rebargroup.org
FRIDAY 1:15p.m.
Blaine Merker is an environmental designer and artist based in San Francisco. He directs the innovative studio Rebar (rebargroup.org) and is a founder of Park(ing) Day (parkingday.org), an international open-source event that transforms metered parking spaces into parks. His design practice encompasses the varied implements of the twenty-first century: inflatable street furniture, art objects that house wildlife, pop-up plazas, public infrastructure remixed as public sculpture, urban farms, streets that learn, and high-rise building sites that sequester carbon. At the heart of each project is a re-examination of the assumed value of a particular space, and often a proposal for an absurdist challenge to existing values.
Part of a vanguard of designers using guerrilla tactics to reinvent both the physical and political landscape of the city, Merker is prototyping a hybrid practice that blurs the distinction between social entrepreneurship, experimentation and fee-for-service design. With Rebar, he has shown work at the Venice Biennale, ExperimentaDesign in Amsterdam, and currently lectures at the California College of Art and the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also teaching a studio class in 2010.
PRESENTATION TITLE
Interim Urban Use and Tactical Spacemaking
PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION
This presentation will give a visual overview of Rebar's work which includes guerrilla-style streetscape interventions, speculative public landscapes, social art pieces, and built work that offers a new vision for productive urban landscapes. Rebar is also exploring the extent of San Francisco's watershed, wasteshed and "tacoshed" and Blaine will share some of their proposed new ways for mapping the ecological carrying capacity of the city. The presentation will outline a framework for an activist spacemaking practice, based in military theory of strategy and tactics.
prudencejohnson.com
FRIDAY 3:30p.m.
Prudence Johnson’s career has taken her from honky-tonks to Carnegie Hall, from the theater stage to the Silver Screen, from the Midwest to the Middle East. With her roots in folk and country music, Prudence developed a passion for jazz and the work of the 20th century’s great songwriters. Her discography includes ‘S Gershwin, Moon Country: the Music of Hoagy Carmichael, Little Dreamer, (a collection of international lullabies) and many more.
Prudence has, in recent years, been busy creating works for the concert stage that blend music with her interests in history and literature. She is the creator of A Girl Named Vincent, which features musical settings of the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay, and producer of the CD and touring production Gales of November, based on a musical about the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald.
She appears as herself in Robert Altman’s 2006 film, A Prairie Home Companion, and as a dance hall singer in Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It. She is the winner of a McKnight Fellowship for Performing Musicians and an Artists Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and enjoys a steady schedule of concert appearances across the US, Canada, and, most recently, Sweden.
PRESENTATION TITLE
Art for Art’s Sake
PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION
Prudence will share stories about the things that have
inspired her. She will discuss the paradigm shift she sees from creating work based on
what the market may want to an exploration of an “if you build it, they will come”
approach. Best of all, she will entertain Retreat attendees with her music.
timkaiser.org
INTERLUDES and FRIDAY EVENING ENTERTAINMENT
FOLK MUSIC OF THE FUTURE
Tim Kaiser has been producing experimental art at various venues for the past 25 years. His video, installation and performance art projects have been presented in Germany, Brazil, Sweden, Hong Kong, Cuba, Canada, Philadelphia, New York and Chicago. His live musical performances have been throughout the United States. Tim has served on the boards of the Duluth Public Arts Commission, the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, Zenith City Arts and the Duluth New Music Institute. He has been a panelist for the Minnesota State Arts Board film and video review panel and a volunteer consultant to many arts organizations.
SATURDAY 9:00a.m.
Kevin Clemens, engineer, journalist, author, and adventurer, has driven north of the Arctic Circle in the dead of winter, across the searing deserts of China in the heat of summer, through the perils of the republics of the former Soviet Union, over treacherous roads in the Andes Mountains, in fifty-four countries and fifty states.
He holds eight design patents from the time he spent working as a research engineer at Michelin and
as a journalist he has written more than 450 articles and stories that have appeared in magazines and newspapers like Reader’s Digest, Automobile Magazine, and European Car. Clemens is a magazine editor, publisher, and the author of seven books, including his latest, The Crooked Mile: Through peak oil, biofuels, hybrid cars, and global climate change to reach a brighter future.
frontiercoop.com
SATURDAY 10:45a.m.
Kimberly Dickey is an Iowa business woman, designer, statistician, and environmental specialist with a fondness for people and travel. She has a Bachelor of Arts (she recalls her Anthropology/Archaeology degree, but then, it has been a while since she looked and it may be something else entirely); and was until recently a street-smarts trained mechanical engineer.
Currently she manages Frontier Natural Products Co-op's Environmental Portfolio and is the Compliance Officer for Well Earth™ Frontier's ethical and sustainable sourcing program. During her ‘me-time’ you will find Kimberly cycling, practicing yoga, organic gardening, reading issues of High Performance Buildings, or watching Bollywood films.
PRESENTATION TITLE
Influencing Change through Ethical Sourcing
PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION
As one of the largest buyers of organic herbs, spices,
botanicals, and essential oils, Frontier acknowledges the impacts made on the communities
from whom it purchases. Frontier's deep belief in having a positive effect on the earth
and the global community led to the development of the Well Earth program in order to
verify and further influence positive change. In 2006, Frontier developed Well Earth™ an
in-house sustainable sourcing program to expand outreach to ethical sources of high
quality products. In many cases, these sources are small farmers from every corner of
the world. Kimberly will discuss details and challenges involved with developing and
administering an in-house ethical sourcing program.
IwamotoScott.com
SATURDAY 4:00p.m.
Craig Scott is a founding partner of IwamotoScott Architecture, located in San Francisco, California. As a practice committed to pursuing architecture as a form of applied design research, ISAr engages in projects that range from theoretical proposals, competitions and commissioned design projects to fabrications, installations and exhibitions. Scott has continuously maintained a teaching career alongside the practice of IwamotoScott.
He is currently Associate Professor of Architecture at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and has taught at SCIArc, Harvard University, University of Sydney, University of Michigan and Yale University. He received his Master of Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University, and Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University.
PRESENTATION TITLE
Architectural Adaptations
PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION
The work of IwamotoScott centers on amplifying the perceptual performance of
architecture, establishing strong environmental and site relationships, and pursuing
innovation in use of material, fabrication techniques and configuration of space. The
lecture will survey this pursuit of architecture as a form of applied design research,
covering projects at multiple scales and in a variety of contexts consisting of full-scale
fabrications, museum installations and exhibitions, theoretical proposals, competitions
and commissioned designed projects.