Artist In Research
About AIR
The Artist-in-Research Program (AIR Program) is one of the many programs developed under the Berwick Research Institute, a non-profit art organization that provides emerging artists with the opportunity for fiscal sponsorship and a laboratory where they can experiment with new forms and concepts without the pressures of a commercial environment. The Berwick brings artists and audiences together to foster a community that is based on dialog.The AIR Program is a residency program that provides emerging artists essential time, space, community, financial assistance, and critical feedback to develop and present their work. The artists have two public events that offer a venue to test their ideas in a dialog with other artists, curators, and the general public. The AIR Program is run by two co-curators, Bonnie Bastien and Nova Benway, who devote all their free time for the love of it. Our artists are selected by panels of local artists, curators, and arts professionals on the basis of quality, feasibility, and fit with the Berwick mission of supporting innovative art that engages the public in conversations about their worlds. Each artist is given two and a half months of free studio time, project and promotional support, a $1250 stipend, and weekly critiques with Nova and Bonnie. Critical feedback is the cornerstone of our program.
One of the greatest assets of the AIR Program is access to the larger Berwick community. According to the needs of the artist, we call on our vast network of artists, curators, scientists, urban planners, engineers, etc. to come and join us to bring fresh minds and expertise to the critique sessions. It is a great perk to be located in such a wonderful urban intellectual center surrounded by universities such as MIT and Harvard. We are a small program but we know many people and have earned respect in the Boston arts community.
We look for conceptual artists who want to work in a focused, engaged, and collaborative way. A high value is placed on a sustained period of critical analysis. There are no expectations for the completion of artwork. Instead, we push the investigation and interrogation of an idea and experimentation with the subsequent research material.
Announcing The 2007 AIR Artists!
After a year of learning the ropes, Rosie Branson Gill and Bonnie Bastien have taken the reins at the AIR Program. The artists have been chosen and the 2007 season is ready to get underway.
Here is the line-up for 2007!
April-June
Jon Taylor is interested in exploring clothing as an adaptive interface to the outside world. His work is a witty commentary on social norms, and especially those of blind consumerism. Taylor often creates characters who he outfits with clothing or structures that are an augmentation of the body and blend aspects of fashion, packaging and architecture. He then documents the character in situations that parody real events, highlighting and exaggerating the oddities of human behavior. At the Berwick he will be working towards a performance of a character he will create during his residency.
July-August
Maura Jasper wonders how the elderly experience our world of rapid change. Uncomfortable with these changes herself, she began to notice that in our culture of technology and youth, the elderly are often invisible, or barely present. Using technology and weather as her focus points, Jasper will use her Berwick residency to further develop "Weather You Remember", an online collection of weather reports delivered by senior citizens, as they recall and comment on the weather of their homes. This portraiture project attempts to capture and preserve moments and memories of a world we may or may not still inhabit.
September-November
Matthew Shanley wants us to get our hands dirty in the numbers! He will use his Berwick residency to develop "Our Knowledge Mashups", a tool for organizing and displaying data that combines numerical information from different sources and create an elegant visual display of the results. What relationships are hidden in numbers? Shanley believes there are many and that exploratory combinations of previously unmixed fields allow for the possibility to be inspired.
Matthew Shanley
Project Description GiftDocs is an internet-based project cataloging and displaying freely available documents found across the web. These are most often pdf files which address most every imaginable topic, contain loads of graphs and images, and are well-written and designed to boot. Numerous people have poured vast amounts of time into these artifacts, and are now giving them to us unconditionally. The GiftDocs site contains a database of information on these documents. For each one it stores things like the title, author, download location, a summary, and a list of keyword tags describing the content. This information is viewable by anyone, and created and edited by a group of administrator-librarians. In addition, there is an interactive, force directed graph displaying a web of these documents, connected to each other based on common attributes. In other words, two documents are connected with a line if they share a common keyword, and more tightly connected if they share a few keywords and an author. This display highlights the networked structure of the document ecosystem. I'm using GiftDocs as a vehicle to experiment with ideas about gift economies. In a culture where we are constantly being told about the newfound value of information, here is a parallel plane on which information is being distributed with no financial compensation. If GiftDocs is insidiously approachable and pertinent, I would be ok with that.