[616] in UA Senate
Re: the Sweat Lodge
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nicole D Teague)
Mon Apr 12 13:03:29 2010
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:03:25 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nicole D Teague <nteague@MIT.EDU>
To: Keone Hon <keone@mit.edu>
cc: Ashley Nash <ashnash@mit.edu>, UA Senate <ua-senate@mit.edu>,
lef-arcade-board <lef-arcade-board@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <q2w6241a5d61004120948w46158263l7d70cf653ca5e0ed@mail.gmail.com>
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In addition to the points Keone has mentioned, the LEF/ARCADE turned down=
=20
this event because of the huge amount of money being budgeted to=20
publicity ($1000) and photo and video documentation ($1500). These are=20
unnecessary expenses whose total exceeds the amount they requested from=20
LEF.
On Mon, 12 Apr 2010, Keone Hon wrote:
> Here's the application submitted to LEF/ARCADE, since you guys asked.
> Also see the PDF, which is a bit more descriptive than the one
> attached in this thread before.
>
> The event was turned down by LEF due to timing issues (it is Fri May
> 21, the last day of finals week) and questions about whether they
> could really draw 1000 attendees as claimed, especially during that
> time.
>
> Although some events do take place during/after finals week, but they
> are typically related to finals week (Medlinks), or are very small,
> tight-knit groups (BGSA). The events that take place after finals
> week are held in grad dormitories, which essentially eliminates the
> draw concern.
>
>
> Board: LEF
> Event name: Sweat Lodge
> Sponsoring group: SOCS
>
> Total attendance: 1,000
> MIT student attendance: 65%
>
> Funding request: 2733
> Total budget: 6700
> Other funding sources:
> =09 2150 from Council for the Arts
> =09 1484 from de Florez Humor Fund
>
> Date: 5/21/10 Time: 36 hours
> Location: In the courtyard beteween the Media Lab and Medical Buildings
>
> Other information:
> * met with SAO
> * location IS reserved
> * WAS held previously
>
> Event description: Sweat Lodge
> Graduate and undergraduate students from the ASA club Society of
> Creatives (SOCS) and MIT's programs in Architecture, Art, Culture, &
> Technology, and Media Arts & Sciences are organizing a month long
> inflatable intervention on the MIT campus this spring. Happening over
> three themed days, "Construct," "Experience," and "De-Construct,"
> Sweat Lodge will be a nexus of performances, happenings, structures,
> workshops, lectures, discussions and experiences focusing on social
> and sensory perception. Sweat Lodge will be a platform for MIT
> students pursuing independent creative work to showcase that work to
> and collaborate with the communities of MIT, Cambridge, and Boston.
>
> Sweat Lodge will not actually be a sweat lodge in the native American
> or Nordic sense! The name is a metaphor for the types of sensory and
> social experiences we are interested in engineering, and a pun on the
> fact that inflatables tend to get hot and stinky inside when occupied.
> The traditional sweat lodge is a place for individuals to come
> together and share in a collective experience through which community
> is constructed. Our conceptual focus on social and sensory perception
> in relation to public performance, society, and the built environment
> will facilitate similar experiential opportunities for the
> participants. Sweat Lodge will create social, collaborative and
> community opportunities for the MIT campus to actively explore
> creative practices and activities facilitated by artists, designers,
> engineers, and scientists.
>
> Promotion
>
> Sweat Lodge will be inflated during the last weekend of May (Friday -
> Sunday) in Richard Fleischner's "Courtyard" (the lawn and walkways
> between the E25, E23, E15, and E14). This location was chosen to
> maximize our potential audience of passersby due to its high volume of
> pedestrian traffic from the Kendal T station to central campus.
> Engaging serendipitously with a broad cross section of campus is
> fundamental to our mission of flattening barriers between departments,
> disciplines, and people.
>
> In addition to creating the potential for serendipitous interaction,
> many of our collaborators have audiences they are already engaged with
> who will attend the events. Publicity to these groups is a two-fold
> strategy of beginning the collaborative dialog, then using
> word-of-mouth and social media to spread the word. To this end a call
> for proposals to SOCS, MIT's School of Architecture + Planning and the
> organizers' social networks in January has engaged creative thinkers
> from the community to submit ideas for projects. The process of
> calling for and collecting proposals will continue till April 1st,
> when we will make curatorial decisions about which proposals to follow
> through on. Following this, we will use face-to-face interaction,
> digital invitations, web site documentation, and FaceBook groups to
> promote the event to our respective audiences and the public. We are
> also engaged with faculty in the Art, Culture & Technology program who
> have promoted the project to undergraduate and graduate students in
> their classes.
>
> Promotion will continue during Sweat Lodge through the distribution of
> a self-published pamphlet. The pamphlet will be given away for free on
> site and will contain information about what the Sweat Lodge is, a
> schedule of its events, and descriptions and artist statements about
> the activities taking place.
>
> Happenings
>
> Sweat Lodge will kick-off with "Construct", a series of events about
> physical and metaphysical constructions. We'll be running free and
> public events on inflatable techniques for large objects; discussing
> the politics of appropriated spaces and societies; producing digital
> maps with helium dirigibles; fabricating tensegrity structures for
> pedagogy; building tools for public wireless networks; and
> collaborating to produce a human scale knit object, to name a few.
