Brooklyn’s budding cultural district will soon raise the curtain on a new classic theater. Just Last Friday, construction started on the Theater for a New Audience, a Hugh Hardy designed flexible theater created specifically for the performance of Shakespeare and classic drama. Cloaked in a dramatic black box exterior, the LEED Silver-seeking building will seat nearly 300 and be surrounded by a gorgeous public arts plaza, creating a complete cultural experience.
To create a design-based performance piece in response to the 2011 Prague Quadrennial that examines materials, and then organizes and redistribute (would be wasted) materials to the local arts community.
The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts is a hybrid organization dedicated to gathering and redistributing information about sustainable practices in art making. Â This project marks our first initiative to solve one of the major dilemmas of creating art on the ground: Â Wasted Materials! Â We will travel to Prague this summer to focus on the environmental impact of production at the 2011 Prague Quadrennial and will creatively repurpose the waste generated from this 10-day design conference of over seventy exhibiting countries.
Organizing team members include Ian Garrett and Miranda Wright (co-founders of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts), Sarah Peterson (Production Manager, Theater Artist, New York CSPA Associate), Moe Beitiks (artist, cultural volunteer, and writer for inhabitat, CBOT, and the CSPA), Misa Rygrova (leading researcher on this topic in the Czech Republic), and James McKernan (faculty at York University and Technical Director for the PQ’s Scenofest).
The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space is a leading world artistic event – a presentation of contemporary work in a variety of performance design disciplines and genres including costume, stage, lighting, sound design, and theatre architecture for dance, opera, drama, site-specific, multi-media performances, and performance art.
Founded in 1967, the Prague Quadrennial has presented work from more than 70 countries on 5 continents. The exhibition draws thousands of performance and theatre professionals, students, and spectators from all over the world. At the most recent Quadrennial in 2007, 35,000 visitors came to enjoy installations, photos, videos, and live performances of work ranging between theatre and visual arts, as well as more than 500 events, workshops, performances, presentations, lectures, and discussions.
This project will be a significant catalyst for the advancement of sustainability in theater and design. Â It is an opportunity to develop a comprehensive case study on community engagement in creative resource management. Â As a performance, it will examine the relationship of production communities from around the world to their use of materials practically and dramaturgically. Â It will create new methods for distributing large amounts of previously used materials quickly, test the limits of a community’s ability to absorb the material, and develop a mode of a working network of materials exchange.
We are looking for $4,000 in additional funding to supplement travel for our team, and to provide resources and tools for distributing materials and documenting this project.
We promise to give you what we get: Â INFORMATION! Â We’ll be documenting this project, and will gladly share our findings with you. Â Other perks include copies of the CSPA Quarterly, a publication dedicated to sustainable practices in all creative areas, CSPA membership, and special tokens from the PQ!
Other Ways You Can Help
Spread the word! Â Share this project with your friends and colleagues.
To support the greater effort of the CSPA, become a member by visiting www.sustainablepractice.org/join-the-cspa
Campaign CSPA Prague Convergence: Reduce Waste at the Prague Quadrennial — IndieGoGo.
A pop-top snake god? This alien creature was one of a number of interesting installations placed on show at this year’s COP16 Climate Change Village. Located between the UN Conference’s official venue and downtown Cancun, the bustling village hosted workshops, films, conferences and eye-catching art installations from all over the world. Never one to pass up the chance to take some art snaps, Inhabitat was on-site to document all of the excitement — jump ahead to see more of the fantastic creations!
Check it out here: Â COP16: Art in the Climate Change Village in Cancun | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World.
Any country that agrees to host a UN climate change conference is bound to be scrutinized for their environmental policies, and at COP16 Mexico has met this scrutiny full force with at least three independent exhibitions and explorations of its natural beauty. Some are federally-funded exercises in propaganda. Some are the fierce work of jungle explorers. All reveal a landscape beyond the manufactured shores of Cancun – read on to take a look!
Inhabitat was on the scene yesterday at COP16 when tcktcktck, a global network of NGOs, pieced together this colorful Mayan pyramid. Sure, it’s made from recycled boxes, but this cardboard monument is a little more than green materials. In fact, it’s covered in images submitted by NGOs worldwide, sending a message of passion and hope for the talks ahead. Read on to learn about how you can be part of this massive collaboration (hint: it has to do with that blank TV screen…)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, there’s a whole lot of talking going on right now at the Eleventh Annual Poster Biennial of Mexico. “Disenyadores por la tierra,†(Designers for the Earth) is an exhibition of poster design down at the COP16 Climate Change Village exploring the theme of the relationship between man and his environment. Click through all of the pictures of these eye-opening posters and visit the site to download them for yourself.
This colorful kiddie ride comes courtesy of gleeful art prankster Banksy, an artist well known for his graffiti and politically charged installations. In his most recent creation, the artist transformed a coin-operated ride into a searing statement against the BP oil spill.
A piece on Inhabitat from Moe Beitiks. We’ll have some news from Nick Vida and Brent Heyning’s talk at CalArts on designing the Solar Array and Lighting from the Crimson Collective’s Acension Soon!
Solely reliant on the sun for its power, the piece changes in synch with nature, offering visitors clear auditory cues into the cycles that occur over a normal day. Each individual is strongly encouraged to wander the field and experience the evolution of music in relation to their position within the space, as well as the intensity of the sunlight – the Sun Boxes will adjust to the light accordingly, and stop playing music when the sun sets. Given the variation in volume and sound, each person is able to create their own experience specific to the path they take within the space.
Original Here:Â ECO ART: Solar-Powered Speakers Sing Volumes for Renewable Energy | Inhabitat – Green Design Will Save the World.
Moe Beitiks of Inhabitat (amongst other things) conducted an email interview with CSPA Executive Director, Ian Garrett (Me). Â You can see the whole things here:
INTERVIEW: Ian Garrett Reports on COP15 and the Arts | Inhabitat.
Some Excerpts:
INHABITAT: What were your cultural expectations for Copenhagen?
GARRETT: At this point, I don’t know what my expectations are. I’m a big fan of the idea that if you get a lot of people together in one spot, talking about a thing, things can happen. The feeling I have from the news out of here and being in the streets is that there is going to be more civilian change out of this than there will be government change. My hope is that, with this many people of divergent origins, with the efforts being made from a cultural end, that it will reify something at the grassroots level. I can only hope that it makes it upwards, because that doesn’t seem like the case at the Bella Center.
INHABITAT: What have been some standout experiences thus far? What artworks have struck a chord, and why?
GARRETT: It’s hard to tell right now, there is so much more to see in this next week, but if I chose now my vote is in for wooloo.org’s efforts and partnerships. They’ve got Superflex’s sustainable burial contracts, the Yes Men’s Coca-Cola Pledge and New Life Copenhagen. Everything they are doing is very much in the spirit of unity and many people doing small things towards a bigger goal. I think that’s a message in and of itself. And since all three of the projects I mentioned rely on documentation and masses of people as the documenters I think that it’s got the potential to show the most real human aspects of the issues being discussed and the opportunities to work together.
There is the common thread these days of “Changing light bulbs won’t save the world.†Which is true, but you know, ultimately if everyone change all light bulbs, sure it would do something about energy use. The point being that lots of people making small efforts aren’t to be scoffed at. It’s those sort of efforts, that when combined, lead to tipping points. We just aren’t there yet, and light bulbs have no future as a tipping point for the climate.
