadlines, proper studio space, available resources, technology and the biggest heartbreak of all; not enough money. What if an artist was presented with the possibility to create a work of art without these limitations? What if that artist had financial backing, equipment, materials, manpower and experienced technicians ready to take direction and create their vision? What if that artist’s work wasn’t limited by the fact that they live on the planet, Earth, in the year 2014 and are subjected to physical laws?

Art Without Limits: Farther Regions explores what is possible for artists when they are released from practical, economical and physical constraints. What can be accomplished without limitations of natural laws, moral codes or current technologies? Art Without Limits will give artists resources to execute their dream-projects. Artists often create work that is determined by the walls around them. Art making is often a problem that needs to be solved. We would like to solve that problem. You can create art anywhere in the Universe! Show us your gallery inside of a volcano, your sculpture on top of the Great Pyramids,float your work on top of the largest storm in the solar system or Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Unbound by the physical realities of the here and now, the sky is not your limit! 

Earthbound Moon seeks proposals from around the world for fantastically imaginative and  absurdly inventive site oriented artworks. You have artistic immunity; you have every resource you need. Indulge us!

Proposals will be exhibited in April 2014 at Texas Tech University.

The requirements of the Artist proposal are outlined simply as:

1. CV
2. Rendering of the theoretical artwork.
3. Return envelope with return postage
4. Description of the artwork that can be as long or as short as the artist wishes.

No entry fee.

Deadline March 24, 2014

Please send Proposals to: 
Art Without Limits ℅ Carson Murdach
1627 Marion St. NW #2
Washington, DC 20001            

Questions? Contact carson@earthboundmoon.com
http://www.depts.ttu.edu/ART/SOA/nav/landmark/currentprograms.php
http://www.earthboundmoon.com/

Works will not be returned without stamped return envelope.