Field Experiment - 2015
Field Ex-per-i-ment - To examine an intervention in naturally occurring environments. Less artificial than laboratory experiments, certain variables can be manipulated but conditions generally cannot be controlled.
In the spirit of nurturing creative research, development, and action, The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences and The Goat Farm Arts Center joined forces to launch an exciting new public action project in Atlanta. FIELD EXPERIMENT aimed to fully realize an ambitious singular vision with priority given to work that is interactive, community-driven, collaborative, and accessible to the public. Artists, scientists, architects, performers, and visionaries were invited to work individually or collectively, to dream big and produce a true Field Experiment.
Selected from 130 applications received from 44 cities, 21 states, and 5 countries including Germany, Canada, Spain, USA, and the UK. The proposals included experimentations in the natural sciences & applied sciences, new media, movement, sound based work, transportation, architecture & design computation, music composition, participatory interventions, 2D & 3D visual art, large scale puppetry & materials engineering.
The 5 finalists each received $2,000 to complete a concept of their projects to debut at the annual Hambidge Auction at The Goat Farm Arts Center on May 30, 2015, and be shown publicly for the following week. This concluded Phase 01 of FIELD EXPERIMENT. Phase 02 commenced with the selection of the winning project, Jam-D-Jam! by Mel Chin & Severn Eaton, announced on June 5, 2015. The winner was awarded $20,000, a two week Hambidge residency, and administration and production support to realize the final, full-scale project.
FIVE FINALIST PROJECTS
Jeffrey Collins // Envelope
>> Site-specific architectural enhancements to mundane buildings and spaces in Atlanta. Buildings are planned and built to be anywhere. Therein, important factors of history, locality and place are in danger of being lost. This project offers an opportunity to reexamine the history & current identity of our city through the faces of its buildings using custom mass-produced parts that are adjusted passively by the environment – the place. Collins will be working with GA Tech University’s School of Architecture, the Digital Fabrication Lab and a cross-disciplinary team of students. Envelope will take something ordinary, everyday and passed-by and, with thoughtfulness and experimentation, turn it into something unexpected, useful and beautiful. <<
Jeffrey Collins is a Registered Architect from Atlanta, Georgia. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Architecture and Master of Architecture degrees from The Ohio State University and is currently a PhD student in Architecture with concentration in Design Computation at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Jeff worked as a designer in the office of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects from 2002 to 2009, working in various phases of design from concept through construction and in roles from model builder to senior project manager. This semester, he is teaching second year architectural design studio at Kennesaw State University and has previously taught architecture courses at Auburn University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Southern Polytechnic State University.
Mel Chin & Severn Eaton (EMC’s) // Jam-D-Jam!
>> A response to a contemporary dilemma shared by all Atlantans, rush hour congestion throughout the city. This radio based interactive entertainment intervention will invite participants to use these moments to contribute to an ever-changing soundscape. Calling in from their vehicles, their unscripted words or noises of frustration, boredom, aggression or anxiety will be transformed into musical invention & looped back to the traffic, the public, the performers. EMC’s will be working with a diverse set of Atlanta music makers and producers to collaborate in sampling these unpredictable recordings. <<
Mel Chin is known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork and works that conjoin cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas. Mel is also well known for his iconic sculptures, works that often address the importance of memory and collective identity, and for inserting art into unlikely places, including destroyed homes, toxic landfills, and even popular television, investigating how art can provoke greater social awareness and responsibility. His work is exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad and was documented in the popular PBS program, Art 21: Art of the 21st Century. Mel is the recipient of numerous national and international awards, including four honorary doctorates.
Severn Eaton is a graduate of ASU and UNC-Chapel Hill. He approaches each idea and project as its own entity with its own set of challenges, both technically and conceptually, and strives to strike a balance within any set of circumstances. He questions the motives of the human race and its long-term endeavors. His daily thoughts and actions are colored by such an outlook, and occasionally he comes across a common object, structure or event that speaks powerfully and directly of the comic tragedy of human progress. These striking metaphors he encounters have become the basis for the majority of his work. He is most known for his interactive art installations, some of which have been featured at Black Mountain College Museum’s {Re}Happening, Moogfest, and Push Gallery in Asheville, NC.
