More INFORMATION and SUBMISSION Guidlines : ridersonthetrainproject@comcast.net
ABOUT THE PROJECT
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
RIDERS ON THE TRAIN PROJECT, organized by Boston-based artist Nancy Davies, is an art project seeking your creative responses to riding on public transportation [subway train or bus]. Video, Sound Art, Visual Images [photos, prints, drawings, mappings], Proposals for Performance-related Actions and/or Interventions, Text Pieces [poetry, prose, journal entries]. Have a strange day? A chance meeting? A random digression of thought? A philosophical insight? Observations about time and space, community, social behavior? Anything at all. Your work may be included in the project in one of a number of venues [gallery, train, public video screen].
CONCEPT
In recent years, the ideas concerning ‘what art can be, where it should exist, how it should by made – by whom and for whom – have undergone radical changes. We no longer expect to find art only in museums and galleries, made by and consumed by an informed elite. Today art is off the wall, under the bridge, on the river, and in the soup and conversation! Art moves, morphs, divides and multiplies as people from diverse walks of life, contribute to and inform our cultural production. Often artist and audience 'fuse' for purposes of creating a more authentic and empathetic voice. [1]
The contemporary ‘T’ rider exists as a part of an atypical community shaped by social contingency, time / place fluctuations and indeterminate recurrences - a community transported by train and thought. This project does not assume to create community but rather to make visible, through writing, a kind of ‘already-existing-community’. Participating 'T Riders' are the collective makers of the work. [2]
SITE [ trainSPACE & consciousnessSPACE ]
The project site is layered space. Specifically – the space of the train [literal / material] and the space of human consciousness [virtual]. Riders navigate and negotiate this shared space through carefully coded behavior – often retreating to private thought. Unlike car and bike navigation, which require concentrated skill and attention, this kind of travel allows the rider a temporary suspension in time and space - an interval of unscheduled consciousness. The project seeks to frame this temporary space as a place of potential, generative thought – a fluid place for imagination - a collective nervous system. [3]
Finally, it is hoped that the creative work offered by the riding community will offer an authentic, aggregate, definition of the train riding experience through a diversity of perspectives – work that reflects and critiques the conditions of this mobile space where the rider is - at once - transported and transporting.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROJECT and HOW TO SUBMIT
email: ridersonthetrain@comcast.net
R E S O U R C E S
James Brook "Reading and Riding With Borges" Resisting the Virtual Life City Lights Books San Francisco 1995
Critical Art Ensemble “Observations on Collective Cultural Actions” Art Journal 1998 73 -85
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari 'A Thousand Platueas: Capitalism and Schizophrenia' U of MN Press 1987
Michel de Certeau 'The Practice of Everyday Life' trans. Steven Rendall Berkeley, CA U of CA Press, 1984
Guy Debord [Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.] 'The Society of the Spectacle' New York: Zone Bookds, 1995
Andrea Fraser "What's Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the Public Sphere"? October, 80, 111-116. 1997
Elizabeth Grosz ed. 'Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures'
Peter Halley “ON LINE” from 'BLASTED ALLEGORIES: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Aritsts', Wallis, Brian ed.. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987
Miwon Kwon 'One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity' Cambridge, MA MIT Press 2002
James Meyer "The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity," in 'Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art', ed. Erika Suderberg Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 23-37
Anne-Laure Oberson "SITE AS SITUATION" [curator’s essay] Action Field Kodra 06 6th visual arts festival http://www.d624.org/thesite/page04.html
Erika Suderberg, ed. 'Space Site Intervention: Situating Installation Art' Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000
Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette eds. (2004) 'The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life' MIT Press Cambridge
Stephen Wilson 'Information Arts intersections of art, science, and technology' MIT Press Cambridge 2002
I am an interdisciplinary, mixed-media artist. My interests include the impact of culture, technology and location on personal experience and social interrelationship.
I am an assistant professor at Massachusetts College of Art where I teach in the Studio Foundations and Graduate departments. My work has been widely exhibited - including New York City, Melbourne, Australia, Baltimore, Boston, Oakland, Richmond VA, Winston-Salem, NC, Portland, OR, and Rockport and Portland, ME.