2012 Summer Research Residency
Submission Deadline: CLOSED
Public Display
residency details
project proposal / application
We are proud to announce that the jury has selected Ilona Gaynor, currently Ridley Scott's artist in residence, as our 2012 Summer Research Resident. Her project is titled "The Heist" and is part of her ongoing research into "the idea of ‘design’ as a role to plot, to hunt, to scheme, to concoct, using craft to be crafty and to simulate."
The Heist
A plot to rob a casino. Using actuary methods, architectural conjecture and
cinematic speculation.
I'd like to explore part of a larger current, ongoing project. The project I am proposing is a meticulously calculated, casino heist. Exploring the use of space in which the architectural context is the obstacle between you and what you're looking for. Including the maniplation and utilisation of the surrounding public space and it’s occupants to surreptitiously co-assist in this plot.
“...satellite mapping [is] redefining public and private space”
I ask: What if social media tools could assist in one the biggest heists in history. Could the future of criminality be invisibly crowdsourced? Could a cartographic intentional digital error be used as a ruse or distraction to occupy civilian or police attention?
Through various interventions: technological, spacial, psychological and digitally social, my intention is to present a visceral, crafted plot. Part fact, part fiction, presented through film fragments, props and various experiments in hacking public space and speculatively the building’s interior. I intend to design the perfect
crime.
Currently, any attempt to portray criminal ecologies, particularly when making reference to attempted smash and grab robbery or heists have been cinematically informed ones, my intention is to bridge the gap between artifact and artifice moving beyond (current fictional notions such as Oceans Eleven etc) into a more challenging actuary authentic proposal bordering on sheer, delicious criminality.
This call welcomes designers, filmmakers, architects, urban designers, landscape architects, interaction designers, hardware sketchers and software developers to submit proposals for design-driven research projects to be conducted in Summer 2012 in residence in the Graduate Media Design Program.
The ResidencyThe Graduate Media Design Program Summer Research Residency runs from April 30 – August 24, 2012 and includes project space within the Wind Tunnel studio—a former supersonic wind tunnel—on the south campus of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
The resident will receive a $5,000 stipend and a $5,000 budget for materials and support along with access to the College's shops and production facilities ranging from letterpress to video editing to rapid prototyping.
The resident will also get to work with a project team of 2–5 graduate student research assistants (media designers/design researchers) for 7 weeks full-time or 14 weeks half-time.
The Theme
We are particularly interested in projects that explore the theme Public Display: Space as Platform, a look at how social media, ubiquitous computing and satellite mapping are redefining public and private space.
The Occupy movements and the Arab Spring demonstrations point to a heightened role for physical space in asserting individual and collective agency. At the same time, public space has become an edgeless media stage.
If temporary shelters are being recognized as "speech," what are the implications for a new architecture that is media?
How do the now-commonplace miracles of navigable first person maps, satellite images, and gps fundamentally alter our perception of space and territory?
Our public world is incessantly captured and metered by countless cameras and sensors of all forms. How does this alter the design of places, buildings, and objects?
What forms of social space are emerging from the linking of actual environments and their virtual counterparts?
We are interested in examining the redefinitions of public space that are occurring due to the effects and affordances of digital media and communication, including, but not limited to: transitory event spaces, colossal messages for satellite viewing, satellite messages for earthbound viewing, buildings-as-signs, signs-as-buildings, wired smart landscapes, space as speech, protests in the margins of the private, spaces as sets, static temporary spaces, dynamic permanent spaces and more.
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. His most recent book, In The Beach Beneath the Street (2011), traces the Situationist International's beginnings in 1950s bohemian Paris up to the explosive days of May 1968. He works mainly on media theory, critical theory and new media. His best-known works are A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and Gamer Theory (2007). Wark is currently Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and The New School for Social Research in New York City.
Rosten Woo is a cultural producer living in Los Angeles who specializes in helping people understand complex systems and participate in group decision-making. He is co-founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a New York based non-profit organization dedicated to using art and design to foster civic participation. He is the author of Street Value: Shopping, Planning, and Politics at Fulton Mall, (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). His work has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Netherlands Architectural Institute, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and various piers, public housing developments, tugboats, shopping malls, and parks.
Tim Durfee is an architect, curator, and writer. In the Graduate Media Design Program, he is on the core faculty and is Director of AMP Studio, an in-house R&D unit that connects the work of the program with emerging themes in design. Durfee curated, and AMP produced, the exhibition MADE UP: Design's Fictions which began with a summer research residency in 2010. An architect and partner of Durfee|Regn, Durfee has created exhibitions for The Hammer and The Huntington and a permanent gallery for Target's corporate headquarters. He has collaborated with artists—Doug Aitken's installation "Ultraworld"— and developed an award-winning Web site for LACMA. He taught at Woodbury University and at SCI-Arc, where he was director of Visual Studies from 2001 to 2005.
Molly Wright Steenson is an architectural historian, designer, researcher and strategist. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton's School of Architecture, where her dissertation, "Artificial Intelligence, Architectural Intelligence: Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group" looks at the intersection of technology and architecture in the 60s and 70s. Her research also includes the urban-scale pneumatic tube postal services of the 19th and 20th century (published in Cabinet magazine and seen in Ignite! talks). Molly began working with the Web in 1994 at a variety of Fortune 500 and smaller, creative companies. Molly was director of the Connected Communities group at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. She holds a Master's of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) in architectural history from Yale University. At Art Center, she is a thesis advisor and teaches writing and knowledge-sharing. She's been online at girlwonder.com since the mid-90s.