Public Xmas Cards in Windows: Experiments in Place Making

Richard Ing, 2012: Experiments in Place Making. London: RSA.
http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/581451/Experiments-in-place-making-case-studies.pdf

"Arts & Social Change is a project that belongs to the Citizen Power Peterborough programme. Citizen Power Peterborough (CPP) is a two-year programme of action supported by Peterborough City Council and RSA. The aim of CPP is to build connections between people and communities, get people more involved in public life and encourage active citizenship."

"Arts and Social Change looks at the role of arts and imagination in creating new connections between people and where they live in order to strengthen participation in community life in Peterborough.
This programme involves a wide range of projects that place artists at the centre of re-imagining the possibilities of what a place could be and how to create this together."

"The artist has to create a project design that is sensitive to local needs and that offers more than a targeted workshop approach. Ideally, their intervention should act as a catalyst for social and even political engagement. Although each experiment is small scale, it should serve to show how a more lasting change might happen."

EXPERIMENT 1: PUBLIC CHRISTMAS CARD

"On the morning of 15th December 2010, the residents of Crawthorne Street and Monument Street in Peterborough awoke to find a handwritten Christmas card on the doormat. Opening it, they found seasonal greetings from two local artists, a question and a set of five colour-coded cards. The question was: What gift would you most like to give this Christmas? Each of the cards bore a single word in capitals: PEACE, HOPE, GOODWILL, LOVE and COMMUNITY. On the reverse were some instructions: Place this card in your downstairs front window, with the COLOURED side facing out, and leave it there for one week.By Christmas Eve, 31 out of the 81 houses in these two streets had displayed one or more of the cards. Passers-by might not immediately spot what the cards said, as the chosen word was printed unobtrusively, in a lighter tone of the background colour, but the neighbours here would know"

Creative Gathering, #SocialArt by RSA in London

Arts & Social Change, a project of the Citizen Power Peterborough programme, supported by RSA.http://www.thersa.org/action-research-centre/public-services-arts-social-change/citizen-power/arts-and-social-change

RSA (Royal SOciety for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) is a London NGO established in 1754. Its mission is public Enlightment.

Its programme Citizen Power Peterborough is focused on citizenship connections building.

Creative Gathering is the most important action of Arts & Social Change project.
http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/707162/RSA_Arts_Social_Change-Creative_Gathering.pdf

(a) Short-term goal: space where people can meet, share & learn.  and practise. 
(b) Long-term agenda: better arts community 4 citizenship empowerment.RSA

It promotes "the role of arts and imagination in creating new connections between people and where they live in order to strengthen participation in community life".

It places artists at the centre of re-imagining the possibilities of what a place could be.

"The ‘gathering’ has emerged from a broader trend in community activism that Peter Block, in a paper entitled ‘Civic Engagement and the Restoration of Community’, defi nes thus: “ We use the term 'gathering’, because the word has more signifi cance than what we think of as just a ‘meeting’. A  gathering is hosted; it is the product of an act of hospitality. Meetings are called or scheduled. They are intended for production rather than hospitality… They either review the past or embody the belief that better planning, better managing or more measurement and prediction can create an alternative future. In this way they become just talk, not powerful conversation."

Raudenbush, new civilization in the desert

Kate Raudenbush, sculptures for social awareness, education and civic dialogue.
http://www.kateraudenbush.com/
Born in USA and resident at New York City.

Raudenbush's Sculptures are palaces in the desert, the new beginning of a civilization or the last seed of a lost world. You can inhabit inside these sculptures. For Raudenbush, these creations are new places for inspiring civic dialogue and social awareness through meditation and new boundaries. 

Kate Raudenbush, 2009: Braindrop.

"The course of human evolution is putting the future of water at risk. Braindrop is a meditation space created to bring awareness to the element of water on our planet and it’s importance to our evolutionary balance. It is a 17-foot tall, 10-foot wide laser-cut steel water drop whose design is inspired by Japanese textiles and tribal tattoos of the Pacific rim. The interior is a six-sided shaded latticework of linked waveforms that shelters a gathering of one to twelve people. A teardrop-shaped doorway opens onto a cushioned floor underfoot, and a 4-foot long cascade of glass and mirrored beads pour down like water overhead. Blue and black light l.e.d.spotlights illuminate the sculpture from within at night creating waveform shadows on the dry lake bed below. We are water beings on a water planet we call Earth. (...)

