Creative Time: Living As Form

Last month, myself and a few people from my programme headed to NYC to attend the Creative Time "Living as Form" summit at NYU. With a long list of excellent speakers, I was keeping my fingers crossed that I would learn and benefit  from this summit. I had been to too many where I felt I wasted my time and money. 

 Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Luckily, Creative Time had speakers on for 10 minutes where they talked about their work, read their manifestos (like Mierle Laderman Ukeles) or showed short clips. Fortunately, it was beneficial. I learned about many organisations I had never heard of before who are doing great work and their visions influenced me to look at other projects I wanted to pursue with Kalimat and in my graduate research. Alan W. Moore, who discussed the idea of squatters and how they changed the face of buildings was one of the most interesting talks. 

Jeanne Van Heeswijk

Jeanne Van Heeswijk, winner of the Leonore Anneberg Prize for Art and Social Change, definitely deserved the award. Introduced by Laurie Anderson, Jeanne talked about all her projects including "Face Your World" where kids would lobby the government for change by making kids design homes and cities through a specially made software. It was quite fascinating and such a great idea that made fantastic use of the imaginations of children. 

Katerina Šedá

Katerina Šedá's game "There is nothing there", although it was being translated on the spot from Czech to English, made everyone howl of laughter. She managed to get two Czech villages to follow the same schedule and do the same thing at the same time. The game is based on the idea of predictability and the assumption that nothing happens in a small town. 

Here's a home boy from the TDot that I met, Darren O'Donnell. Cool guy. Told me when I'm done school, I should come back to the TDot.

After the summit, we headed to the old Essex market in the Lower East Side to check out the exhibit. Because I had come in from Baltimore, I missed Alessandro Petti from Decolonizing Architecture's talk, but after some serious looking stalking, I had the opportunity to chat with him briefly at the exhibit.