>
> The following day, "Experience", Sweat Lodge will become a nexus of
> public performance, sound, video, installation, and media events,
> which will create a variety of experiential environments for audience
> participants. Proposals for this day are still being gathered, but we
> have received promising submissions from members of the Society of
> Creatives (SOCS); students in Antoni Muntadas' Public Art class;
> students in the program in Media Arts & Sciences; students in the
> program in Art, Culture, & Technology; and community members from
> Boston and Cambridge. More details of individual proposals can be
> provided by request.
>
> The final day, "De-Construct", will feature a participatory public
> deconstruction of the pavilions involving workshops dealing with
> positive alternatives to Ant Farm=92s (pioneers in inflatable
> architecture and comedic performance-art) advice to =93burn it=94. Public
> presentations will be staged on site about sustainable material use in
> art production; re-purposing, re-use, and re-cycling of inflatable
> objects; multi-media documentation of the prior days' goings-on; and a
> round table panel discussion with the collaborators, curators and
> community to critique: "What just happened?"
>
> Approvals
>
> Sweat Lodge consists of a set of single and multiple occupancy modular
> inflatable pavilions ranging from 3'x3'x9' to 9'x9'x9' (under the size
> threshold for building permits) made from fire-retardant plastic. The
> pavilions will be inflated each morning of the event and deflated for
> storage each evening. A member of the project management team will be
> monitoring the installations full-time while they are inflated, and
> ballasts will be devised to buoy them in place. After the exhibit the
> pavilions will be stored for future use, donated for re-purposing, or
> recycled with a vendor. Approval from MIT's EHS office are still
> pending, but we have already initiated the approval process and are
> actively working with them to gain approval. Additional site visits
> are being conducted by MIT's Council for the Arts.
>
> Project Management Team
>
> The Society of Creatives (SOCS) is a newish (founded Feb 2009)
> student-run organization for people engaged in creative practices that
> exist between the boundaries of Art, Science, Design, and Engineering.
> We organize events like lectures, workshops, art happenings,
> critiques, exhibitions, and field trips, with the goal of building
> community across creative disciplines. Sweat Lodge is by far the
> largest event we have organized to-date, but it is not without
> precedent. Currently, we run a weekly peer critique group at the Muddy
> Charles Pub called Negative Feedback, for students who are working on
> independent creative projects to present their work and receive
> critical feedback from a multi-disciplinary audience. This semester we
> inaugurated our second regular event, MIT Creatives, a bi-weekly
> lecture series about creative thinking and practices happening at MIT.
> Finally, last spring, SOCS's founder and past president, Ryan O'Toole,
> produced a similar event in the same location for Antoni Muntadas's
> Public Art class called Public Art Bath. Sweat Lodge is a continuation
> of that work, but much more grandiose in scope and deeper in its
> collaborative effort. The principal organizers of Sweat Lodge are Ryan
> O'Toole (MAS '10) and Amanda Moore (ACT '11) supported by the work,
> ideas, participation, and good will of many other students and faculty
> involved staging the happenings: David Robert (MAS), Sam Kronick
> (BSAD), Sara Witt (ACT), Mary Hale (ALUM), Brandon Roy (MAS), Nadav
> Ahrony (MAS), Antoni Muntadas (ACT), Ute Meta Bauer (ACT), Gedeminas
> Urbonas (ACT), Noah Vawter (MAS), Noah Feehan (MAS), Jeff Warren(MAS),
> John Buck (LVAC&MassArt), Hannah Perner-Wilson (MAS), Sean Folmer
> (MAS), Kathryn Payne (MassArt), and others to be announced.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Miscellaneous:
> Acct# : 2721289
> Available_funds : 0
> Performer_Speaker? : no
> Group_email : sweatlodge@mit.edu
> Contact : Ryan O'Toole
> Collaborating_Other_Groups : Students from the programs in Media Arts
> & Sciences, Art Culture & Technology, and Architecture.
> name : Ryan Michael O'Toole
> email : rot@mit.edu
> Contact_email : rot@mit.edu
> Past_date : 5/15/09
>
> --
> Keone Hon
> President, Association of Student Activities | MIT Class of 2011
> Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | Dept. of Mathemati=
cs
> keone@mit.edu | (407) 536-6346
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 3:00 AM, Ashley Nash <ashnash@mit.edu> wrote:
>> Here's the budget. Whoops
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 2:59 AM, Ashley Nash <ashnash@mit.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> Sorry I didn't send this out earlier.=A0 I meant to, but then life
>>> happened.=A0 Anyway, the Sweat Lodge is a new event for MIT.=A0 It's a =
three-day
>>> event (each day over a different weekend) where students can showcase t=
heir
>>> work.=A0 They can install stuff or perform, and this is really awesome =
because
>>> lots of students like doing cool things, but they don't have the time t=
o do
>>> their work, and do art and do the bureaucratic stuff they need to do to
>>> perform, getting the appropriate licenses, dealing with MIT EHS (safety
>>> office) applying for funding, etc.=A0 This event will give students the=
chance
>>> to do cool things and someone else, the event organizers, are doing all=
of
>>> the paperwork and stuff that the students don't have time to do themsel=
ves.
>>> =A0 We haven't been spending all that much this term, which translates =
to
>>> people aren't doing as much, and so I think that if we could help a new
>>> initiative get off the ground, it would be 1. an awesome thing for stud=
ents
>>> and 2. would encourage more people to come up with awesome things for
>>> students.
>>>
>>> I attached their budget below.=A0 One funding source is listed as ???=
=A0 They
>>> told me who it was, and I forgot, so I put in ???
>>>
>>> If you have any questions or information you want, let me know so I can
>>> try to make sure it is available before/at Senate.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Ashley
>>
>>
>
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