Personal Trajectory
My thesis project is an amalgam of my formal interests in architectural representations, the social and psychological impact of built spaces, and my research about the history of socially engaged art. Since I started making work, I have persistently made models that act as metaphors for psychological interactions with space. Initially objects were very important, jewel-like and precious.  Because I was engaged with traditional craft medium and techniques, the contemporary craft movement influenced me.  This movement was brought on by several factors; early Post-Modern ideas about inclusion of marginalized makers and techniques into the art historical canon, the resurrection of traditional material and formats such as folk art, and by William Morris’s ideas regarding the connection between functional art objects and Socialist principles1. 
Academically, I was interested in the social impact of constructed space, how space can be molded to communicate power or control behavior with a particular interest in Benito Mussolini’s urban planning projects in Fascist Italy.  In my studio work, I became interested in responding both to real sites and to how they become metaphors for larger social issues.  I documented the gentrification of my Chicago neighborhood and made models of demolitions sites in Cleveland that reconstructed vanishing architecture.  I consider these models to be memorials to a site, subverting the traditional role of models as proposals for future buildings.  Likewise I have also mimicked and distorted other forms of architectural visualization such as blueprints, virtual models and project proposals.  These projects played with assumptions about the provisional nature of models and proposals, submitting to the audience to consider their viability even as they are absurd and fantastical.
In reflecting on the design and evolution of public spaces, I began to think about the inherent problems in the relationship between architecture, urban planning and the communities they impact.  How do these projects take into account the user, their needs and experiences?  I looked at how other artists and theoretical architects used proposals and differently than Architects.  The distinction that interests me the most is the relationship to the audience/client/user.  Projects such as Nils Norman’s proposal for tree house shelters for the homeless Tompkins Square Park Monument to Civil Disobedience (1997), Thomas Demand’s Office (1995), a photograph of a model of the ransacked government offices in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall, and Constant’s Situationist proposals for New Babylon from the late 1950s all work with architectural tropes.  However these artists used these tropes to obscure meaning even as they used formats that architects traditionally use for clear communication.  They invert this language to present resonating critiques of social issues, political events, and fantasies about future potential.

Nils Norman Tompkins Square Park Monument to Civil Disobedience, 1997.	Thomas Demand Office, 1995.	Constant New Babylon, mid 1950s to late 1960s.

Several artists whose work involves social strategies as well as objects also influence me. Charles Simonds’s Dwellings from the early 1970s are miniature architectural interventions that interacted with the communities on the Lower East Side in New York, creating myths and allowing the community to determine whether they would be destroyed or protected.  The FutureFarmers’s Lofoten Game of the Future (2004) uses game play to activate and collaborate with the community in Lofotposten, Norway on the design of a park.  Beginning in 1970, Mierle Laderman-Ukeles’s long-term residency with the New York Sanitation Department confronts perceptions of the value of labor and maintenance while actively benefiting the Sanitation workers by advocating improvement of their facilities. These artists are not only making subjective responses to public spaces, they are also engaging communities in direct ways.

Charles Simonds Dwellings, 1970-	FutureFarmers Lofoten Game of the Future, 2004.	Mierle Laderman-Ukeles Social Mirror, 1983.

Thus, I began looking for ways to work directly with people to generate work.  During a residency in Houston, Texas I interviewed four people displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.  I was surprised at the way the interviewees structured their experiences and I produced a variety of models or diagrams to communicate their stories. Likewise, in a group show about art in public spaces I worked directly with the curator and other artists in the show. My contribution consisted of making a distorted movie theater that showed the video work of the other artists.  The space mimicked rundown theaters in the rust belt and my intention was to reflect upon the importance of creating sites for cultural exchange. 
My principle investigation of these ideas was an architectural and social space project, Softbox.  Softbox was a completely malleable space where rooms on wheels and entire environments could be changed around. Focused on hosting as a central activity, Softbox was both a laboratory and a social space where programming took place in the form of short-term live/work residencies, exhibitions, screenings and performances.  Maintaining and running the space in conjunction with making my own studio work showed me that while I was interested in creating social platforms I also felt a strong tie to making objects and environments that generate encounters.

