1. OE Life/Work Parallel Programming
Central to the OE programming, the projects and presentations submitted for the Life/Work Parallel Programming should be directly related to OE 2014’s focus on Life/Work. This theme examines how economic and social conditions connect to life values and philosophies and situate the everyday in relation to larger political and social issues including labor, economics, food production, ways of being, and education. This section will be programmed to cover the various dimensions of the overall theme and to provide for dynamic engagements. Projects, presentations, and panels are eligible for this category and are encouraged to demonstrate and explore the ethos of Life/Work. Panels are eligible for 90-minute time slots and presentations and talks for 15-30-or-60 minute time slots. 15, 30 and 60 minute talks may be scheduled in conjunction with other presentations in one session. Projects need not fit within these time parameters or may be ongoing throughout the conference. Projects should be sited on the Queens Museum campus.
2. Open Platform
Open Platform will be a forum running concurrently to the parallel programming. Hosted in an easily accessible dedicated presentation area in the Queens Museum galleries, the program will consist of a series of 10-minute presentations, allowing for presenters and audience alike to come and go easily, or engage with a number of presenters in a reasonably short period. Straightforward presentations with simple tech (projector, laptop, and speakers) needs are eligible for this category. Encouraged to be related to the main Life/Work theme, this category is not exclusive to only presentations dealing with these themes. Everyone applying to Life/Work is encouraged to also apply to Open Platform as well, if applicable.
3. Site-Specific Submissions
A. The Panorama of the City of New York
The Panorama was built by Robert Moses, perhaps one of the most controversial and influential urban planners in the history of New York City, as an attraction for the NYC Pavilion during the 1964 World’s Fair to celebrate the City’s municipal infrastructure. Now this 9,335 square-foot architectural model is part of the permanent collection of what is currently the Queens Museum. It includes every single building constructed before 1992 in all five boroughs – a total of 895,000 individual structures. In addition to acting as an introduction to urban planning for thousands of NYC school children each year, in recent times, the Museum has been offering the model as a place of artistic intervention and programming that directly addresses current and historical planning and development issues – from Damon Rich’s mapping of the foreclosure crisis as part of his Redlines Housing Crisis Learning Center to Greg Sholette’s 15 Islands for Robert Moses in which he installed models of different artists’ imagined islands that explore the sometimes contested and unjust dynamics of the city. As part of the Life/Work lens, we invite submissions for 30-or-60 minute sessions that address how artists and designers can, and are, imagining and intervening in the urban fabric of New York City in areas such as affordable housing, transportation, public space, resilient architectures and communities, economic development, cultural policy, food security, and civic engagement more generally. While presenters won’t be able to physically install/intervene on the model itself, they are encouraged to creatively use video projection and laser pointers to highlight specific geographic and architectural features of the city as part of their presentations. Submissions will be reviewed by a diverse panel of NYC-based urbanists.
B. The Relief Map of the New York City Watershed
For the 1939 World’s Fair, city agencies were invited to produce exhibits for the New York City Pavilion (now the Queens Museum) that shared “what the various branches of municipal government are doing to serve the citizens of today.” The Department of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity, (now the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP), created the Relief Map of the New York City Water Supply System, a 480 square-foot topographical map depicting NYC’s water systems, aqueducts, and reservoirs. The Queens Museum now permanently exhibits the relief map and develops educational programming around it related to sustainability and water systems in partnership with the DEP. In addition to its educational purpose, the Museum is looking to offer the relief map as a place of artistic intervention and programming that directly address issues including but not limited to urban systems, sustainability, the environment, and climate change. As part of the Life/Work thread, we invite submissions for 30-or-60 minute sessions that will address how artists and designers can promote sustainable systems and respond to the increasingly real and frightening impacts of climate change, particularly through the lens of access to clean water. While presenters won’t be able to physically install/intervene on the model itself, they are encouraged to creatively use video media and laser pointers to highlight specific geographic features of the relief map. The relief map itself is surrounded by ramps allowing visitors to mimic an aerial view of NYC’s watershed regions. A remote switch allows presenters to light up the different aqueducts that carry water to New York City. There is a large video monitor available that presenters can access and program. The exhibition contains reproductions of historical photos and technical drawings and photos of NYC’s watershed region. Submissions will be reviewed by a diverse panel of NYC-based urbanists, environmental activists, educators, artists, and designers.
C. Immigrant Movement International (IMI)
In 2011, Queens Museum and Creative Time collaborated with artist Tania Bruguera to launch a multi-year project whose mission is to help define the immigrant as a unique, new global citizen in a post-national world and to test the concept of arte útil or “useful art”, in which artists actively implement the merger of art into society’s urgent social, political, and scientific issues. Halfway into the project, the storefront headquarters of IMI on the main thoroughfare of Roosevelt Avenue in Corona, Queens now hosts a variety of free experimental educational workshops facilitated by both artists and community members that serve the needs of local immigrants every day of the week. These include learning English through performance art and developing a children’s orchestra based on the “El Sistema” model from Venezuela. It also acts as a think tank for visiting international artists, activists, and theorists interested in creating a more humane and dignified legal and economic reality for migrants in the future. We welcome proposals for presentations, performances, or workshops of 30-or-60 minutes or panel discussions of 90-minutes that address how “artivists” can play a role in securing the human rights of migrants that are so essential to how we all live and work in this globally inter-dependent world. As with all of the programing presented in the space, we encourage you to think about how your program will merge both practical and creative knowledge. The approximately 1000 square-foot multi-purpose space with movable tables and chairs can be configured in a myriad of ways for a maximum of 50 people, and allows for video projection, audio amplification, and use of whiteboard or flipchart paper as needed. Submissions will be reviewed by a panel that includes members of a newly formed steering committee of IMI users. Since the majority of IMI users are Spanish speakers, please keep in mind that all activities in the space require professional simultaneous interpretation using headset equipment.