<div dir="ltr"><div><b>Project Description</b><br></div>In mid-March, just as the
pandemic lockdowns were beginning, two strangers – Liz Flyntz and I–
began meeting weekly on Zoom. We invited architects, artists, and
pedagogs from all over the world to discuss how to preserve Antioch
College’s abandoned art building, the only publicly accessible building
designed by media art and architecture group, Ant Farm. <br><br>We are
now turning our months of meetings and years of research on early media
artists and experimental architecture into The Space-Expanding Room
(working title), a VR experimental film set at several connected sites
of past utopian projects, including Antioch’s art building. Other
subjects include a student-designed inflatable college campus building
which was destroyed by a storm in 1973, a year after its construction; a
Frank Gehry-designed structure which once headquartered an idealistic
planned city and is now a Whole Foods; and the Afro-centric
Sojourner-Douglass College, established in Baltimore in 1972 –
originally as an expansion of Antioch College – whose accreditation was
recently revoked, and whose historic campus buildings are now abandoned.
<br><br>360 degree video allows you, the spectator, to “be” embodied in
these places: you can look around, up and down. But some of the things
you see will be unique to the cinematic experience: at sites where the
former architecture is no longer there—the inflatable campus, for
example—a digital model takes its place, and photographs on the surface
of the renderings create an uncanny experience. The narrator, Liz
Flyntz, is occasionally revealed: she is pinning notes to a wall,
connecting the current site to the next one to come. Eventually we find
ourselves in a Whole Foods that we find out is the Frank Gehry-designed
former headquarters of Columbia, Maryland, a planned city created in
1967 to enhance residents’ quality of life and eliminate racial,
religious, and class segregation. We begin to move within the film for
the first time—the camera is doing a cartwheel—but in slow motion; we
look around from the strangest of positions. At the site of the former
Sojourner-Douglass College, architectural drawings and archival photos
of classes and parties have been digitally composited into the
environment. Audio of an interview resonates into the room—finally we
locate the source of the sound in a corner—if we look closely we
identify a talking head on a laptop screen. Later, in an abandoned art
building, the entire space itself is split: we are half in a 3D rendered
archival photograph—the other half is the present-day—students are
using the building.<br><div><br></div><div>This project is a meditation
on how designed spaces figure into idealism and experimentation. Failure
is an essential part of experimentation, and in each of these attempts
buildings and institutions did fail. What can we learn looking back?</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><b>Collaboration</b></div>We
are interested in finding even more stakeholders for this project: we
have frequently invited guests to our project meetings, and these casual
conversations have led to new connections and strategies to continue
forward. <br><br>All of these meetings have been online; to this date,
we have met in person only once. In our initiative to preserve the Ant
Farm building at Antioch College, we've been completely reliant on
remote connection to the core "nodes" of our collaboration and the
broader network of archives, state historic register commissions, and
our interaction with those who remember the building's construction.<br><br>Liz
and I are invested in understanding the ethics of sharing work. We
coordinated a paid position for a student to take part in our collective
effort and were later joined by architect, Timothy Noble. Several
months ago we filled out “The Collaboration Agreement”—a questionnaire
Liz designed to aid collaborators in coming to an understanding about
roles, shared goals, guidelines, and ethics. We discussed the purpose of
our collaboration, the scope and duration of the project, and
decision-making structure. We also discussed the financial structure and
how to add new participants, as well as how to terminate the agreement.
<br><br><div>In making this project, we remember and re-imagine a
world, which in turn enriches our real one. We are reflecting on
previous attempts to re-envision systems from the ground up. Examining
this era of rich experimentation inspires us, but also teaches us what
we can do better next time. <br></div><div><br></div><font size="2">Our
thinking partner, Razan AlSalah, pointed out that much VR has regressed
the documentary community back to the very early problems of the
colonial gaze. We are interested in critically engaging with 360
aesthetics, architectural renderings and perspectival epistemology. How
could we formally subvert this spatial language to question utopia? <br><br><b>Bios</b></font><br><u>Liz Flyntz</u>
is an artist, curator, writer, and digital experience designer. She
works with archives and digital tools to develop exhibitions,
performances, multimedia projects, software, and websites. Her work uses
contemporary tools and systems thinking to explore time, governance,
economics, communication, idealism, and futility. <br>She’s written
extensively about early media art for publications including Afterimage,
Intercourse, and The Creators Project. In 2016 she co-curated The
Present Is the Form of All Life, an exhibition of the time capsule works
of Ant Farm and their successor group LST at Pioneer Works. She’s
spoken about art/science collaboration, media art history, and
experience design at ISEA, the College Art Association Conference, NYU,
MICA, and RISD.<br><br><u>Catalina Alvarez</u> is a Colombian-American
film director and interdisciplinary artist. Her films have screened at
festivals including Slamdance, Fantastic Fest, New Orleans and Palm Springs, and venues such as the ICA Philadelphia, the
San Diego Art Institute, the Museum of the Moving Image and Arclight Hollywood.<br>Alvarez received her MFA from Temple University and is
currently an Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Antioch College and a Fellow in the Film/Video Studio Program at the Wexner Center for the Arts. <br><div><br><u>Leander O’Connell Johnson</u> was
born in Eugene, Oregon in 1996 and was the Printer’s Devil at Salt &
Cedar - a letterpress studio in Detroit - during his adolescence. His
printed work has been collected by the New York Public Library and
Prelinger Library in San Francisco. In 2013 Johnson was awarded a Knight
Foundation fellowship to make a series of publications, 12 ‘Zines. He
is currently studying at Antioch College.</div><div><br></div><div><u>Timothy Noble</u> is a Buffalo-based artist who works in a wide variety of
disciplines, including robotics, digital art, sculptural installations,
video, and print. Born in San Francisco and raised in the midwest, he is
a graduate of Antioch College and a student at SUNY Buffalo. <br><font color="#888888"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span></p><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre-wrap"></span></font></div><font color="#888888"><div><br><br></div></font><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><font size="2">Catalina<br></font><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><font size="2"><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)">Assistant Professor of Media Arts<br>Pronouns: she/her</span></font></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><font size="2">Schedule remote meetings with me <a href="https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=Y2FsdmFyZXpAYW50aW9jaGNvbGxlZ2UuZWR1" target="_blank">here</a>.<br></font></span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="color:rgb(68,68,68)"><a href="http://catalinaalvarez.com" target="_blank"><font size="2">catalinaalvarez.com</font></a></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>