Failure and Risk with Machine Project (2)
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Failure and risk explorations using art, from Annual Convention 2014
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Failure and Risk with Machine Project (2)
- 1. OH NOES!
- 7. A MACHINE FOR MAKING CULTURE
- 12. NEA panel said what we did “wasn’t art”
- 13. LA grant maker rejected our proposal because “too innovative to scale”
- 14. We thought locking kids into the trunks of cars was a good idea
- 15. New York residency cancelled because the owners sold the building
- 16. We organized a fundraising event around fondue on the hottest day of the year
- 17. Public performance series cancelled midway because of “questionable artistic quality”
- 18. We tried to open a drive through DIY frying restaurant
- 19. Museum residency concluded early because they’d “had enough”
- 20. We heavily promoted an event where the performers ended up outnumbering the people that showed up
- 21. We convinced a museum to produce a limited edition print for our show. They sold 3 out of 100.
- 22. We opened a performance which drove around Los Angeles on same day as flaming tanker explosion closed down the freeway exchange.
- 38. Different kinds of risk
- 49. Build a framework and iterate inside it
- 55. It’s good to be human
- 59. Activity!
Editor's Notes
- With these occasional awkward moments it's important to develop a collaborative relationship with your audience and artists, so they understand the larger narrative and ideas of a Machine get expressed over time, over the course of many different experiments and events
- To what I do, such as produce a parent/child workshop on breaking into and out of cars. Participants learned how to break jimmy open a car door, how to hotwire the ignition once inside, and are then locked into the trunk and taught how to escape. [this took place on a public street near downtown los angeles]
- a simultaneous concert for a dentist and one dental patient
- A dance performance by six women, eight and half months pregnant inside an egg shaped wooden churche
- a butter making aerobics class
- Machine Project is a machine for making culture
- we operate in contrast to the artist studio model, where works are made in private by artists before entering the marketplace
- In the projects we produce, the event becomes a moment where the artist completes the work, and for this you need to have a live audience [fix this text]
- An interesting thing about an audience is it's a continually changing variable, and you don't really know what will happens until the event happens with the public. So this puts Machine in the position of presenting projects whose success or effects might be unknown until after they are over [fix]
- This is the most important job of an alternative space. To be the place in our culture where projects can emerge without already demonstrating that they are successful in some conventional sense. The event space then can be thought of as kind of research laboratory for the artist to actualize and understand the effects of their work on an audience.
- So, how do you deal with uncertainty about results? My strategy is to put aside ideas of success and failure and think of the projects as experiments. This experiment framing lets you see what you do in terms of flows and process
- This can happen in a material sense when something from one show is plugged into the next event, here the deinstall debris from this installation of a forest was turned into gifts for the audience, such as the handbag pictured on the left.
- More typically, the things you learn from one project lead you to the next thing, for example we got tired of our sewing classes being mostly women and our electronics classes being mostly men, so we did a combined felt making and circuit board design class to mix those audiences together.
- From the felt/electronics class we realized that hands on workshops were an effective way to mix audiences, so for a recent piece at the berkeley art museum we combined workshops on kim chi, plant cloning, making electronic instruments out of melons, and tranimal makeovers into an event called the machine project confusatron
- Tranimal is an interpretation of drag influenced by Leigh Bowery that plays with the difference between human and non-human as well as gender. So participants would come to the museum, learn to make pickles, get a really internse makeover, go back and clone some plants, etc.
- So the event can be a space to explore different ideas around audience and participation. In the confusatron it became a way to talk about different forms of knowledge production by juxtaposing learning one might think of as practical, like electronics and kimchi making, and things less functionalized like a tranimal makeover
- what kind of institution are you?
- less assets more risk
- scale create intimate experiences for crowds, by distributing multiple simulantious actions, adjancent to other actions, so the viewer has a sense of doing things with a small group and a large group simultaniously. Christy and Saras arch served to draw the small groups together once an hour, to remind them they were part of a whole large sace project. the arch/guitar creates a pulse. each individual project was designed for roughly the size of people that do things at machine, audience of 20-60 ppl
- wouldn’t let us do the original idea
- so we made our own arch
- houston good bad story
- pair up into threes - need something to write with count off by 10s here’s your new identity 10 event ideas Pass to the left - make some problems - minor, weird, catastrophic Pass to the left - find the silver lining or iteration