Research
I began to research social design in general and specifically Utopianism because of my interest in artists’ projects that use social engagement as their material. Utopias are comprehensive models, fantastic or actualized, that propose an alternative to prevailing system of social organization.  Utopia often becomes the blanket term2 for hubris and defunct idealism.  But the desire for Utopia is my primary interest, not concrete manifestations or failed examples.  A Utopia can be a model or intermediary object that we use to have dialogues about our current social problems.  This is why the literary Utopias of Plato and Thomas More remain dynamic and persist while examples of implemented Utopias are not only quickly forgotten, they can be tedious and inflexible at best and fascist at worst. Contemporary academic works dealing with the history of Utopianism often qualify the term; the Literary Utopia, the Blueprint Utopia, the Pragmatic Utopia, the Viable Utopia, the Transgressive Utopia.  This reflects not only a Post-Modern comfort with the pluralism of forms, but also a desire to distinguish desirable examples from early 20th Century dogmatic projects and their links to totalitarianism. 
The primary criticism of Utopias is that they do not last and are not sustainable.  They dissolve, die out or self-destruct. So how do contemporary examples of Utopian projects deal with this history, or challenge teleological readings?  They try to remain sustainable by recycling membership, as in the Twin Oaks commune in Virginia, or sidestep the problem by restricting the timeline and the scope of the project, as with the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. These new Utopias strive for openness and access, as opposed to exclusivity and obedience. There are many names for these projects (communes, collectives, co-houses, and intentional communities) but the groups that conceive of them always claim them as distinct from the status quo.  Although these projects are often proposed as an alternative, they do not necessarily promise a new code of living, or rely on the charismatic leadership or community obedience as was the case in examples from the late 19th Century of Oneida, New York and Shaker communities. 
Temporary Utopian projects are a familiar option for contemporary artists; the short-lived program, event or happening that presents an opportunity for discourse without requiring maintenance3. Often, the artists that create these projects are not only interested in socially engaged movements from art history, but they are also interested in political activists that use their skills and strategies in the service of larger social, political, and philanthropic projects.  In the case of the Yes Men, who orchestrate elaborate hoaxes by impersonating corporate spokesman to the media, the main concern is making an impact on a larger political context.  To do this they use time honored aesthetic strategies of spectacle and compelling fictions, as in the case of their fantasy New York Times from 2008.  Political affinities subject these artists to the same criticisms leveled at both their artist predecessors and political activists: how do the projects tangibly serve the communities or problems that they reference or represent?
By being critical of the potential social or political impact of a traditional art practice, artists involved in social practice challenge the role of artist as the maker of objects.  They do this by challenging the primacy of the object itself as analyzed by art historians and purchased by collectors.  However, these experiential or community based projects further confuse the artists’ roles by morphing them into community planners, arts administrators, event hosts, non profit foundations, and privatized agents of a incomprehensive welfare state4.  In the search for definition of the artist’s role, the conversation about materiality and objecthood returns. The expression and reception of the subjective vision is the Modernist ideal that places focus squarely on the object. Post-Modernism compels us to reconsider identity, context and parallel fields. The contemporary emphasis on collectivity and social engagement redefines the object as the attitudes and goals of the actors, the quasi-material residue or documentation of their actions, and the immeasurable impact on the audience.  This expands the Modernism/Postmodernism debate of  “Is the object something, or is it about something” to include a new consideration:  does it do something?
Another important aspect of new Utopianism is a challenge to patronizing and prescriptive attitudes that persist in top-down design.  In the context of architectural and urban space, I looked at the conflict between emergence as a model of how cities grow and mid-century modernization projects that alienated and segregated populations.  Jane Jacobs’s writings about the grass roots indicators of the health of a city set her up in opposition to Robert Moses and the institutional, hierarchical structures he represented.  Jacobs was not only interested in organizing principles of emergence as an abstraction, but in the ways that street level contacts in a neighborhood create and maintain stability5.  What makes the healthy neighborhoods safe, economically viable and vibrant are the accumulations of small encounters among its inhabitants and with visiting strangers6. 
The debate between emergence and top-down design manifests itself in socially engaged art in the debate of authorship.  In socially engaged art, the audience is often not merely an actor in a scripted scenario, but also actively creates the experience, as in Phil Collins’s video El mundo no escuchará, (2004) where he invites participants in Columbia to sing Karaoke to The Smiths’s album The World Won’t Listen.  Another less literal example is Michael Rakowitz’s project A History of Dates (2006), a storefront revival of his grandfather’s import business in which imported Iraqi dates served as metaphors for refugees of the Iraq war.  He identified the project as a cultural project as distinct from a business venture in order to explain the unprofitability (and thus unsustainability) to his collaborators in the production and import of the dates.  The meaning, and the viability, of the project were generated as much by the interactions among participants and their storytelling as by the artist’s initiative7.