Recalling sacred spaces created to honor the water gods of ancient times, Braindrop is a meditation space to honor the element of water in modern times. Its purpose is to raise the consciousness of our species to an increased respect for a most humble yet all-powerful element. Braindrop brings us together in the starkness of the dry desert to contemplate our role in the evolutionary history of water yet to be written."

Listen to Raudenbush in...
Kate Raudenbush, 2011: On socially conscious art. TED, Black Rock City. 10:20m http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JhRIEsqyoE

Kate Raudenbush, 2008: Sculptures you can feel. Interviewed by Michael Robinson
http://realitysandwich.com/1053/kate_raudenbush/

"The act of creation is enormously powerful; it is the ability to bring into being something that existed only in the mind."

"Artists are the mirrors of our society. In a way they are also portals to the future."

"I am driven by the desire to create an interactive gathering space for community to connect with each other and together be inspired by their collective and individual experience."

"I seek to distill an idea down to its essential form, its essential question, its essential metaphor, and to build unity from opposites in the most harmonious and elegant way possible. My intention is to create a sculpture that you can feel, that possesses it's own energy, that is transporting."

"We are blindly, foolishly participating in a planet-wide game of musical chairs, and there are fewer and fewer seats because we are paving and mining and chopping down all the wood in our home. What diabolical maniac is in charge of this game? We are."

"More and more people are growing conscious of our own interconnectivity. But let’s get real. Unless we act with this evolved consciousness and apply it boldly, globally and physically in our daily lives – unless this consciousness gets truly catalyzed- – our evolution will remain in the imagination."

Kate Raudenbush, 2010: Futures Past.

“Crossing through the cacophony of progress in our shining desert Metropolis, we waver and stop to witness a modern utopic vision surrender to a dystopic fate. A monument to man’s technological advancement has been mysteriously abandoned to time and left to seed. In its place, a monument to nature grows out of its fertile ground. The angular black steel roots of modern computer circuitry in the shape of a stepped pyramid give way to the ancient roots of a sacred Bodhi tree, as it reclaims this relic of our Future’s Past in its embrace. 

 Future’s Past is a modern ruin, an architectural artifact found in the future. Once built as a monument to technological progress, this pyramid of system circuitry has been abandoned through unchecked consumptive collapse, but reclaimed by the resilience of natural forces, and evolved consciousness, symbolically represented by the roots of a sacred Bodhi tree, a symbol of Siddhartha’s seat of enlightenment, and our own.

Taking inspiration from explorations of lost civilizations akin to the pyramid temples at Chichen Itza (Mayan Peninsula, Mexico) and the massive root systems of the trees at Ta Prohm temple (Angkor, Cambodia), this tree both supports and consumes the immortal archaeological efforts of mankind with its slow-motion grip that both crushes and buttresses the temple walls. These collapsed civilizations of the past have much to teach us through their failures of ecological sustainability and the mercilessness of nature. Yet, in this sculpture, the conjunction of the tree and the pyramid symbolize more than just the evolution of nature trumping the machinations of man. Future’s Past is a symbol of the human evolution of consciousness triumphing in our precarious modern developmental struggle. 

We know that technology alone will not to save us. Technology, after all, is crafted by the hands of humans, ruled by both integrity and ignorance. Technology is a tool. It is our mindsthat use it, to build and communicate, to destroy and to heal. It is our minds that choose the path towards failure or survival. For true advancement to have real value, any technological objective today must require an evolved awareness of the earth’s finite, interdependent resources, and enough empathy for the fragility of our home planet to strive to be part of the solution to our survival. We are no longer just nations or political parties, races or religions; ecological disaster has blurred those lines for us by now. We are all in this mess together. But we can evolve out of it. We can, if we choose, use our technology - together with our creativity - as a tool to create a Global Bio-Consciousness movement. This "awakening" is the first step in the process to save us from ourselves, by collectively demanding global ecological responsibility not just from our leaders, but more importantly, from each other.... 

This we also know: Action-- or inaction-- in this face of global change is the fulcrum on which the survival of a species rests. To be an active participant in the present moment is the only way to shape what is to come. Our Future’s Past is now.”