 I think of myself as a painter, which probably seems antithetical to everything that's been talked about today. But it is through this traditionally lone medium that I came to collaboration. My paintings now move, and they make sound. And it is because over time, I became interested in paint, itself, its physicality, and making concrete paintings late in music to make tangible touch through the audible, to bring painting into the 21st century into the realm of timeless sound. And increasingly, this work led me to have to learn how to machine, program, and work with collaborators. With engineers, for instance, I was an artist and resident at MIT in Mechanical Engineering. A number of composers, sound artists, in some cases, with artists around the world. I also founded and run Transculture Exchange, which probably some of you may know, as the organization that puts together assemblies, the partings of this topic of this panel, an assembly of law, of an assembly or conference of artists from around the world. It's an international conference on opportunities in the arts that is to let artists know about all the opportunities and ways that they can work with people around the world. So I'm very happy to moderate this panel on assemblies to hear more about other people working in a similar vein. In this case, Daniel Callahan from Emerson, Friedan Bard from MassArt, Hannel Engelsen from... Engelsen? Is that right? Engelsen? Yep, Engelsen from Emerson and Julia Kwan from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, who use the art to create shared experiences and relationships through and involving dialogue, conflict, legacy, and participation. Artists who engage and create communities and varying degrees in their own practice. The first I'd like to introduce you to my co-moderator, the artist, and the real brains behind putting together this panel and the co-curator of this amazing conference, Anto Estudino. Yeah, thanks. Hi. Yeah. Hey. You made it. Awesome. So Mary Sherman and I got together and brainstormed a couple of questions for the panelists. But she encouraged me to talk about why this panel and why I wanted to be part of this panel. So I wrote something. When putting together the different panels about collaboration, community was one of those words that came to my mind almost immediately. Personally, I feel community is a word that has been overused, and I personally don't like it. Some take it, some stay away from it, similar to feminism. Sometimes I love that word and I consider myself feminism, but it also is a problematic word. And this is why we decided to call it assemblies of collaboration, kind of like, all right, so that's not called a community, but assemblies. And assembly is the starting point of our reunion to then create a community. So then assembly as a way to start a community, to gather first and then create a community. I've always been someone who seeks connections with others, especially in the world of performance and filmmaking, which is my performance as my background in filmmaking is what I'm doing now as a grad student at Emerson. The seeking of a community is a very anthropological quest. Here's why. When I first came to Boston, I sought a community in which others share my artistic interests in making and appreciating films. I was looking to connect with those who share my skills. First, I looked for similar skills, but something was lacking, so I continued my search for community. This time looking for those who looked like me, spoke like me, and were considering my culture background, even though as I became a Hispanic here and the United States when I got here from Chile, I realized, well, this is not actually my culture, it's totally different. But anyway, I took it and I started to explore it. And here it was, connecting through skills and ethnicity, and I realized that community was also about shared experiences. When you share a similar life experience with someone like a family member or a friend or another coworker, another artist you're working with. And ultimately about struggle, and then something that Laura talked about earlier, one of the panelists in the second panel, she said empathy. I thought that was a really good word to put it. I became part of a filmmaker's community that's currently struggling, and it's empathic of this issue, which is that disappearance of film, and film labs, and film stocks. And we gather in this group in order to keep that alive. This is where I am so far in my search. I realize community and collaboration is an ever-evolving quest. This is why we wanted to put this panel together to be able to have this conversation, a conversation I was having with myself and I wanted to know what others had to say on this matter. Where do you start when you work with others and what is the motivation to include others in your artistic process? I leave you now with our first panelist, Julia Kwan from the museum school. Thank you. Thank you for having me. My name is Julia Kwan, and I'm currently a second year MFA student at the School of the Museum of Finance Boston. My upcoming thesis exhibition will feature colorful pattern paintings, sculptures based on Korean textiles. I not only convey my experience of being objectified and judged superficially, but also expose and undercut the very preconceptions people may have based on my gender and ethnicity. But today I'll be presenting another project that I've been working on alongside with my thesis project. I'll be presenting my collaborative drawing project titled Conversational Drawings. Conversational Drawings explores collaboration, personal relationship, building as subjects. I visit SMFA graduate peer studios to draw each other on a seven inch by seven inch paper with black ball pen while having a conversation over some tea and snacks. Today I'll be showing photographs of the drawings as well as my friend's studios which were where the project took place. The