by Bryan Jones
Art can take many forms: release of emotion, contemplation, or even a method to create controversy and debate. The University of West Georgia hosted a screening of the first day of the Creative Time Summit on November 14 in the Tanner Health Center Nursing Building to examine the methodology.
The summit itself took place in Kulturhuset, Sweden and was a collaboration between New York City’s Creative Time and Public Art Agency Sweden. For the portion of the summit that took place at UWG, Erin Johnson and Rachel Reese coordinated the event with the support of UWG's art department and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.
As part of the on-campus portion of the summit, two major events took place. The first was a lecture by Michael David Murphy of Atlanta Celebrates Photography in which he discussed his work in the context of nationalism. As part of his lecture, he showed an animated GIF file depicting the 1991 rendition of the national anthem by Whitney Houston.
“In watching something like this it is nearly impossible not to get swept away by it,” he said. “There’s fervor in these things; there’s fervor in the flag.”
The second of several events that day was a lunchtime presentation by Meredith Kooi, editor of Radius, a Chicago-based experimental radio broadcast platform. As part of her presentation during the lunch period, she played samples of an experimental piece entitled GRIDS. According to the Radius website, GRIDS is a commissioned series of experimental musical works that “will specifically address how energy is produced, distributed, and consumed in the event of a radio broadcast.”
For more information on the Creative Time Summit, visit creativetime.org/summit. For more information on Radius, visit theradius.us, and for more information on the UWG Department of Art, visit www.westga.edu/~artdept.
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