Micah & Whitney Stansell // Inversion (with land)
>> A multi-story, multi-location projection project that grows in scale, run-time and complexity, this project invites people to explore the communities and histories of different areas of the city. The content for each story will be mined from the location where it is to be projected. The stories will be simple, open & experimental. Filmed from a unique aerial perspective moving from the city scale to the human scale using a heavy-lift remote drone that Stansell’s team built from the ground up. The project will culminate in a fourth location that wraps the built environment in narrative. All four stories will weave together, producing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. This project, introspective & anthropological in nature, will provide an inverted view of Atlanta’s sprawl, moving from broad to narrow, focusing in on the human elements of the city. The aleatory form of storytelling will guide Stansell’s team towards collaborations with participating poets & musicians depending on the content captured. <<
Frequent collaborators, Micah and Whitney Stansell’s body of work ranges from fibers, sculpture, painting and drawing, to single and multi-channel film and video works, and installations. The work often explores ideas of family history, narrative traditions, and binary relationships that pull from contemporary issues that are influenced and informed by environment and location. The Stansells’ work has been reviewed in numerous publications including Art in America, Moviemaker Magazine, FiberARTS Magazine, and the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. Exhibiting in galleries, museums, contemporary art centers, and film festivals; the Stansell’s work has been experienced in cities around the world including Beijing, Vienna, New York, and Atlanta.
Mark Wentzel // Flow Field(s)
>> A large-scale application of a grid pattern and vector fields, this installation will use a pattern of laminar flow to consider the human experience of moving through time and space. Scientific discovery is increasingly pointing toward an understanding of both time and space as fluid; altered by things such as memory, mass, consciousness, and distance. As technology persistently invades our time and redefines our space we may begin to feel an increasing insecurity about our connection to ourselves and the natural world. Flow Fields creates a massive Cartesian landscape within Freedom Park with the simple concept of direction as a tool for self-contextualizing and psychological mooring. Flow Field(s) emerged through ongoing collaborations between Wentzel and Dr. Joel Kimmons, a scientist at the CDC. Their current focus is in the area of behavioral design, work that has a continuous effect on the direction of this project. <<
Mark Wentzel is a multi-media visual artist living in Atlanta, Georgia since 2008 and a native of Detroit, Michigan. His work represents a diverse set of topics from Modern iconography, human ideology and consciousness, perception and individual motivation. He was included in the 2008 SCOPE NY exhibition, has work in the South Bend Regional Museum permanent collection, and has received international attention for his work XLounge, an artistic modification of a set of Eames Lounge chairs. In 2009 Mark presented a solo exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center entitled Morale Hazard, a comment on the crisis in the US auto industry, in which he suspended a 1965 Ford Mustang from the ceiling. He did a follow-up exhibition in 2010 at the CDC’s David J. Sencer Museum entitled Consequential Matters considering obesity and contemporary aesthetics.
Kris Pilcher, Kevin Byrd, and Dale Adams // The Dream Collection Agency
>> The Dream Collection Agency (DCA) is a corporate entity designed to collect, document, and recycle dreams. The Agency solicits public dream donations via an online Dream Depository and an in-store collection laboratory. Dream donations are cataloged and recreated in three dimensional digital environments using cutting edge 21st century Oculus Rift VR technology. Visitors to the storefront collection laboratory are invited to experience these documented dreams in a safe and secure virtual reality environment under the watchful eye of professionally trained Dream Technicians. “As virtual reality and other technologies become more widespread in the near future, we would like to begin discussing the implications of existing in both a physical & digital reality and at which point will we allow our hopes, dreams, and ambitions to become nothing more than a computer simulation. We would like to find out if this digital experience & corporatization cheapens or enhances our naturally occurring mental visions.” – DCA <<
Kris Pilcher is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in street art and theatrical design. Kris’s work has been exhibited in streets, alleyways, and galleries throughout Atlanta and beyond. Kris is a Hambidge Fellow and recent resident with the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance as part of the Artists for Wilderness series. Currently he is working with Out of Hand Theatre company to create “Resurgens,” a community-focused performance and installation in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward.
Kevin Byrd is an artist by way of design. Born in Charleston SC, he received his Bachelors of Architecture from Southern Polytechnic University. Kevin’s work has been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, MINT, Swan Coach Gallery, Hambidge’s Annual Auction, and Elevate in Downtown Atlanta, organized by The Goat Farm. He is a Dashboard Co-Op artist and Hambidge Fellow. Most recently, Kevin created Lightworks, an intervention with “Mi Casa, Su Casa” at the HIGH Museum in Atlanta.
Dale Adams is a polymathic autodidact specializing in sonic and visual architecture for the past 30 years. He has been manipulating and sculpting sound while augmenting visual and spacial perceptions by creating interactive storytelling experiences utilizing the latest in hardware technology and frameworks, he provides style and knowledge in a skill set wider than Phi.
