Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE)

Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) is pleased to host Amy Franceschini for a lecture and workshop at the University of Georgia in spring 2012, supported by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Lamar Dodd School of Art. She will focus on her recent work with sustainable energy, urban food production, and dialogues between artists and scientists.

Amy Franceschini is the founder of Futurefarmers, a critically acclaimed group of artists and designers who have worked together since 1995. Their highly innovative studio produces art projects, design for print and interactive websites, workshops, and research that explores social, cultural, and environmental systems.

Franceschini received a BFA from San Francisco State University and an MFA from Stanford University. She is a professor of Art and Architecture at the University of San Francisco and a visiting artist at the California College of the Arts.

Amy Franceschini and Futurefarmers have been featured in exhibitions at prestigious institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), The Whitney Museum (included in the Whitney Biennial), Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria (winner of the Prix Ars Electronica, the top prize in new media art), the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (Smithsonian National Design Triennial), and many more. Their clients include Adobe, Swatch, Hewlett Packard, Levi’s, Nike, LucasFilm, Dreamworks, the New York Times, PBS, Wired Magazine, and more. They received a Webby Award (Art and Design category) and in 2007 created the “Twitter” logo.

For more information about Amy Franceschini visit www.futurefarmers.com.

Amy Franceschini
Lecture: Art Is a Verb
Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 4 PM
Miller Learning Center Room 101

ICE-Vision: Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
Thursday, January 26 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“… Nicolas Roeg’s hallucinatory 1973 Daphne du Maurier adaptation – the story of a couple, played by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, who decamp to a spooky Venice after the death by drowning of their daughter. We can speculate on the roots of its popularity: that it satisfies the genre and arthouse crowds; that it uses framing, sound, editing and camera movement to unreel a transfixing tale and flesh out excruciatingly authentic characters; that it dares to coax out the ghosts lurking in every watery passageway in Venice, Europe’s most ornate and singular city; that it contains arguably the greatest sex scene on film. Or, we can just accept it as a movie whose every glorious frame is bursting with meaning, emotion and mystery, and which stands as the crowning achievement of one of Britain’s true iconoclasts and masters of cinema.” -Time Out London

Are you excited by new performance? Are you interested in food? Want a chance to create a new play? Come to either one (or both) of the following two meetings on The Food Project to find out more and to get involved:

Monday, January 23 from 4:30 – 6:30 PM
Department of Theatre and Film Studies
Fine Arts Building Room 201

Tuesday, January 24 from 4:30 – 6:30 PM
Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE)
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S160

Rachel Parish will be coming over from London, UK to begin developing a new play in Athens from January 23 through February 6. Over the two weeks, we will be exploring FOOD – why we love it, how we make it, where it comes from, and many other questions about our contemporary relationship to this basic part of our lives. We will look at classic stories as well as gathering real life stories to use as source material for making this new performance piece.

This is just the start of the project. During the two weeks we will be collecting stories, exploring soundscapes, cooking, eating, and researching our relationship to food. Over the next year, this will develop into a full-scale show. Get involved now to help shape the direction of the entire piece!

Between the 3rd and the 6th of February, we will arrange two presentations of our work in progress to invited public audiences, once in Athens, and once in Milledgeville.

We will also organize a creative salon dinner to share ideas as they develop (or further explanation and testimonials from London visit: firehousecreativeproductions.com/forge/forge/fireside.html )

Rachel Parish is artistic director of Firehouse Creative Productions and works regularly as a freelance theatre director, garnering audience and critical acclaim. Her work includes devising and directing new plays, creating installations and interactive performances. Her specialty is in collaborative practice, devising theatre, gathering people’s real stories, and blending true stories with classic texts. Her work has taken place in London, the USA, and in West Africa, with support from organisations including Arts Council England and the AHRC. Rachel trained at the National Theatre Studio and Central School of Speech and Drama. Recent academic posts include lecturing, workshops and performances at the European Graduate School, University of Georgia, Macon State University, Georgia College and State University and Crossroads Writers Conference at Mercer University.

Supported in part by Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE), an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts at UGA.

ICE-Vision: Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
Thursday, January 19 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150

Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.

