PUBLIC ART
D-I-A-LOGZ
The interactive public artwork D-i-a-logz was developed in conjunction with students from the Wellstone International High School in Minneapolis. In writing and media arts workshops, they learned how to combine their stories and digital art technology as tools to explore their personal narratives.. The students’ written and video stories about their lives were housed on a project website, where the work of each artist could be accessed individually. Video interviews with the students were combined with motion graphics into short video ‘tags’ to be discovered on cellphones via (the then-new) bluetooth technology at kiosks around the city in a digital scavenger hunt that introduced these new arrivals to the Twin Cities community.
FOREIGN BORN
Foreign Born was a collaboration with the Mpls. Public School ELL Program and Art Inside/Outside Space Commission funded by the Jerome Foundation and Intermedia Arts. Working in classes with recently arrived immigrants in Mpls. Public School English Literacy classes, I assisted students in the exploration of their relocations experiences as written narratives. Combining their writings with video and motion graphics, the work was projection onto their school building in South Minneapolis, the Lehman Center. During the evenings of the work's launch, stories of language adjustments, border crossings and first snowfalls crawled and danced over this former greeting card factory, in an introduction of these students to their new community.
MILE 853
Mile 853, the glass laylight above the Freshman Admissions Welcome Center in Jones Hall, is a visual snapshot of the research and academic work at the University of Minnesota. Titled after location of the Minneapolis campus along the banks of the Mississippi, the work is a visual representation of the departments and research facilities of the University system. Layers of sandblasted text that constitute the landscape areas of ‘map’ are comprised of excerpts from articles and research documents contributed by over seventy-five academic and research faculty and staff in eleven different languages, including Icelandic, Ojibwe, and Oromo. The text paths throughout the design trace the geological formations of the campus, and the placement of the texts reference locations of the academic divisions. Floating above new incoming students, their parents, and other visitors to the Welcome Center, the work is an introduction to the richly diverse academic inquiry at this institution..
