15 Feb 2012

Provisions Research Residencies

About
Provisions Library, a non-profit instigator of arts and social change in Washington DC, is pleased to launch research residencies that investigate futures for creative civil society. The program will bring together four residents (artists, scholars, activists, and practitioners) for research-based projects that explore and extend social change themes. Participants will gain exposure to policies, practices, and politics while exploring transformative social imaginations and strategies. The rapidly changing urban and institutional landscape of Washington DC will serve as a platform, model, and resource to propose and prepare social futures.

Process
Call. Culture producers are invited to submit letters of interest through nominations and an open call. A national council will select program participants.

Orientation. The residency orientation will include a dinner with research advisors, visits throughout DC, and meetings that illuminate the residency topic.

Action. Participants will pursue research and action-based projects that explore the residency topic. The participants will be invited to work individually, collaboratively, or with any constellation of council members and DC partners. Research projects will inhabit whatever media or form participants deem necessary. Residency curators will create connections with DC-based individuals and institutions and locate sites to engage public communities.

Responsibilities. Participation responsibilities include:
1. one workshop at George Mason University,
2. one public lecture,
3. participation in a culminating event and
4. a contribution to public research. This contribution can take the form of critical or creative writings, photo documentation of a realized or imagined project, designs, drawings, 2-D works, and/or new media samples. Participants will work closely with the residency curator to realize their contribution.

Documentation. The Provisions documentary team will work with producers throughout the residency to collect video, sound, web and writings that explore and reveal the research process.

Objectives

1. introduce new models, methods, and perspectives to the field of arts and social change
2. foster collaborations, knowledge-sharing, and ideation through exchanges across disciplines
3. found relationships with policy think tanks, community service organizations and grassroots movements to expand understandings of the arts in relation to their initiatives
4. generate cultural vitality in DC to grow the city through creative placemaking practices
5. expand the potential for culture producers to serve as incisive and critical agents for social change

Resources
Provisions will provide participants comfortable, convivial, and easily accessible lodging in the DC area, travel funds, and a stipend of $2000 for each resident. Residents will enjoy access to George Mason University's studio facility, project facilitation, and opportunities to build DC networks. Residency curators will assist in project and research curation in public spaces and surrounding institutions.

Apply
Provisions invites letters of interest from artists, activists, scholars, writers, educators, and practitioners. To apply to the program, compose a one page letter for each research topic of interest that expresses your past works, future visions, research interests, and how you would benefit from program participation. All letters should be submitted with a resume/cv and samples of current work (website link or pdf). All letters of interest for the first round of projects must be received by March 15, 2012 at provisionslibrary@gmail.com. Selection will be announced April 1st. Link to Provisions Research Residency Call for Submissions

Research Topics 2012/ 2013

PARKS AND PASSAGES: recent ruins and public futures
June 21-July 2, 2012 (Berlin) & July 10 -July 20, 2012 (Washington DC)
This residency will investigate approaches to common space, public territory, urban environment, social architecture, and cultural development through grassroots re-construction efforts that mobilize everyday citizens as re-builders of a connected city and society. For the first ten days of the residency, Washington DC residents will participate in Kulturpark—a project temporarily re-activating an abandoned amusement park in East Berlin. Participants will then apply approaches and understandings gleaned from the Berlin landscape to extended research on The Dupont Underground, an abandoned street-car station beneath Dupont Circle currently being prospected as a site for cultural development. Suggested participants include artists, activists, civic policy practitioners, urban researchers, and documentarians. Priority is given to Washington DC-based culture producers for the Parks and Passages topic.

REPUBLIC: reviving popular politics
OCTOBER 11, 2012 – NOVEMBER 3, 2012
During the final month of the 2012 election cycle, this residency will investigate the values underpinning deliberative democracy, popular citizenship, public transparency, accountability, polling, and representation. Residents will participate in real-time projects and actions in Washington DC and on the web that animate and instigate issues surrounding the national election and democratic process. Residents are welcome to partner with movements and/or research systems that mobilize and govern our electorate. Suggested participants include artists, activists, democracy policy leaders, and research.

COPY RIGHTS: open orders of global information
JANUARY 24, 2013 – FEBRUARY 16, 2013
Copy Rights will investigate individual and collective authorship in the digital age, considering how reproductivity and replication enables free expression, empowers creative re-use, and mobilizes social justice actions. Exploring the structure and organization of mass digital communication systems, Copy Rights will examine debates around media policy and consider the power of shared intellectual property rights. Projects will research the implications of universal access, connectivity, privacy, regulation, absorption, and dissemination to imagine a vigorous virtual commons of popular information. Potential participants include attorneys, digital artists, entrepreneurs, web developers, media geographers, and media policy leaders.

THE CASE FOR SPACE: cosmic consciousness
APRIL 11, 2013 – MAY 4, 2013
The aspiration of outer space defines our relationship to other realms as a ethos, aesthetics, and ecology. This residency will consider the role that space programs play in cognitive and spiritual life, social consciousness, and political progress. How do the micro and macro cosmos regenerate the potential for space as a ground for identification, relationship, and reflection? How can space technologies, tools, and tactics help us explore plateaus of the possible? How does the diversity of cosmic physical orders help us imagine constellations for change here at home? Residents will research a range of space missions and objectives to discover how explorations of external worlds and the broader universe affect popular imagination and social action. Potential participants include artists, physicists, astronomers, space practitioners, light designers, photographers, scientists, astrologers, psychologists, and consciousness scholars.