The Fun-a-Day in the Bay show opened on Friday night at Rock Paper Scissors (Oakland) and will be up for the whole month of February. There was a great crowd, music by Jonathan Mann (who has been writing a song-a-day for over two years!) and the Rock Cookie Bottoms, a bunch of Art Murmur fun, and whole lot of art. One of my painting was stolen a little over an hour into the show after an earlier botched attempt.

My work, from artjokes.tumblr.com

For more Fun-a-Day photos, check out my flickr stream.

Some videos from the performance I worked on for the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland have found their way to the internet:

There are a couple more excerpts on youtube.

Ted and I made some art for a show in an old convent in Brooklyn now known as St. Cecilia’s Gallery. It involved lighting prayer candles and watching videos of celebrities, before they were famous, talking about how they wanted to be famous. I’ll post photos soon.

flyer by kara

participatory installation and custom software
State of the Arts Conference, UC Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA)
November 19th-21st, 2010

“still building: mapping possibilities of student movements”

The building collective, based in Santa Cruz, CA, aims to transform the physical spaces that we occupy by playing games, engaging in conversations, going on walks, and drinking coffee. Our installation for the UCIRA State of the Arts Conference invites attendees to contribute to a collective map of UC campuses that focuses on the historicity, recent events and future possibilities of respective student movements.

Here are some photos from our installation:

I curated a show on add-art, the firefox plugin that replaces internet advertisements with art. You can read my curator’s statement and install the plugin to see the show which will be up through the first week of December. It features five super talented artists who work with the language of geometry. Here’s a preview of a few of the 136 images that make up the show:

Andrew Jeffrey Wright

Ann Altstatt

Pablo Manga

Maureen Halligan

Nik Hanselmann

Fun-a-Day, a show I started with some friends almost seven years ago, is coming up again! The premise is simple: pick a project (take a photograph, make the bed, draw a picture, bake a cake, etc), do it every day in January, then show your work the following month in a big group show. There will be a bunch of shows around the country this year and everyone is invited to participate. Check out our site for more details and to post your project ideas. Or read our quick start guide to starting a Fun-a-Day show if you want to bring Fun-a-Day to your community.

graphic by kara

building is going to San Diego for the State of the Arts Conference 2010, from November 19th-21st at UCSD. Kyle McKinley, Madeline McDonald Lane, and I will be creating a participatory installation entitled still building which will include snacks, conversations, walks around campus and an effort to create a huge spatial/conceptual mapping of the new student movement.

I’m working with my good pals Tender Forever and Ted Passon on another multimedia performance piece, this time for the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, OR (check out our last performance for the Whitney). It’s happening on September 15th in the evening. For more info, check out the festival’s website.

building, the installation-making art collective that I co-founded for my MFA show, is headed to San Diego this November for a conference put on by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA). The theme of the State of the Arts Conference is “Future Tense: Alternative Arts and Economies in the University” and will look at the effects of the public education crisis on art programs and the ways in which artists are responding. building will be creating a dialogical space, mapping connections and conversations, and performing critical spatial interventions. The conference is happening from November 18th through the 21st at UCSD.

I’m teaching two class this fall: Mathematics and Computer Processes at the San Francisco Art Institute and The Art of Math at the California College of the Arts. They’re both hands-on, project-based approaches to learning mathematics.

And this November, I will be curating a show for Add-Art, the Firefox plugin that replaces advertisements with art.

I just exhibited my MFA Thesis project, entitled building. Here’s the wall tag text:

building
installation

by Kyle McKinley and Nick Lally with Ann Altstatt, Karl Baumann, Pou Dimitrijevich, Theresa Enright, Miki Foster, Nik Hanselmann, Jessy Lancaster, Madeline McDonald Lane, Lucas McGranaham, and Sophia Strosberg.

Building anything is a process. Building something good usually involves a lot of people’s ideas and labor. building is what we have called the people and the process of building something good in this building. Each Friday at 2pm, building gets together to talk, eat snacks, and make building. building builds on itself: last week’s building is this week’s built, but this week’s built is the place to build next week’s building. The interests of building include ghosts, software studies, coffee, walks in the woods, things that turn, critical spatial practice, the politics of representation, edge sites, flea markets, poesis, precarity, female-fronted punk bands of the 70s and 80s, and building. However, building interests are always building.  The process of building results in traces of those interests. It also involves traces of the art/works of Nick and Kyle. All those traces are the building where you now stand. What will be building tomorrow?

The artists wish to thank: Kelly Brown, EG Crichton, Sharon Daniel, Jennifer González, Shelby Graham, Chip Lord, Josh McVeigh-Schultz, Joshua Muir, Soraya Murray, Jennifer Parker, Warren Sack, Elizabeth Travelslight, Lyle Troxell, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Rob Wilson, Richard Wohlfeiler, and everyone who contributed to building. This presentation was made possible with funding from UCSC’s Porter College Graduate Arts Research Committee and the Florence French Award.

And here are some photos from building (project descriptions to follow):

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I’m currently working on a collaborative installation entitled building for my MFA thesis exhibition.

Each week we create participatory events and situations which explore critical spatial practices, participatory software, and social practices. Last week we went to the flea market and sold stuff in exchange for ideas for our exhibition space.

Then we built an installation which includes photos of people with the stuff they bought and the ideas they sold, audio recordings from that day, written documentation, and the receipt printer which invites people to add their idea by calling or texting 706.4048 (Santa Cruz area code–not printed here to prevent spam).

Would you like to be part of building? Contact me to participate!