School for Designing a Society… and the traces left by it

by Toney the Pomeranian/Lhasa-Apsa mix.

The haitus in blogging on the general state of the School for Designing a Society has been a product of more tangible benefits of life with actual humans. Here are some things that have been going on…

Elizabeth has zoomed in on the absense of fun in her life thus far. Formulations fruit explosively from her “Funnyfesto” and Information Theory applied to fun (=measurement of potential that things could have been fun). Also, Elizabeth loves bike tattooing when bike abandoning in/on NY.

Danielle went to the Gesundheit Institute and facilitated the whole Health Care Design Intensive. Apparently, she is a super-hero.

Susan’s impatience with drained brains straining to grasp the concepts and high-falootin’ text is countered by Mark’s attentive eyeballs. Cybernetics deficits make less interesting talking and more frustration.

There have been drop-in drop-outs. Keith’s belt for example.

JiSu remembers her friends, and their time together, through photographs of the food they shared.

Elections dominated discussion the first week of November. Bobbi has shaky mental health. Andrew is working on Herbert Brün data, and is writing songs in a 17-tone scale for the Cüm Büs (a Turkish 12-stringed banjo-like instrument). Eun Ah is interested in grinding nature in order to create pigment.

Ryan Strandjord from Minnewood and Kelsey addressed the issue of socially-conscious film. Phil wears warm-ups and Kord’s hair hangs. Steven hurled insults at U.S. imperialism.

The wiki is spreading around like a happy virus.

Watch out for the cause-and-effect words everyone on earth and throughout manipulative history.

There was a request for “direction” in the group of the whole — Bobbi followed up with an under-the-radar statement of her preference for a multi-directional path.

Dahni is the youngest, and most fatigued.

by Jacob Barton

I want:
A group of more than 10 people playing udderbot (and its relatives), as an ensemble that meets regularly in Urbana.  A group of people, of various ages, who rehearse and become able to (very tightly) perform a repertoire of miniature performances.  These will begin as very elementary things, things which teach those playing to play udderbot.  These will have theatrical, whole-body and/or whole-group aspects;  constitute a choreographed counter-friend to the marching band.

The group to be able to perform in the guise of “marching band”, as well “concert choir”, and other guises will be added as wanted.  I will seed the group as organizer and teacher, and gradually will make the whole thing as susceptible to collaboration as we can bear.  The members of the group, as well as anyone else interested (unconstrained by physical geography), take up the invitation to compose pieces for the group to perform, with an emphasis on little bits, miniatures, tiny things to try out and repeat with ease and variety.

Not to think of composing or performing in a way that allows anyone to treat it as an exclusive or elitist activity.  (This may require some ontological adjustment!)

This project informed by an assignment by Herbert Brün:
The Art of Instantaneous Remembering.  Try and project an event you care for, as it happens to you, into an imagined past, so that you can simultaneously experience the event ‘now’ and ‘once upon a time’.

You, if you are interested in affecting or being affected by the project, make a change to the Udderbot Wiki.

by Mark Enslin

Even if you don’t have health care, you have a health care system. And if your health care system is not providing health care for those who need it, or for you in the way you’d like, doesn’t that call for change of health care system? This question was the starting point for the 4th Health Care System Design Intensive offered by Susan Parenti, the Gesundheit! Institute and the School for Designing a Society, and held at the site of Gesundheit’s future model hospital in rural West Virginia August 6-11.

The instructors and guest presenters offered design tools and inspiring examples of humane practice — from Neil Shulman’s demystification for children, to PK Beville’s Second Wind wish fulfillment for elders, to Rebecca Trotzky-Sirr’s work with barrio clinics in Venezuela — plus reports and problem workshops from the participants themselves. Design groups gathered and elicited specific desires from each and fostered deep discussions, connections and friendships to be continued. Ideas were sparked and problems clarified, with frequent doses of hugs and lots ideas about how to change the system.

by Ostrananie and the Xatets

How can a human describe a three-week period of indescribable stuff being tried all the time and the weird results of that? At the Summer School for Designing a Society…

We cleaned the bathrooms with hydrogen peroxide and vinegar. Rob said “vaffunculo” all the time. People skinny-dipped. Danielle talked with a shaky voice about escaping city council. Elizabeth shaved her head in stages. Terra sang an Appalachian folk song for a circle of people holding hands.