project was inspired by my desire to collaborate with others and get to know artists within my SMFA graduate community more closely. I've enjoyed my experience within the graduate program but felt that many of my peers and I were busy with our own works and schedules so I wanted to create a space where I could connect with my friends both personally and creatively. I wanted the project to be small, simple and easy so that the collaborators didn't feel like they needed to have any special skill sets or make big time commitments. Small scale pen drawings also appealed to me because I hoped to be able to do the project with not only other artists but others who aren't necessarily artists. The project is about enjoying the company and the many everyday and deep conversations shared. The drawings are not meant to be the purpose of the project. They capture the moment shared in a specific way but they will be far from the actual moment. Drawing becomes a good creative justification to meet and hang out with my peers. The structure of the project is simple and open ended. It allows refreshing, personal and meaningful conversations to happen organically. One set of conversational drawings usually takes about an hour or so but I've also had conversations continue on for about four to five hours. I usually don't schedule something else close to the end of the sessions and follow the lead of my collaborator when it comes to the length or topics of the conversation. I've had people ask if I have a set of topics or questions I prepare to talk about especially in relation to my thesis project but I consciously didn't make such goals or guidelines. I've bonded over conversations on issues regarding gender, ethnicity and societal expectations but that was because we wanted to talk about them and not because we were obligated to discuss and analyze shared concerns. I didn't want the project to become a prescribed collaboration or forced community. My friends and I usually talk about each other's personal history, family, friends, everyday routines, concerns, art, the classes that we're taking, thesis project, future plans and many other things. There is a great sense of intimacy that comes with drawing someone and especially drawing each other one-on-one as many people who have taken introductory drawing classes might have experienced. Also although I was making new friends in my new classes I was going to and I was going to many school events and friends openings. I realized that there were brilliant peers that I'll never get to meet and get to know if I was solely focused on my artistic priorities. So I've asked my friends to recommend someone within the program, preferably someone who I do not know as my next collaborator. I've had a great time catching up with friends and also make new friends through the project. After my friends would ask and connect me with another graduate peer I would introduce myself and my project by emailing or texting them and then we would schedule a time to meet at their studio. Sometimes due to the difference in schedules there's a lot of communication that happens over months just scheduling and rescheduling. The project provides not only the permission to stare and observe but also the opportunity to get close without feeling like it's forced or boundaries are being crossed. I get to meet someone for the first time, intimately gaze at each other, converse and give support when they're adjusting to their new environment and the MFA program. It's been an amazing way to become really good friends after just one meeting. I've had a first meeting drawing session that went on for four to five hours and it was during the beginning of the school year in October. She told me that she hasn't had the opportunity to talk to someone for that long since she moved to Boston. I've had another friend tell me during a drawing session that she wanted to do the project for a long time because it's been talked about amongst peers and it was the secret project that you had to be referred to by another student. It was never really a secret but it was kind of nice to see that this was being talked about and it was creating dialogue. I've also had really quiet conversational drawing sessions where conversation mainly happened before and after the drawing. I enjoy them as much as the talkative sessions because I enjoy the friends' extreme focus and their silent, intense presence. With a comfortable silence, the act of observing and drawing can become a calm and meditative process, a nice break from everything else. To me, the project is about multiple things such as going back to the basics. I've been mainly making paintings and sculptures and using drawing as a way to make quick visual notes after conceptualizing. This project is about going back to the act of observational drawing, really looking closely and possibly capturing a glimpse of the moment shared by two people. It's a surprisingly terrifying and humbling experience. I jump into my line drawings by starting at one point of the face and then move to the next element. I study the topology of the face and measure the distance in relation to the distance I already have on my paper. I feel clumsy yet motivated to find a way to capture a side of this person sitting in front of me. I am hesitant to draw with strong marks from the start because I feel like I'm stumbling, figuring out how to draw and correcting myself the whole time I'm drawing. There's often a mutual crisis of feeling like you're learning how to draw all over again. So I reassure my collaborators that the process and the conversations are more important rather than the actual drawings. There's a sense of intimacy, immediacy and spontaneity that comes with drawing with pen. There is also an imperfect rawness that comes from drawing while talking. Sometimes the collaborator is deeply focused on the drawing and his face falls and changes angles multiple times. Sometimes the