“What if the White House, the ultimate architectural symbol of political power, were to be designed today? On occasion of the election of the 44th President of the United States of America, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in association with Control Group, challenge you to design a new residence for the world’s most powerful individual. The best ideas, designs, descriptions, images, and videos will be selected by some of the world’s most distinguished designers and critics and featured in a month-long exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in July 2008 and published in Surface magazine. All three winners will be flown to New York to collect their prizes at the opening party. Register now and send us your ideas for the Presidential Palace of the future!”

via BLDGBLOG

Panel Discussion & Craft Reception
Saturday, January 26, 2008,  3:00 - 5:00 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
New York City

Moderator:
Julia Bryan-Wilson, art historian and critic, University of California
at Irvine

Panelists:
Liz Collins, artist/designer
Sabrina Gschwandtner, artist
Cat Mazza, artist/activist
Allison Smith, artist

Many contemporary artists are using craft as a largely unregulated
place of protest where diverse and timely political statements are being
made. This panel is presented as part of a series of talks on
“Agency” and proposes that crafting, because it is so often
social and communal, plays a vital role in the public sphere. The
speakers examine the role of craft in forming national identities,
especially in times of political turmoil or war; notions of patriotism;
feminism and the domestic sphere; and economic models that circumvent
conventional market models. The five artists will present projects and
discuss their work under the broad rubric of “Crafting Protest.” By
linking the actual act of production and handmaking in the public realm
to political expression, participants will ask: how can art foster
political agency?

This program is presented concurrently with the release of the February
issue of Modern Painters, which features a roundtable discussion by the
panelists. The speakers have also collaborated on a large-scale knit
banner to be unveiled at the event. Following the panel discussion,
audience members are invited to an informal craft reception in which
panelists will present tactile examples of the materials, machinery, and
processes they use in their work.

*   *   *

The  event is presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s program
cycle on “Agency,” and is co-sponsored by Modern Painters. Allison
Smith is a 2007 Artists’ Fellowship recipient of the New York
Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is co-sponsored by
Artists & Audiences Exchange, a public program of NYFA. Special thanks
to Liz Collins and RISD Texiles for the use of their industrial knitting
machine.

*   *   *

EVENT INFORMATION: 212.229.5353, specialprograms@newschool.edu, or
www.newschool.edu/publicprograms.

*   *   *

There is the beginnings of an interesting thread on the iDC (Distributed Creativity) List about “voting as an act of citizenship, perhaps?” Prof. Vanalyne Green of the University of Leeds is initiating a project that “wants to validate people for not voting, when they don’t vote, rather than shame them.” She writes:

Working as an artist, writer and someone passionate about education and educational programs, I’ve begun a collaboration about the relationship between politics and pleasure as it might be understood through voting.

. . .

Anyway: it all started when Stephen was telling me that people who voted Tory had different visual memories of what they saw on the way to their polling station, as compared with people who voted Labour. And so we began talking about our ludicrous moments of hope and utopia while in the voting station and how, in spite of our cynicism, we so enjoyed those moments of mingling with strangers united by our common desire for a better world in an instant when we probably all knew that the vote is nigh on to meaning nothing. (Or does it. The experience of having the elections rigged in the States, the Supreme Court, Gore, Ohio, etc., makes for a different set of traumas, I think… .). Stephen is doing a lot of work about reality television shows that incorporate voting. Why is it, he asks, people will vote for Big Brother, the controversial reality TV show in Britain, but they won’t vote in the general election? Voting is ever more part of a social

Full post via iDC.

The Road to Voting Project website.