“Made in 1958, it was Orson Welles’s last Hollywood film, and in it he makes transcendent use of the American technology his genius throve on; never again would his resources be so rich or his imagination so fiendishly baroque. Welles stars as the sheriff of a corrupt border town who finds his nemesis in visiting Mexican narcotics agent Charlton Heston; the witnesses to this weirdly gargantuan struggle include Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, Akim Tamiroff, and Joseph Calleia, who holds the film’s moral center with sublime uncertainty.” -Dave Kehr (Chicago Reader)

“Touch of Evil, the project with which – some 16 years after Citizen Kane – the 42-year-old Orson Welles tried (and failed) to stage a Hollywood comeback, is a movie of transcendent movie-ness and still-astonishing virtuosity . . . Touch of Evil effectively rung down the curtain on one of the most fertile movements in American popular culture.” -J. Hoberman (Village Voice)

Former ICE Graduate Research Assistant Marie Porterfield Barry shares her extraordinary experiences as a Fulbright Fellow in Turkey through her online journal, Kütahya İlluminated.

Kütahya is a city in Western Anatolia Turkey where ceramics have been produced for thousands of years. According to the story, many many years ago a maiden brought a plate to a bazar at which vendors were selling their goods from around the world. A terrible accident occured and her beautiful painted plate was dropped but, miraculously, it did not break. People from all corners of the world ran to her asking her where she found the clay. Kütahya. Since that time, many centuries ago, artists have been coming to this city to build and paint ceramics. I came here to drink tea at an ancient castle whose floor spins in circles and whose tunnels lead to old Ottoman houses and that is where I heard her story.

Kütahya İlluminated is an illumination of traditional techniques of illuminating on ceramic surfaces through the eyes of a foreigner living in an illuminated city as beautiful as a dream.

Marie Porterfield Barry is an American artist living in Kütahya, Turkey studying traditional tile painting and practicing imagination. For images of her work and more information, please visit her website: marieporterfield.com.

ICE Graduate Research Assistants featured in exhibition

Distillate showcases innovative works at Future Tenant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from January 13 through February 4, 2012.

Distillate artists were challenged to investigate some properties inherent in growth, and to consider variants such as support structure, relationships between working components, and the values we assume in order to understand our world. The exhibition was curated by Meghan Olson and Kara Skylling.

The featured artists are Rachel Debuque with Tifany Lee, Becky Slemmons, Jaci Rice, Ashley Pixelle Andrews, Morgan Cahn, Wendy Osher, Anna E. Mikolay, Rob Katkowski, Aimee Manion, Rose Clancy, Joshua Space, Stephanie Armbruster, Carolyn Wenning, and Ryan Woodring.

The Brew House Association’s mission is to provide artists with the support necessary to foster invention, creation and collaboration, and to encourage creative risk-taking to pursuit ruthless artistic excellence. The Brew House Distillery Residency has helped emerging Pittsburgh artists for nearly ten years. These artists have investigated subjects that are significant in the support and proliferation of the arts in Pittsburgh and beyond. The mediums practiced by participating artists have included performance, video, sculpture, music, painting, printmaking and photography.

For more information about Future Tenant, please visit futuretenant.org.

HONS 3010H: Introduction to Research in the Arts
Instructor: Mark Callahan, Artistic Director, Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE)
Wednesdays, 1:25-2:15 PM

The Introduction to Research in the Arts seminar provides an overview of arts research, presents methodological models for sustaining research-based creative practice, and acts as a workshop for project development. The seminar will examine conventional and emerging forms of arts research, ranging from historical and critical studies to project-based works that address newer media and interdisciplinary approaches. Students will visit various areas of campus to become familiar with performance and exhibition resources at UGA and meet leading faculty and professionals who are conducting research in the Departments of Art, Dance, Theatre & Film Studies, English, Music, and ICE (Ideas for Creative Exploration). Students will be exposed to a range of models for creative practice based on visits with faculty, outside reading, and discussion.

Gateway Seminars are offered each Spring semester for one-credit-hour, graded A-F, and are available to all students. Access must be obtained through the CURO Office. Please call 706-542-4053 or email Matt Jordan (mejordan@uga.edu) for access.
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About Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities (CURO) Gateway Seminars

While students are often interested in pursuing research, they can be uncertain of what it means to do so. Before they can identify specific areas of research interest or faculty with whom they may work, many want to develop an understanding of the research process within an academic field. Moreover, they want to get a better sense of the current research in that field.

The CURO Gateway Seminars are offered with these students in mind.

Through these seminars, faculty and CURO seek to encourage undergraduates to understand the research process and discover tools to engage in research of their own. It is a fun and informative way to learn about research opportunities and resources at UGA.

Specifically, these seminars introduce students to what it means to conduct research in broadly-defined disciplines and help them identify potential faculty mentors with whom the student will continue research through CURO research courses.