collaborator puts on glasses in the middle of the session. Sometimes the collaborator draws really fast and I also speed up my drawing to keep up with the pace. Whatever they may be, I adapt to the changes and compile the different perspectives into one drawing. The project forces me to get over the fear and the need to perfectly capture someone's likeness or to capture them in a flattering light. Some collaborators have a hard time multitasking. One moment there's more drawing than talking and another moment there's more talking than drawing. Good, passionate conversations often momentarily stop the drawing process altogether. The basic rule to use the provided black ball pen and one side of the seven inch by seven inch paper is sometimes broken. I've had friends who prefer to use fancier pens that make smoother lines and a friend who couldn't work with the mistakes made on paper so she apologized and took out and used the whiteout. Friends who didn't like their drawings drew on another one on the back and friends who draw really fast and took out their own, they took out their own paper and drew four drawings in total. I visit my peer studio with tea and snack not only because I want to get to know them and their art practice but also because it's a way to thank them for their time and drawings. I like to provide any support or helpful feedback if they are needed. The mutual practice of generosity and sharing are part of the project. Conversational drawings has become my favorite social media because it allows me to actually meet and talk to my friends friends rather than not getting to know them or just having mutual friends. The project consists of not only the conversation between two people or the two drawings but also the conversations amongst the different set of drawings and more importantly the collaboration and interaction that happens amongst participants and within the community. I love photographing the drawings along with my friend studio where the drawings happen because it's a great way to introduce their work and recognize them as collaborators of the project. The meeting of the drawing is in the process and the act of meeting and sharing. The drawings become a means to converse, connect, and collaborate. There are no video of the drawing process or recording of the conversations because the recordings not only would feel like but essentially fall short of representing the actual moment but also would affect the conversation and interactions themselves. I wanted to create a space that feels okay to talk about anything without feeling the need to self-censor because of the presence of a recorder or camera. The project takes human relations and interactions as materials and objectives. The simple open-ended structure allows multiple interpretations and reactions. I draw in a certain way as an attempt to really study my friend's faces and hone my drawing skills but I'm always presently surprised by the diverse ways I am depicted in other's drawings. The project questions the concept of the art object and authorship because the drawings are not an end product but rather an evidence and glimpse into the fleeting intimate moments and honest exchanges shared by two people as well as the web of connections within the community. To me, conversational drawings is an ongoing project that I would like to continue on throughout my art practice. Ultimately, I hope that the project resonates with and is accessible not only to the SMFA graduate or art community but also to the broader public. You can follow the project by visiting my website or following the hashtag conversational drawings on Instagram. Please feel free to let me know if you'd like to participate and collaborate it through this project and or feel free to start your drawing collection with your friends. Yeah. I hope, that's fine. Thank you. My name is Daniel Callahan. I titled myself a trans media artist and I'll explain sort of what that means but I wanted to take the first couple seconds of my presence or before my presentation to ask you all to humor me in an activity, a group activity. So I would like for you to look at the person sitting next to you. If there's someone there, if there's not someone there or if they're far away, I'd ask you to go to that person and sit next to them so we can get groups of two people. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. All of this will be explained, I promise. Okay, great. So this activity really works well and I'm able to do it very quickly if we keep the talking to a bare minimum. So what I'd like to do is for the next 30 seconds and I have a timer. I'm not gonna do it any longer than that. I would like you to look at this person again without saying anything but just to look without any judgment or any thought for the next 30 seconds. You're off the hook. Thank you very much for doing that. So you might ask yourself, what are we looking for? And that if there's a title for my presentation it would be that. Again, my name is Daniel Callahan. I am a second year student here at Emerson in the VMA department. And again, I consider myself a trans media artist and what does that mean? Well, what it means to me is that the mediums that I use are not as important as the experience that I am trying to convey with my art. And my idea for why I use art is to create an experience either for myself or others or for all of us. And so Melvin Van Peeples said it best. He said the medium does not dictate the message, the need dictates the medium. And I really appreciated that and hold that dear. So if someone were to ask me, okay, fine, you're a transmitter artist, what do you actually do? Or what's the medium that you use? I would have to say that the medium I use is the human being. And I mean that on a literal and I guess metaphysical way. My canvas is the human face. The human face is a really incredible part of our body. It's comprised of over 43 individual muscles