This summer I spent a month in Northern California for a residency at the Exloratorium, a museum of “art, science, and human perception”. To support the venture I received a £1000 bursary from a-n towards the travel costs of the trip. My practice is based around creative pedagogy and collaborative making, so much of the trip was dedicated to experimenting with processes and learning about how people are experimenting with these processes.
This is a blog series about the trip.
A lunch time wonder…
…I’ve been invited to go on a light walk as a lunch time thought experiment, a customary event for staff at the Exploratorium. We start the walk huddled at the edge of pier 15. Our guide arrives and looks up. He comments on the weather – it is sunny, and a good day for a light walk. We are lead down the street, and our guide confesses that he is not sure how this tour will turn out. He also lets us know that we need to find some trees. “Lets cross here”. We cross over the Embacadero and on the far side of a small car park we find some splatters of light under a row of Eucalyptus, we convene under the trees. “What do you notice?” our guide asks. There is an…er…awkward shuffle…shadows? There is an enthusiastic shriek from our guide: yes! He rummages around a calico tote bag he is clutching, and almost as if he is performing a new trick on stage, he pulls out a large piece of card. Holding it parallel to the ground we are invited to look again. “What do you notice now?” Our guide drops the card onto the floor, “…and now?”.
I go back the studio, inspired, and thinking about chickens. It turns out that “Light Walks” were developed by Bob Miller, an artist come scientist and long term collaborator at the Exploratotium. His exhibits documented his fascination with light, and many are still on display. My favorite is the sun painting. Two weeks later my twitter feed is full of partial eclipse shaped colanders and I am reminded again of the big chicken shaped sun.
The Exploratorium is a museum of science, art, and human perception. I was resident at the museum for 2 weeks in July, based at the Tinkering Studio.
A moveable museum
I learned so much from being situated in the museum. As an organization they were open and curious, and they valued and trusted people. On the first day I was given a “thinking collaborator” pass that gave me access to the museum between 8am and 8pm, I literally tagged in, directly into the hub of the museum from day 1. I was honored.
And some of the museum is not in the museum at all. Recently they built an extension at the far side of pier, overlooking the Bay. It is designed for looking outwards. In this area there are telescopes to look out into the Bay with, and drawing prompts help you look. There is a museum within the museum -a small geo-socio-historical museum of San Francisco and the Bay Area. And there is documentation of the time when the museum was a walk. In 2013 Harrell Fletcher made this part of the museum into a walk to mount Diablo in the project The Best Things in Museums Are the Windows. Apart from the wonderful light exhibits, this was my favorite part of the museum to spend time in.
The San Francisco Bay Area has a history of making (think Silicon Valley, microchips, VR, Elon Musk etc.). While I was in the area I had a poke around some of the spaces to make in. Not all the spaces for making are entrenched in the Silicon Valley ethos, and some (not all) are set up in opposition to some of the tensions that have arisen through the technology / consumer driven objectives that dominate a lot of the creativity in the Bay Area. On my trip I visited a few of these spaces.
Exploartorium
There are a few making spaces in the Exploratorium. The one above is part of the fabric of the museum, and run by both staff and volunteers. There is also a making space on their other pier, used to make a lot of the exhibits, and a smaller making space in the tinkering studio.
Liberating Ourselves Locally (LOL)
Lol is “a queer and trans people of color -centered, social justice -focused Maker Space in East Oakland”. I didn’t get to go to the space, but hope to one day.
Double Union
Double Union is a feminist hacker / maker space “where women can feel equally comfortable knitting, coding, drawing, or using power tools and no one feels pressure to prove they belong here”. They have a shared anti-harassment policy and a list of base assumptions for members.
Creative Growth
Creative Growth is an arts studios for artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities.
A couple of weeks before heading out the US I met up with Ryan Jenkins. We had met on twitter through our mutual interest in creative learning, and finally managed to meet in person. I mentioned the flat-game-jam that I had recently coordinated with Mark Wonnacott. Ryan loved the concept, and two weeks later on a sunny afternoon in Oakland, we are in a workshop in the Temescal district running a flat-game-jam with a group of local artists. Flat games were developed by Dreamfeel, and are kind of like a cross between ad video game and a zine. They use the video game conventions -they are made in unity3d, you control sprites and the camera view. But they depart from a video game in the way that you explore the game space without collisions, and in how ideas are expressed like they would be in a zine or comic book, they are often poetic, and tell personal stories.
We set-up the space with craft materials. Part of the flatgame format is to make IRL before making in digital. Nicole (Ryan’s collaborator) made cookies.
Ryan wrote about the jam on his blog.
I am is artist, designer and educator based in Bristol, UK. I make playful work at the intersection of folk-art, storytelling, and creative-technology. I also design and facilitate creative learning experiences.