Kwami claimed the basement as his lair. He held court there in the evening to show things. During the day, we made a vibeosphere. That means we made paintings almost everyday.

Bobbi learned about hearts being vaginas.

Ginevra, Patrizia, and Cristina continued to formulate their “Educare al Desiderio” project which returns this November to Pruno, Italy. They are using our School proposal which has now been translated by Cristina. Ginevra introduced us to the idea of “schifo clown”.

Change of State presented their performance projects at the 100-year-old Opera House in Marlington, West Virginia which seemed kind of like a ghost town in some parts.

Dario Solina and Kwami K. Kwami have decided to start a magazine to document the projects started by “alumni” of the school. “Ideas Mazagine.” Hopefully that works out — many of the crazy ideas from this School go unrecorded and that is a shame.

Ash says she is starting a clown club when she gets back to college. Almah describes herself as a hummingbird in human drag. She is also an alchemist. Maria Olga is spending a month in California working for a new non-profit that helps Guatemalans living in limbo in the U.S., then she is headed to Guatemala City to start a Psychology practice in the evenings from her living room. Christine is going back to Germany - she and her brother and a few friends are going to build a house and live in it together. Samara wants to start her own community. Pissed off that on the first Saturday during the school there was no weekend outing planned, she was “so bored that she spent all day making cardboard animals”.

We ate too many carbohydrates and not enough protein. Susan Parenti told me to get over my parents and take on corporate America. I told her I would keep it in mind. After the fact I did think about it. It is good advice and I’m sure I needed to hear it, but no one ever gets over their parents. Not really. I told Mark Enslin and he said had I asked her if she was over hers.

The best talent show was Betsy. She was interesting and self-conscious. I held her face during the Love Fest that Patch Adams conducted and told her that I loved her. I meant it. She kept turning her eyes away and I kept getting her to look back at me. She cried.

by elizaBeth Simpson

Larry Richards refers to Cybernetics as “a way of thinking about ways of thinking, of which it is one”. During May 11-14, the 2008 American Society for Cybernetics Conference was hosted in Urbana, Illinois. The theme was ‘Our Cybernetics’:

The conference was designed to nest the presentations of individuals in a social context as an offer for participants to make themselves a relevant factor in each others experience. A group reflection period was offered after each session, participants were invited to to create an Exquisite Corpse of questions (called Socrates Cybernetics), to diagram the conference as it was happening, and to note questions and observations towards each presentation and post them in a Metaroom; a space formally dedicated to the ‘about-ness’ of the conference. To encompass a greater range of media, a gorgeous performance was crafted to host compositions inspired by or constructed through cybernetics. On May 12, in conjunction with the Understanding Complex Systems conference, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Biological Computer Laboratory which lived in Urbana.

In this way, roughly 40 people of gently varying backgrounds wove language around each other, often in recursive loops that led observation to self-observation to social observation and back again. For more information on cybernetics, including the 2008 conference program: www.asc-cybernetics.org

By Anna Hochhalter

The As If Ensemble of Urbana (AIEoU) was started by School for Designing a Society students and teachers in Fall 2007.

In the AIEOU we play Klezmer/Balkan/a Capella/circular/undescribed works. You might find us playing several of the following instruments: xaphoon, bassoon, banjo,
baritone, bass, oud, udderbot, clarinet, tenor uke, tenor sax, tenor voice, accordion, ascalatos, alto, soprano, guitar, kazoo, violin, washboard, whistle, and flippers.

Performing at City Council meeting doorsteps, House Concerts, Fundraisers, and even singing in a bike parade during the Boneyard Arts Festival, our ensemble supports its members’ desire to challenge and engage their attention to sound, audiences, public spaces, and society. We encourage each other to compose, to revive old compositions in new forms, to refine our techniques with others’ compositions, and to experiment. Why is our ensemble “As If”? We look for new possibilities and systems.