that can create countless amounts of expressions. It's the sort of media center of our bodies. It's where our eyes and our ears and our nose and our mouth and our brain is located, which makes it an extremely important part of our bodies. It's also dynamic. It's always changing depending on the situation, depending on who we're interacting with, depending on what we're feeling. It's always changing and changing to that different state. So it's an incredible canvas to use. And what I do is I use this canvas to create what I call masks. But I spell them a little differently because I wanted to get away from the concept of what we think of when we think of a mask. So when we think of a mask, we usually think of something that we hide behind or something that covers our face. So for instance, the anonymous mask is a great example. It's a way for us to assume the identity of something or to hide our own identity. And I think it's very interesting and it can, masks can be used in a very amazing ways and they're amazing things and very powerful things. But what ends up happening is when you hide your identity and you're able to hide who you are, you limit the amount of, you allow for things to happen where you can do things without any recourse because your identity is not attached to the actions you do. So what often happens with masks is they allow people to do things and act out in ways in which they would never do normally and sort of freeze them from any responsibility for their actions. And this way masks can become very harmful. But what I wanted to do is I wanted to use a mask not to conceal who someone is but to reveal something about that person. And I use paint. I paint directly onto the face. And in this way it removes the artifice of a mask and simply reveals the humanity in a new way. So to define what a mask is, it's a marking of the face with paint used to reveal one's inner essence or a state of being. I also consider it a ritual. And rituals are something that I'll talk about as well. They're very important to my work and something I'm very interested in. And I have three core concepts that have sort of evolved from this masking process. And that is identity, communion and change. I also don't like the word community at all. So I use the word communion. So what a mask essentially is, or at least the ones that I create, they're almost meta-portraitures in that you're painting a portrait of somebody but you're actually painting on the portrait that you're painting. So if we see here, this gentleman is painting a portrait of someone and it's really three steps removed from the original person. Someone painted a portrait of a person and he's painting a portrait of that portrait. And then this picture itself is a portrait of him painting a portrait of a portrait. So what I like about masking is that it removes that distance and you are actually creating the artwork on the person who you are painting a portrait of. Also, sorry, also with the mask, art is no longer simply an object that one can look at but is a living conscious sentient being who can look back. And the gaze that is usually associated with looking at art is in some ways democratized and also personalized. So where is this stuff coming from? Well, I did this project where every day for a month I would create one of these masks on my own face and I would then upload the little video vignettes and little writings that I did alongside that to a website called Month of the Mask fittingly. And that was really like a watershed moment for me in terms of seeing art not only as something that one does as a profession or as a craft or even as a lifestyle but as a way for someone to understand and find out about themselves and their relations to the world around them. I had a profound learning experience from it. I learned a lot about myself and about I was able to deal with a lot of issues that I was dealing with at the time. So it became a very therapeutic way for me to address the issues in my life which proved to be extremely powerful and important to me. So I knew from that point on I was like, okay, this is something that I really need to start exploring. But the history of this art form dates back to, oh sorry, this is more of the website, but it dates back to something I did in California when I was doing music out in California in the Bay Area. We had this annual ball that we throw and we didn't want to do the whole Victorian thing of people coming with masks. So we decided that we would paint the masks on people's faces. And if you're not familiar with the Bay Area, it's a very diverse area, but a lot of the people there don't really hang out together that much. So it's a very diverse area, but there's not a lot of cross-cultural exchange. But this masquerade ball was a way for us to actually create that cross-cultural exchange. So what ended up happening is we had over 200 people come to these balls and we had over seven different ethnicities. We had people from age three to 65, so it was cross-generational. And it was this incredible melting pot of cultural appreciation because everyone came with their own tradition. And it was one of the most amazing moments that I had experienced. And I was part of a musical group at the time. And so we did our first performance at this masquerade ball. So we performed with our faces painted. And it was such a powerful experience that we were like, okay, from here on out, we're just gonna do this every time we perform. And so that sort of became our calling card for the group I was in, Fear and Fancy. We would mask before every performance. And we would change the mask every time. We never did the same mask twice. So when I came back home, I was sort of missing this culture and I started to do it as my own personal expression. But the story of masking goes even further back, very far back to really the human tradition of body art, which we started to research to find out what