Efficiencies – The CSPA

…This type of question isnâ€™t always asked, but for Superhero Clubhouse, itâ€™s de rigeur.Â Founded in 2007 by Jeremy Pickard, Superhero Clubhouse is a â€œsociety of theater artists engaged in making original plays and events about the natural world via a green and collaborative process.â€Â How they make their work is equally as important as the subject matter itself.Â A rehearsal room populated with handheld devices may be a solution to printing multiple versions of a script, yet it is also a manner of developing work with more fluidity.Â Theyâ€™re measuring multiple efficiencies here as they constantly tackle large-scale issues: water pollution, mercury poisoning, ethical food production.Â In the process, theyâ€™re also examining an issue that theater artists are only just starting to acknowledge: how the act of creating theater can be so inherently wasteful.Â For Jeremy a play is â€œa way to realize or actualize the conversations weâ€™re having about bigger issues.â€

via Superhero Clubhouse: the Call to Grow Theater – The Brooklyn Rail.

ENDANGERED SPECIES – This temporary public art project uses transit vehicles and their environments as a medium, investigating relationships between city and region, social and environmental values. From January into April 2011, four Endangered Species buses will circulate throughout San Francisco, dispatched to different routes each day.

FROM THE PROJECT SITE: The idea came when I learned the SFMTA’s â€œTransit Effectiveness Projectâ€ was measuring maintenance, driving efficiencies, ridership statistics, the bread and butter of transportation engineers work. But no one was discussing aesthetics, or what wider impacts and meanings transit has. It seemed to me that an assessment of effectiveness should include these criteria too.

Like street trees, sidewalk cafes, and parks, public transit vehicles can be lively, as well as useful visual elements of everyday urban life. But the buses are so assaulted by advertising, itâ€™s as if our transit system is not our own. But whose environment is it? How can we best look after the places we live? Public transit is about pooling and sharing resources. Bringing the bus together with local ecosystems andÂ vulnerable animal species was a natural fit once I started to think about it that way.

The project is also a metaphor of the relationships it addresses, like a fractal whose structure is similar at different scales. The images on the buses are at the center, but they are activated as the buses circulate through different neighborhoods and circumstances. And in parallel to the buses, there is the project website, which opens doors to information and partnerships with area non-profits whose work addresses the questions the project is raising: what is beauty in everyday life? what are our responsibilities to the resources we use? How is ownership and power divided between people â€“ and between species?

As the project evolves Iâ€™ll be updating this webpage. For more on how Iâ€™ve been thinking about Endangered Species, please see my article â€œIn and Out of Placeâ€ in ANTENNAE: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. And for more on the species and organizations behind the project, please browse the project website. Photographs of the buses are posted on Flickr here.

I am grateful to the many people who have helped with Endangered Species, as well to these supporting institutions: Community Initiatives, a San Francisco-based fiscal sponsor which is a 501 (c)(3) organization; the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority; SPUR; and the San Francisco Arts Commission, Potrero Nuevo Fund of Tides Foundation, Zellerbach Family Fund, San Francisco Foundation, Adobe Community Foundation, and Christensen Fund.

via project::endangered species.