By Kyra Shaughnessy

Sprouting from a shared desire to increase our freedom from the behemoth of industrial agriculture, a group of recent SDaS students and other members of the Urbana-Champaign community have been meeting weekly to share seeds and knowledge about the many aspects and looks of gardening. While our motivations are varied, the problem of resource exploitation, misery and waste maintained by the current system of mass food production is a uniting factor.

Winter sessions consisted mainly of theory-shares: people would offer theoretical materials to the group which they had found of use or interest to them, either through presentations or sharing of literature. We also held seed swaps and “plotted” designs. Now that spring has sprung, workdays are being held at multiple sites around town. One of our applied criteria in transforming these sites has been that of working with the constraints (rendered benefits) of each location, as opposed to against them, using permaculture and biointensive methods.

For example, at La Casa Colectiva, a co-op and food producing garden site in Urbana, there has been particular emphasis on: the transplanting and nurturing of already present perennials such as fruit and nut trees and root plants ranging from horseradish to asparagus and chives; the use and rerouting of water from the prolific basement sump-pump; creating paths according to the habits of frequent users; the creation of gathering areas, including a fire pit nestled near the center of the garden; the integration of three precocious chickens into the system as a whole. Both chickens and fire pit are an uncommon sight in the otherwise suburban surrounding neighborhood, not to mention the presence of a dozen or so young people dedicating time and energy to producing their own food! The chickens also provide valuable help in turning the compost pile and supply a daily batch of eggs for household use.

by Jacob Barton

On Leap Day 2008, recent SDaS students presented a House Concert in the living room of La Casa Grande Colectiva, a co-op house in historic East Urbana. The offerings were variegated: a science fiction therapy scene, an anecdote about drummage, an Italian folk story hastily illustrated by audience volunteers. A Fox News clip blew itself out of proportion and into the frame of a folding chair. A lecture anticipated and dismissed its own dismissals by way of an audience conspiracy. Wizards made way for metaclowns.

Songs were sung: a two-centuries-old round all about death, a four-month-old false-statement round calling for multilingualism, anthems of apathy and quantitative research, and a microtonal protest song accompanied by fretless guitar and udderbot (see photo). Etudes on electric kalimba and udderbot further illustrated microtonality (the use of alternatives to “12 tone equal temperament,” the tuning system inhabited by 99.999% of Western music)

“Fox News on Display” by K. Qilo Matzen

Video by Kord Russell.

Video -WMV | Video -QT

“Fox News on Display” responds to a Feb. 25 Fox News video interview discrediting Ralph Nader and his decision to join the 2008 U.S. Presidential Campaign.

After today’s meeting, we are moving forward to break ground on our new building at the Gesundheit Institute in September 2008. Final drawings are now being drafted by the architect Dave Sellers, AIA, for the Teaching Center at the Gesundheit Institute in where the School for Designing a Society offers its summer program. Plans will include bed space for 30 students and staff, classrooms, performance/rehearsal space, conversation nooks, kitchen and dining room, library and office space. The teaching center will then be linked via bridge to an adjacent residence building with more private lodging, Patch Adams’ famous library, and a museum. A full day was spent with organizers from the School for Designing a Society and the Gesundheit Institute generating input in advance of final plans being drafted.

Time was spent inventing connections and ideas for the relationships between the parts, for the buildings and the community that will live there. For instance, when conceptualizing the bedroom space: rather than a straight “dorm” situation, discussion focused on different bedroom zones — a late-night “owl den”, a good wheelchair room, a lover’s parlor, a suite with alcoves, the loner’s room, etc. The task wasn’t to determine the use of space so much as to generate potential for multiplicity of uses. Dave will now produce architectural drawings to conserve that potential, while adding curvy walls and towers and whatnot. There’s even plans for a little beach outside a giant portrait window.

Patch Adams and Dave Sellers have been working on architectural drawings and building projects for a full-scale hospital at the Gesundheit Institute since 1980. Danielle Chynoweth and Susan Parenti deserve credit for recent steps taken to build the teaching center and residency — see their Prospectus (9MB .pdf) for detailed description of the current phase Gesundheit building projects.