it was about this thing that we had found that was so amazing or that was having this amazing result. And we realized that this was something that really is practiced ubiquitously across the world. Everybody has their own tradition of body decoration, especially among indigenous peoples. So you have people from Kenya, from Ethiopia, from Niger, but you also have people from India, you also have people from China, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Brazil and Peru, Mesoamerica, North America, and they all have their own traditions of body decoration and they all involve the face as a focal point of that tradition. So I realized that I had something on my hands that was very powerful, very deep and very human and I wanted to continue to explore it. So I explored why they paint, why do they do this? And they do this for a lot of different reasons. Some of them are purely aesthetic and they use it as an art form. But for other cultures, it is related to passages of rites of passage and transitions from different points of life to others when you're literally becoming a new person and the mask is therefore or this body painting is therefore used for you to differentiate who you were from who you're becoming. And there's a lot of religious and ritual applications of this, this happens during marriages, this happens during war, this happens during adolescence is turning into adults. So it was this very powerful effect and I started to realize that that was actually why I painted as well. Again, I painted at a point in time when I was dealing with a lot of issues, personal issues and it was a way for me to move into the next phase of my life and to get through that rough period. It also allowed me to see myself in a totally radical different way. You can't imagine how much your face changes when you apply paint to the entire face. And often people would not recognize that it was me in some of these works that I would show until I told them. It also was a way for me to express what was happening within me in a way that was nonverbal in a way that was very organic and that was sort of immediate. And the ritual aspect of it again of the month of the mask project, I was doing this every day for a month where I'd wake up like around nine, I would sketch out ideas and then I would mask and then I would create these video vignettes and by the end of the day, I was done, but it was dark and I would go to sleep and I'd wake up and do it again. So it really became this sort of meditation and I almost felt like a monk after a month of doing it. But again, it was very powerful. So the project that I'm doing now is called Year of the Mask where I'm taking this art form and trying to bring it to other people and figuring out how I can include other people into this and how can this be a vehicle for other people's transformation. And the Year of the Mask project has me doing cross-disciplinary work with artists and activists and people from all different types of industries to come together to almost do converse through craft. So this is a work I did with a painter and she would meld some of her marking styles with what I was doing on the mask that I had painted on her face and I would use some of the marks that she was making in her painting on the design of my own mask and then we got a photographer to come in and to shoot the result. So I've also been using this as a way to, let me just check my time here. Okay, I also did this as a way to approach schools and younger adolescents because I realized that this was a very important ritual in adolescent growth and maturity. And so I started to do workshops in different schools and different youth programs, including the ICA, the Gardner, the Queens Museum, Boston Arts Academy and Milton Academy. And what I learned was through these workshops allowing these youth to create their own masks was a way for them not only to connect with their own stories but to validate their stories and to express them in new ways. And I also learned that the youth just jumped on this. They were so into it and ready to do this from the get, which was really incredible. And I think that really pays to the importance of this ritual and to their need for it. I also have started to use this as a platform for telling stories about people in my communities. This piece, Gloria Rising, is about the pastor of a church who went through sexual abuse as a child. And she, through the process of me masking her, she told me her story and I used it to create a film as a basis of a film. Another woman who I had a pleasure of masking is Isara Mendes, who is a peace activist in the Dorchester area. And she had several of her kids killed by gun violence and she has really started a mission to bring peace back to their community. And I was able to use the masking platform as a way for her to tell her story. So when I sit down and talk to somebody, when I mask someone, it involves this really deep conversation that usually lasts for the entire day where we're just talking about their stories, who they are or where they are in life. And there's not a direct one-to-one correlation between the designs that I create and then paint on them to their stories, but it's heavily influenced by the encounter that I have with this person. So every mask is extremely unique and based on that individual, not only on the individual features of that person's face, but on their story as well. And there's an interesting dynamic, power dynamic, because this person is giving their face to me, to yous, and it's a trust-building experiment. And so far, I haven't ruined that. I hope never to. And I have started showing this work in galleries, in my community as well, like the Roxbury Community College Resnikov Gallery. I did a show called Communion where I was showing these newer pieces that I have been doing. I've also been doing family members. It's become more and more personal this project. On the right-hand