Jeremy Beaudry
Projects, Research & Texts

Strat(egy) to Action and Vice Versa

Posted on May 15th, 2010 in musings and tagged action, action mill, design, strategy, theory

Strat(egy) to action and vice versa. Meaning that you can craft strategy in order to shape long-term goals and actions, but taking action makes strategy manifest and allows for iteration of that strategy. Action fleshes out nascent meaning! Learning with The Action Mill.

Curating as Organizing as Design

Posted on December 9th, 2009 in collaboration, project news and tagged action mill, art, curating, design, manifesta8

For the last several months, I have been working intensely with Bassam el Baroni of Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum as one of three curatorial collectives developing Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, which opens in October 2010. As a nomadic event that changes locations, the 2010 biennial will be hosted by the region of Murcia in southeastern Spain, in the cities of Murcia and Cartagena. Our other colleagues are the curatorial teams of Tranzit.org, a networked contemporary art space based in several cities in central Europe, and Chamber of Public Secrets, a media-focused art collaboration based in Denmark. I first worked with Bassam as an artist-in-residence at ACAF in early 2008—see the Place In Place Of: Alexandria project—and it was based on this first interaction with him and other wonderful people at ACAF that he decided to invite me to collaborate on the Manifesta project. With limited conventional curatorial experience, it’s a most curious thing to find myself in the role of curator (whatever that is) for a major international art event. I stress the “conventional” qualifier here to make the point that I am quite well-equipped to deal with the conceptual and organizational challenges of curating our project, and I am fortunate enough to be working with an experienced colleague who more than compensates for my inexperience and shortcomings.

Increasingly, I’ve been drawn into large-scale, complex organizational projects, whether through my own volition or at the invitation of others; and working on Manifesta is probably one of the most elaborate, complicated, complex, and layered projects I’ve yet encountered. My interest in such organizational conundrums began in earnest with community activism around urban planning issues with NABR and Casino Free Philadelphia. Learning the structure of and how to navigate the bureaucratic minefields of community power dynamics and city/state politics has been invaluable, as has observing and managing the organization of people and groups. As a faculty member at the University of the Arts, I’ve also been drafted into a potentially historic strategic planning process determined to envision new models for arts education stretching well into the 21st century (the jury is still out). Again, the complexity in terms of conceptualizing the strategic plan across a diverse institution with literally hundreds of moving parts is daunting but a welcome challenge and learning opportunity. In all cases, I am thrilled to have worked—and continue to work—with a host of very smart and capable colleagues.

With the Manifesta project well underway, I find some interesting parallels between three areas of practice: design, organizing, curating. It remains for me to more fully flesh out the relationships between these, but the similarities between design and organizing (particularly sytems design or tranformational design a la the RED project by the UK’s Design Council) have been on my mind over the past few months based on conversations started in the university and continued with my partners at The Action Mill. This summer in a collaborative, cross-disciplinary design studio, Professor Jonas Milder (Industrial Design grad program) and I worked with several students to develop the outlines of an experimental, post-disciplinary design studio that ran for 6 weeks this fall semester. What I was introduced to through that experience (again, another exercise in complexity) was recent thinking about design that addresses complex problems through participatory processes and intense collaboration across multiple disciplines. In our work at The Action Mill, we’ve been developing our design processes and tools from this model as we work with organizational partners who are rethinking their strategy and the role that direct or symbolic action can play in bringing about social change.

As I stated above, I’m only just realizing how design thinking and organizing intersect with curating—but this notion is evolving as I attempt to apply the former in how we think about and engage with the curatorial process. I plan to deal with this more directly as the project continues and we feel more comfortable discussing the specific details of our work in a public forum.

For now, I’m off to Spain again for the first official preliminary event of Manifesta 8, the Manifesta Coffee Break, which is a sort of symposium during which each curatorial team invites a few theorists, critics, and/or artists to present work and ideas as we begin to establish the conceptual terrain for Manifesta. For our part:

ACAF will concentrate on the recent borrowing of methodologies and discourses from the field of human geography within contemporary art production and theorization. ACAF curators Bassam El Baroni and Jeremy Beaudry will publicly auction off a number of generic prototypical projects that deal with notions of human geography and cultural dialogue in order to expose what the various concepts embedded in human geography offer to artists and curators. Additionally, ACAF presents two lectures by Sherif El Azma and Nida Ghouse on behalf of the Take to the Sea Research Collective (Lina Attalah, Laura Cugusi, Nida Ghouse). The auction, lectures and discussion (moderated by Yaiza Hernández Velázquez) pave the way for an introduction to ACAF’s evolving ‘Theory of Applied Enigmatics’, the philosophical core of their curatorial approach within Manifesta 8.

For the full program announcement, click here.

SMSC at ISEA2009

Posted on August 23rd, 2009 in collaboration, project news and tagged action mill, activism, design, game theory, presentation, social media, uarts

I will be traveling to Belfast on Tuesday to attend ISEA2009, the International Symposium on Electronic Art. I will also be giving a short presentation on the Social Media for Social Change project. As a refresher, SMSC is a design research collaboration between me, three undergraduate students, and members of the Action Mill that is funded by the Philadelphia Applied Research Lab at the University of the Arts. The fundamental question we are asking is: how can we reimagine civil discourse in the context of social media and networked communication? Our objectives are: 1) to learn more about human interaction (online and offline); 2) to create structural changes (as opposed to merely tweaking existing tools); and 3) to build environments that accommodate divergent perspectives, mediate disagreement, and encourage civil debate.

Quite unexpectedly, the deliverable we have produced at the close of this first phase is a haptic board game called The NIMBY Game. Using real-world land use and zoning dilemmas often faced in cities, players must negotiate these in order to collectively plan their city while balancing the pressures of self-inerest and common good. We think it’s quite useful for understanding better structures for civil discourse — and it’s also pretty fun to play. We’d like to release the game as a limited edition multiple once the final glitches are worked out. (As Rob from the Action Mill says, “Board games are the new indy film.” Works for us!)

Anyway, if you’re going to be in Belfast for ISEA and trying to determine which of the myriad presentations and panels to attend, please do come. I present on Saturday, August 29 at 14:30 in a location called “Waterfront Hall Bar I and II” at the University of Ulster. See you then.

UPDATE: Here are the slides of the presentation I gave: