ArtCraftTech

Art CraftTech 2010 (ACT10) has been formed!  The team will be addressing a question about food justice and urban land use. The team is currently working on what question to ask.

ACT10 is directed by Clarinda Mac Low (Culture Push co-director) and Elliott Maltby (Landscape architect and organizer).

Our core participants for this year are:
Jill Slater (Urban planner/writer)
Ann Neumann (writer)
Babette Audant (Chef/teacher/cultural geographer)
Carolina Cisneros + Mateo Pinto (Architects/artists)
Liz Barry (Landscape architect/artist)
Neha Sabnis (Urban designer)
Deena Patel (Systems manager/physicist)
Kathy Westwater (Choreographer)
Sara Eichner (Artist)

We are currently looking for peripheral participants/consultants and event volunteers for ACT10!   For more information on participating please email cp@culturepush.org.

ArtCraftTech is a short-term problem-solving conference that creates a dialogue between several creative disciplines, bringing together artists, craftspeople, scientists, and technology experts to work on a problem outside their field of expertise in a spirit of open inquiry, inviting input and feedback from the public. ArtCraftTech, or ACT, offers the interdisciplinary team the freedom to be as creative and imaginative as they want to be, and then brings a general public into the process. Respect for all perspectives is a given, and everybody’s problem-solving capacities can be exercised in a low-pressure, playful context. It is the hope that this experience will spill over into other parts of life and that all the participants will gain confidence, a new perspective, an opened mind and be galvanized to ACT in their everyday lives, becoming engaged with problem-solving on a local and global level. More about how ACT works here.

The next ArtCraftTech public events will take place in Fall 2010. 

Take a look at some experience and theory (from "crowdsourcing" and social network theory) that suggest that problem-solving by non-experts can be very fruitful.

ACT10 is made possible in part with public funds from the Fund for Creative Communities, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

ACT09: Health and Wealth:  The very first ArtCraftTech (ACT) tackled the complex relationship between money and health.  

There were free public events on two  Sundays, December 13 and December 20, 2009 at Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. between Pitt St. and Columbia St. in Manhattan.

Participants came through the rain and snow to play the The Health Economy Game , take part in round-table discussions, watch a lively pecha-kucha slide presentation (what is a pecha-kucha? See here) on Health and Wealth (coming up here soon), and engage in impromptu dialogue and research.

Answer questions! We still need your views for our research. Results to be posted soon.

View the  Problem Statement on Money, a modest proposal for a new way to think about how Health fits into our current system of Wealth, then give us your ideas on how to make a new relationship between the two.

There were 6 core participants for ACT09: Health and Wealth:
Abraham Burickson (Architect/poet/theater maker)
Susan Englert (Architect/fine artist/jewelry design)
Carolyn Hall (Dancer/marine scientist)
Clarinda Mac Low (Performance maker/writer/medical researcher)
Patrick Murray (Engineer/instrument maker/film-maker)
Mark Sussman (Theater maker/professor)