side is my grandmother, who recently passed, but I was able to mask her before she made that transition, which was powerful. And then to the left is my father, and below is Gloria, and at the top is a good friend of mine. So it's been a way for me to reconnect with my family, to bridge new connections with people I'm not so familiar with, and with ways to engage people from all different ages, ethnicities, genders, and locations. So in closing, the mask effect, what does it do? It allows one to tell their own story. It allows them to transform. It is an art and ritual that allows for therapy. It's a new way of seeing yourself and others, and it's a celebration of what makes us different, but also what makes us the same, and what makes us individual, and what makes us a community. And that, I believe, is what we are looking for. Thank you. I'm freedom-beared. Hi, everyone. I'm freedom-beared. I'm finishing up my MFA in the Low Residency Program at MassArt. Thank you, Anto and Kim, for this opportunity, and for all the Emerson folks. It's a wonderful event. So I'm gonna tell you about Hopsketch. It's a piece I made in collaboration with my friend, Joe White. He's a Boston-based sculptor. We made it last summer. And before I start showing you the images from it, I'll just read you a quote. This is from Tom Finkel-Pearl's book called What We Made, Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation. It's published in 2013. He has an interview with Ernesto Pujol, who's an artist who makes participatory works. And Pujol says, public collaborations are about reinserting citizenship into art-making. They reintegrate art into society as cultural expression rather than as strictly personal gesture. And you've already seen that in some of the work you've seen here, and you'll see that in this piece as well. So this piece was made at a place called the Launan D, which is a rectangular piece of land right next to the Boston Convention Center in the Seaport District of Boston. To the southwest of that area is Southie, a working-class neighborhood. And to the northeast of it is the harbor and the Seaport District, which are upscale. So it's in this kind of transition zone. Here's a closer-up view. You can see it says the Launan D. Two years ago, this piece of land, it's about a block long and about a third of a block wide, was just a patch of gravel and dirt. And next to it, there's an upscale hotel and across the street luxury condos are being built. So the event that was produced that day was called Play Day at the Launan D. The Laun was turned into a sort of experimental art space with some grass and trees, and then over the summer, different exhibitions and events were brought in. So I was brought in for Play Day on July 19th, and this was the layout of Play Day, and many other artists were participating. And all the way over on the right, there's a strip of black top where the producers, Chris Wangro and Emily Hockridge, wanted something like a hopscotch and or chalk art and tape art piece. And so we got the call 12 days ahead, but that's okay, sometimes deadline makes you work inventively. So Joe and I got together and we had the idea to make an evolving hopscotch game where we would supply the players with instructions that would get them to build the game as it progressed. And we were thinking about how to represent these instructions and we thought we could have placards on the ground and then somehow those placards rose up as pyramids and then the pyramids tilted. So this was our initial sketch. And this was the cutout of the pyramid shape, and we turned this into a vector drawing. And then we cut coroplast, which is essentially plastic cardboard out using an automated router table. We learned that you can swap a knife blade into the bit of a router table and use it to cut out lightweight material. That was fun. We did this at the Artisans Asylum in Somerville, which is an amazing makerspace, 40,000 square feet. That's where Joe and I have our studio spaces and that's how we became friends, actually. This was a prototype pyramid. This is pyramid production. We had to crank them out. We made 24 of these pyramids and we had one instruction on each side. So we made 12 pyramids, two instructions per pyramid. And in my collaboration with Joe, this was our first collaboration. I had hired him in the past to do fabrication. So mostly it went really smoothly, but there was this moment where we had to make decisions about the text on the pyramids and the color of the paint. And I said something to him like, well, I'm kind of a steamroller, so you're gonna have to speak up for what you want. And then like an hour later, he said to me, you don't get to say that you're a steamroller. This is a collaboration. And it was so good that he said that. And I was like, well, yeah, you're totally right and I'm sorry. And then we had a conversation about it. So more pyramid production. So this was the actual day itself. This is my daughter. I sometimes invite my kids to participate on projects. It's always optional, but I offer incentives, usually in the form of sugar or money. And in this case, it was money. So she was getting the masking tape ready. This is my son. We seeded the space with some squares and shapes. This is Karina Dishoto. She's also a mass art alum. She is a painter and a professional sign painter and she did all the lettering of our signs, which was fantastic. It was also unbelievably hot that day. It was in the mid 90s and the asphalt was so hot that you couldn't put bare skin on it. And we had anticipated that because we had visited the space the week before and we had speed ordered towels and umbrellas because we wanted people to be safe and we wanted to create this welcoming space for them to participate. This was the signage from the event. It was funded by the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which was great because all the artists got paid and they had