Through the feedback received at mid-term review, I reconsidered the goal of Extension as delineating personal space. I will focus my final project in Fields Corner in Dorchester, a highly economically and socially diverse commercial area that suffers from both social ills and heightened stigmatization, as does much of Dorchester. Rather than focus on personal space alone, I will focus on the zone between personal and public space – social space – in Dorchester.
This project is related to my thesis work, which is exploring the question of whether it is possible to stimulate collective identity formation through the process of being involved in an art intervention. The site, Fields Corner, was selected for several reasons, but one of its key features is active engagement within particular communities, with limited engagement between them. This often causes inefficiency in the important work that different groups contribute. Yet even though the organizations recognize this issue, the patterning is so established that it is difficult to break out of the comfort of group identity and broaden into a collective across diverse boundaries.
The final outcome of my work in Dorchester is going to be a multimedia system for tagging, archiving, and touring information about the past, present, and future of Fields Corner in Dorchester. The information will be accessible via place markers, online, and during specific tour events, starting in August, 2011. However, the thesis treats the process of developing the tour information as the art project, the intervention that uses the tactic of participatory research to improve the sense of collective identity.
The final project will, then, be part of the process of building community for the goal of tour development. Inspired by what would result from a game of telephone in this diverse area, I will begin by developing a modern day tin cup phone that engages passersby. By lighting up and allowing transmission with another pedestrian within sight in a strategic location, this arduino communication device enables random engagement. My hope is that the tactical intervention of the device, before any tour tags are installed at Fields Corner, will create moments of interaction that regular users of the area do not typically encounter. Once some tests have been run, I will slightly shift the location of the devices to point the discussion in a specific direction. It is difficult to specify direction before having done field testing with the device, but the goal will be to inspire dialog about a particular site, such as a building or a vacant space.
The project engages the community of Fields Corner in the development process. Unlike Miwon Kwon’s description of community-artist interaction, in which the artist’s vision initiates the project, this project was community-instigated. As a result, though the process is left for me to design, unlike much situational work, I have an end goal in mind. With the problem set up by the thesis, the goal becomes two-fold: not only gather data for a neighborhood tour, but try to improve the sense of collective identity by doing it.
In the attached presentation, I include an attempt to further extend Rosalind Krauss’s summary diagram of art practice in the 1970s. I update it to include situational practice, beyond the site-specific work she recognized as expanding the field of sculpture four decades ago. While the overall thesis functions in the realm of “marked community,” the tactical device will work under “situational practice,” neither planning nor urban design but with potential implications for both.
Click to see presentation
