by Kuniko Vroman
FUSE:_cadre/montalvo artist research residency initiative (FUSE) is a collaboration between San Jose State University's CADRE Laboratory for New Media and the prestigious Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California. This research-residency program represents a compelling platform for collaboration, experimentation, creativity and innovation focused on emerging new media and technology. FUSE connects fine arts students from the CADRE Laboratory in unorthodox partnerships with artists that inspire new forms of technology-based production and experience. Through cross-discipline collaborations, the residency-model provides an arena for addressing some of the most pertinent issues of our time including, but not limited to, concerns of globalization, sustainability, censorship, human rights, social responsibility, human centered design and a focus on the next generation.
Over the 2007-2008 academic year, FUSE hosted three residencies (FUSE: collaborations) with Portland based collective, Red76, Tijuana and Los Angeles based collective, bulbo and UK based collective Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji. The result of the Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji and Red76 FUSE: collaborations, are featured in the ZERO1 exhibition for the San Jose Museum of Art, Superlight and the bulbo outcome at the Natalie and James Thompson Art Galleries in bulbo, San Jose: DIY Media Strategies from the Border.
bulbo
A FUSE Commissioned Residency for the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge, ZERO1, CADRE Laboratory and the Lucas Artists Program, Montalvo Arts Center in partnership with the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San José State University.
For bulbo, San Jose: DIY Media Strategies from the Border, bulbo lead a week-long workshop, sharing their experience in media production with youth working with CommUniverCity, STAND, and SNI at the McKinley Neighborhood Center, during which a permanent digital media outlet was created. Called the FW/BT Broadcast Unit, (FW/BT for Five Wounds/Brookwood Terrace, the neighborhood where the youth live) the station is stocked with easy-to-use equipment and basic instructions. These tools have a short learning curves yet do not compromise the ability of an engaged individual to explore video and web broadcasting on a deep level. The youth will use the FW/BT Broadcast Unit to learn how to use video and web broadcasting to tell their stories, concerns, and ideas in order to help their community. Primary in bulbo's collaboration with the youth, is the idea that the youth have the power to shape how others see them and their neighborhood; that video and web broadcast are tools that can help the youth do so. bulbo's exhibition in the Thompson Gallery at San José State University will act as a platform to showcase the work created by the youth, and through a video response mechanism via YouTube, create a direct link between SJSU and the youth who frequent the Neighborhood Center. Over time, the hope is that the work done at the neighborhood media station will continue to refine itself and in addition to being a tool for self-expression, help the residents realize two community goals developed in partnership with CommUniverCity: to provide opportunities to youth that offer an alternative to gang activity, and to create and foster a college-going culture in
the neighborhood.
Red76
A FUSE Commissioned Residency for the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge, ZERO1, CADRE Laboratory and the Lucas Artists Program, Montalvo Arts Center.
CADRE Team: Wayne Madsen; James Morgan, director Ars Virtua; Ethan Miller, Web Developer; John Bruneau, Web Developer, Ars Virtua Co-founder, Second Life builder/coder;
James Stone, Web Developer. Additional Second Life builders: Bennett Goble, Agatha Man.
Tool Shed Days, a field of projects for the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge began, as Sam Gould of Red76 explains, as an exploration of “the possibilities of Second Life as a platform for investigations into radical social histories and the often invisible roles that these histories play within society as a whole.” Several projects were developed that resulted in virtual tools for the investigation of various emerging and established social histories. These virtual tools translate to real-life platforms that can be used to stage various acts of resistance. For Befriend a Recruiter (an on-going Red76 collaboration with Iraq Veterans Against the War) a counter recruitment center was built in Second Life, where interested individuals could go and learn how to “tie-up” US military recruiters’ time by posing as someone interested in enlisting, without actually signing on for military service. Also in Second Life, Second Home, a virtual construction that nods to the historic turn of the century free-love community of Home, Washington, provides an online archive of historical ephemera, an opportunity for virtual homesteading and a virtual meeting hall. All of the virtual works are balanced by a decidedly analog approach: the manufacture of newspaper-style publications and organization of gatherings and discussions that will be distributed and enacted throughout San José during the 01SJ Festival. The conflation of virtual reenactment and reconstruction with real-time, real-world resistance represent a less-than-traditional approach to the field of New Media Practice that offers a strong tactile presence to an all to often virtual-only field of production.
Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji
A FUSE Commissioned Residency for the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge, ZERO1, CADRE Laboratory and the Lucas Artists Program, Montalvo Arts Center.
CADRE Team: Thomas Asmuth, Ethan Miller, Danielle Siembieda, Yumika Tanaka. Special thanks to: Teck Liew, Mike Lowell, Wayne Madsen, Vivian Mak, Mike Yohanes.
Tantalum Memorial - Reconstruction is a sculptural work that calls attention the "Coltan Wars" in the Congo and memorializes the estimated 3.8 million people who died as a result of the conflict over tantulum, a component derived from Coltan, mined in the Congo, and used in all mobile phones. The work is constructed out of redundant Strowger Switches, the basis of the previous generation of telephone exchanges. In Tantalum Memorial - Reconstruction the Stowger Switches are configured to physically dial telephone numbers being called in another Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji work, Telephone Trottoire (pavement telephony). Produced in collaboration with Nostalgie Ya Mboka, Telephone Trottoire, as described by Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji, provides a platform for the Congolese community in the UK to pass messages and record their views on issues currently affecting them. The system call[s] Congolese listeners, play[s] them a phone message, invite[s] them to leave their own comment and encourage[s] them to pass it on. This built on the traditional Congolese practice of "radio trottoire" or "pavement radio" (passing around news and gossip on street corners to avoid state censorship). Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji go on to explain, [Tantalum Memorial - Reconstruction] weaves together the ambiguities and consequences of globalization, transnational migration and refugees and the impact of our addiction to constant communication Tantalum Memorial - Reconstruction explores the contradictions of a globalisation that creates migrations yet keep migrants connected, and reveals the lives of displaced Congolese by extending their patterns of communication on the same mobile technologies that are at the root of the coltan wars.