this gorgeous signage. Just prepping more shapes on the ground, more shapes. So here you can see on the pyramid, it says write words to make people move fast. So we had three kinds of prompts on the pyramids. We had prompts that got people to draw different things. We had prompts that got people to write instructions that would get people to do things. And we also had prompts about place because I didn't want it to just be a sort of, oh, let's all draw kind of a game. I wanted people to consider place, like what's my relationship to this place that I'm in right now? How did I get here? What was here before? What's below me? What's above me? So you'll see all that in the slides. This is Joe, also prepping this space. He's a mass art alum as well. And one of the instructions on the pyramids was cast a shadow and outline it. So we did a little bit of that early in the day. Another instruction was draw what's underground. And so this is when the public were allowed to enter the space. So someone here drew a pipe with kind of riveted together. And then another instruction was make people start dancing here. So somebody drew a hopscotch board. And in each square they drew a different body movement, jump, slide, skip, clap. And then this nice grandpa kindly complied and did those gestures. This guy, carefully. You could see people couldn't even sit down on the ground at this point during the day, but he very carefully made this little flag. And that was what he made. One of the signs had instructions in Spanish. One side said, dibuje de donde vienes. And the other side said deja tu marca aquí. That means draw where you come from and leave your mark here. This sign said draw an obstacle. So somebody very cheekily drew the pyramid. Yeah, so, I love that. This sign said change this drawing. So, and my daughter earlier in the day had drawn a cat and then this girl was modifying it. And that's her brother. And he was drawing a portrait of his dad. One of the signs said draw the person next to you. So he was doing that. And then the dad very bravely laid down the broiling hot pavement for this portrait. And then the dad posted this to Instagram. So the images from the event sort of percolated out that way. Cast a shadow and outline it. That was nice. Someone used the actual object itself. These pyramids, in my practice, sometimes I make sculptures that are participatory. And the sculpture becomes what's called a threshold object, which is an object that allows the user or the visitor to enter into the space and to engage with the space. And that term threshold object comes from Janet Murray, who's a professor at Georgia Tech. She teaches about interactive media. And she talks about a threshold object that can bring you into a virtual environment, but a threshold object can bring you into a physical environment also. So cast a shadow and outline it. Write something that makes people interact. So somebody wrote knock, knock. And then the rest of the knock, knock joke kind of unfurled the rest throughout the day. Draw what's high above you right now. Somebody drew the sky and they also drew the symbol for money, which was kind of heavy. Connect this place to another. So somebody drew a trail of purple dots and the dots ended up connecting to another part of the space. This woman drew this elaborate kind of high fashion mermaid and her friend was watching. Draw this bit of ground 200 years ago. Hint, title, marsh. This instruction and this hint came from Jane Marching, who is one of my professors at MassArt. And she does a lot of work around sustainability and environment. She's got a thing going called the Sustainability Incubator this semester at MassArt. Many wonderful events there if you're interested in environmental art. Draw this bit of ground 200 years ago. Again, somebody else interpreted that. Throughout the day I moved the pyramids around and Joe did also, so we just kept the space kind of changing and filling in the blanks. This guy had a vision. He drew these two lines and I was like, what is he gonna do? And then 20 minutes later, that's him again, he had drawn this whole beach. So he was just like, that's the place that he wanted to be. This guy drew the heat shining on buildings. This was a huge love letter, basically. Cast a shadow and outline it. The pyramid became a, it became a sundial, which was so awesome. This guy had a vision. He had an image in his head and he spent about 20 minutes making it. There he is working. His friends were standing around. He kept going and in the end that's what he made. And I learned from his girlfriend that he had made one of the Chalk Art Award in high school, so he was really sick. So people played hopscotch. This guy was drawing a corporate logo and it was very tender, like a young guy, like maybe his startup or his dream and his partner looked totally unimpressed. People modified drawings that other people had made. This is just a panoramic view of this space in use. Write words to make people move fast, run, run, run. Fill this area with color. This woman had something in mind. She worked very slowly and patiently. Her boyfriend looked on. He was a little drunk, just trying to be interested. But this was a phenomenon, like a person would enter this space of making and then their friends or partners would watch and that became part of the interaction. And she made this beautiful kind of 2D and 3D thing. So just how the pyramids looked in this space. Write something that makes people interact. When was the last time you gave a hug? And something shifted during the day and people started writing these kind of lovey things so then love kind of entered the piece as well and that was really unexpected and gratifying and I think maybe people picked up on that we were caring for them and that sentiment came out. Draw yourself drawing. Draw what's high above you right now. These three young women talked and drew and then their drawings and their conversation