Hi Lori.

Thanks once again for offering to do the OE website.

Below is all of the text for the site.

I think that the suggestion Max had of making it a wordpress blog is a great idea. It can just be very simple and straight forward with the conference mark at the top of the page (similar to how you do the headers on your blog)

I have a new GD on the project and she is getting me work to approve by Monday. I will pass along the image to you as soon as I receive it.

I am going to hold out announcing the conference and sending out the call until the website is up. The ideal date to have things up and running would be November 30th (HAPPY BIRTHDAY LORI I LOVE YOU!!!!) But I know you are dealing with many time constraints, so whenever you can manage is fine by me.

Attached here are bio photos you can use for Mark, Nils and Amy.

The web address is: www.openengagement.info

All of this is with Godaddy. Here is all of my login information:

/////////////////////////////////////////
Open Engagement is a three-day conference that is an initiative of the Portland State University Art and Social Practice concentration and co-sponsored by PNCA. Directed by Jen Delos Reyes and Harrell Fletcher and planned in conjunction with the Portland State University MFA Monday Night Lecture Series, this conference features three nationally and internationally renowned artists: Mark Dion, Amy Franceschini and Nils Norman. The conference will showcase work by Temporary Services, InCUBATE, and a new project by Mark Dion created in collaboration with the PSU Art and Social Practice concentration.

The artists involved in Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse, challenge our traditional ideas of what art is and does. These artist’s projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships, and tackle subject matter ranging from urban planning, alternative pedagogy, play, fiction, sustainability, political conflict and the social role of the artist.

Can socially engaged art do more harm than good? Are there ethical responsibilities for social art? Does socially engaged art have to do civic or public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability? As both urban planning and contemporary art imagine new worlds, how can art projects be seen as potential models for living?

This conference is an intensive, immersive, around the clock experience. Open Engagement is approached as a social art work in itself. Artists will create housing, food, transportation, exhibitions, partnerships, exhibitions, tours, special events and include of multiple audiences from their own interests and practices, building on the ideas explored throughout the conference.

Open Engagement a free conference that will happen May 15-17, 2010, in Portland, Oregon. Contributors are not asked to pay a registration fee and the public will not be charged to attend. Contributors to the event will be supported in the following ways: A variety of transportation will be provided that draws on Portland’s bike culture and takes advantage of its excellent public transportation. Contributors will be housed in Portland homes, paired with a host based on common interests. Several meals during the conference will be provided that emphasize slow food, community cooking and underground cafes. Other meals will highlight Portland’s food cart culture. Nightlifeand social activities will be integrated into local businesses, using local pubs and cafes as conference hubs. Open Engagement is a conference, an exhibition/performance venue, a mini-residency and workshops. Participants will partake in experiences that connect them with each other: artists, art institutions, audiences, and communities.

Open Engagement will happen May 14-17, 2010, in Portland, Oregon.

Call for Submissions:

You are invited to contribute to Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse by submitting your projects, performances, tours, presentations, or panel ideas. Other formats are also welcomed. You are encouraged to think of ways to connect peers and colleagues at this conference, connect and engage a greater community and work across disciplines.

All interested individuals are encouraged to submit proposals. This conference is not exclusive to artists.

Submission Requirements:

Part 1: Propose a project, paper, performance, discussion, intervention panel (or other format) that relates to the theme of the conference (500 word max).

Part 2: Write a short bio (100 words or less).

Part 3: Fill out the brief questionnaire and application form. We want to help you make interesting connections at this conference, and this will help us facilitate that.

Email your submission to openengagementsubmissions@gmail.com

DEADLINE:
January 15, 11:59pm  2010 (Pacific Standard Time)

Accepted contributors will be notified by December 7th, 2009 and will need to confirm their participation by January 4th, 2010.

Main Conference Presenters Bios:

Mark Dion

Mark Dion is an American artist who metamorphoses into an ecologist, biochemist, detective, and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments, and museum caches of the great historical naturalists-following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics. Dion crosses Darwin, Disney, and Hitchcock in work ranging from hundreds of photographic “specimens” documenting all the insect life in a single meter of meadow, to the meticulous gathering and labeling of the rubbish tossed out over hundreds of years from a sixteenth-century Italian castle. His research and magical collections are presented in installational still lifes, which combine taxidermic animals, lab equipment, and artifacts-like walk-through wunderkammers, life-sized cabinets of curiosity. The artist is creating a permanent garden in Britain, an orchard of fruits facing extinction planted in the form of a tree of life-a sculptural gene pool for the future.

Amy Franceschini

Amy Franceschini is an artist and designer living in San Francisco, CA. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. She creates websites, installations and public programs that provide platforms to collectively question or challenge this divide.  In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists and designers. Futurefarmers hosts an artist in residency that has hosted over 22 artists from 12 countries and forms the basis of a distributed network of artists who make up the collective. In 2004, she co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. Her individual and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally at the Zentrum Kunst Media in Karsruh Germany, Whitney Museum of Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. She has received numerous awards including the SFMOMA Seca Award, Artadia Award, Eureka Fellowship, Creative Capital and is recently the recipient of  a Graham Foundation and Art Matters grant. She received her BFA from San Francisco State University and her MFA from Stanford University. Amy is a professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco and a visiting faculty in the graduate program at the California College of the Arts.

www.futurefarmers.com

Nils Norman

Nils Norman is an artist living and working in London. His work address topics such as Utopia, urban gardening, alternative energy systems, city regeneration strategies, experimental city design and bohemia. He is developing an interdisciplinary pedagogical model called the Exploding School. From 2007 he has run the Exploding School as part of the School of Walls and Space at the Royal Danish Academies of the Visual Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark. The Department is led by Nils Norman.

www.dismalgarden.org/

Open Engagement is made possible through the support of Portland State University, PNCA, The Cyan PDX.