came closer together. This woman created a space with her body and then she and her baby drew inside that space so it was a space within the space. A mom watched her child draw. This was the drawing. Dots needed here. We had different levels of instruction for to help people if they didn't feel like they could draw. Dibuja de don de Viennes. This is the flag of Chicago. Another piece about place. This woman said I can't draw and then she saw an instruction that said tell people how to move and she wrote bailar salsa because she is a salsa instructor and then later on people complied. More drawing what's underground. That's the drawing that changed throughout the day and then it got this other cat above it kind of hovering, menacingly. Amazing. More conversations. More images of place. Hopscotch. Two mass art graduates made this combined chalk and tape piece. And then people wrote in other languages so they brought their connection to place in through language. A portrait out of tape, unfinished. Draw what's high above you, the blazing hot sun. Duluth, this is, turns out, is an amazing landmark bridge in Duluth, Minnesota. Beautifully rendered in tape. Lighthouse with rippling ocean waves. This is the South Vietnamese flag. I love Boston. And then one of the signs on the pyramid said draw the lawn on D. And nobody really had a concept of it in their mind so somebody was cheeky and drew that. More characters. Add an instruction here, be nice. And then someone drew the sit-go sign and Chris Wengro, the producer said, why did they draw the sit-go sign? I was like, oh, you're not from Boston. This is, might be the Tunisian flag, like the previous Tunisian flag, I'm not sure. And then, so, this is just to show towards the end of the day how all the images kind of accrued. And then finally, towards the very end of the day, somebody connected one place to another by actually drawing a road, which I thought was beautiful. And this is the last image. So we felt that it was a success because the rest of the lawn activities were kind of, you know, play activities, very physical. And we managed to create a contemplative space where people felt safe to engage in this creative activity. And this was the result at the end of a long day. So, that's it. Thank you. Excuse me. Hi, my name's Hannah Engelsen. I'm getting over a cold, so I apologize. My voice isn't at its best. I'm a documentary filmmaker and recent graduate of Emerson College. And I'm gonna present for you a portion of my thesis documentary. It's called Jonah Stands Up. And specifically, I'm gonna talk about the collaboration between myself and the subject of the documentary, Jonah. So Jonah was an artist, an activist, and a comedian in New Orleans. He was born with muscular dystrophy. And when he was about 19, he found out he had a serious heart complication called cardiomyopathy. So the documentary, in total, it's about 22 minutes. And it's about the legacy he left behind of comedy, visual arts, and his activism, disability activism specifically. The documentary combines his comedy as well as archival footage that he shot, observational footage that I shot, and animations based on his visual style that we began to make together, and then I ended up finishing on my own. So for this presentation, I'm mostly gonna focus on the animations and then also how I set up the use of his personal footage within my film. So before I get into it too much, I just wanna give you kind of an overview, the timeframe of the project. So I met Jonah in 2010 at a film meetup group in New Orleans. I sat next to him, and we were instructed to introduce ourselves to the people sitting next to us. He joked that he was making a documentary about himself and that I should help. I thought it was a joke in time, I kinda realized how serious it was. So I started kind of filming sporadically. I ended up moving away from New Orleans, but from about 2011 to 2013, 14, I visited the city every couple months and would film sporadically. In that time, we started making an animation. We didn't really know what it would be for, but we started making kind of cardboard set pieces for fun just to see how it would go. I'll get into that more later. By about the summer 2014, I decided I needed to start filming full time. So I had a Kickstarter campaign, a successful Kickstarter campaign, and I moved down to New Orleans to film full time and then to also work on the animation with Jonah full time. I was there from September to the following January. In that time, Jonah passed away in December 2014 to be specific from heart failure. After he died, I actually got his old hard drives from his family and started going through all his old footage and kind of realized that before he met me, he had been filming a lot of stuff on his own. And I kind of slowly started to realize like, oh, he is kind of making a documentary about himself or he was kind of making a documentary about himself before he had met me. So starting in about January 2015 to about a month or two ago, I worked with two editors to edit the film and also I completed the animations in Boston. So originally the documentary kind of started out as an artist's profile, but as time went on, it turned more into kind of a legacy piece, more of a piece about this person and who he was and what he represented. So I'm gonna show you a brief segment of the film and it contains an animation sequence that we worked on the most together, I would say. I think all the different things that I'm doing are related. It's taking things that are real and things that can be serious or difficult to deal with. Flipping them around so they seem fun or funny. I made a cut out of the Grim Reaper and I did that one because that's basically how it feels to like, let's follow me around. But it's more of like, I kind of want it to be there because it reminds or motivates me to do something. Don't do anything, but it will catch me, it will catch me.