Phil Collins El mundo no escuchará, 2004	Michael Rakowitz A History of Dates, 2006

New terms arise in art criticism to describe these projects; relational aesthetics, service aesthetics, intermediary objects, public interventions, social and dialogic practice.  Inevitably what we are best at artists, what strategies we have to contribute to the larger social context, is making compelling images, objects and experiences. These become parts of temporary, Aesthetic Utopias.  Aesthetic Utopias are a slice of time as well as a fantasy; they distill the present as well as project into the future.  By making Utopias temporary or delegating them as cultural projects, we dodge questions of sustainability and viability. The resulting projects both preserve a place for the primacy of a visual experience while satisfying the compulsion of artists to be of the world, connected and engaged. This is not meant to suggest that these projects are strictly ameliorative.  The projects can employ disruptive or antagonistic tactics, or act as an anarchist call to arms8.  They are a temporary exercise, often undocumented or undocumentable, that is restructured to include interference, participation, and co-authorship.

Project description
I approached 5 people to meet in a public space defined and chosen by them. We had conversations about their impressions about the definitions of public: their positive encounters, the aspects they felt are problematic, their anecdotes, their observations about how others use or define public spaces, and their comparisons between how public spaces function in New York versus other major cities. These meetings were structured more as conversations than interviews.  I actively participated in the observations as well as asking questions. I chose people who were not in my immediate social circle, but rather asked for recommendations from peers or approached people with whom I’d previously met once.  This was a strategy to mark the encounter as a pointed discussion, as well as a way for me to avoid pitfalls of assumptions and personal histories.  In addition, it gave me the opportunity to absorb into the project the intimate encounters that I enjoy and desire. 
I was not approaching the project with the mind of a social scientist to collect representative data or of a journalist looking for a representative subject to highlight a political context.  Nor was I working as like an architect or designer, analyzing or interpreting the problems that need to be solved or defining design criteria.  Rather, I hoped to highlight the importance of social encounters that are used to generate meaning and content in artwork.  Framing these encounters as an important part of the structure of the work communicates not only the social relevance of the subject matter but also how I as the artist am one participant in a larger dialog about access, definition, and use of public spaces.
Based on these conversations, I made five gallery pieces based on the metaphors and structures that came up in the interview.  These pieces use a variety of formats to communicate the experience of these sites including photographs, sculptural models, diagrammatic drawings and 3d animations.  The pieces also emphasize the importance of point of view.  The viewer must crouch, climb, crawl into or look up at the work to fully understand it visually.  The physical participation is not mandatory to “see” the work, but there is a visual award if the audience engages.
Ultimately, I hope to create the desire in the gallery viewer to participate in the project.  The 6th piece, a didactic map that tells the viewers about the project, doubles as a sign up sheet, literally inviting them to show me the spaces they feel exemplify the pleasures and problems of the public spaces.  At a bare minimum, I hope that the objects I have made in response to intimate 1-on-1 conversations will create more dialog and awareness of the role that public spaces play in our social experience outside of the gallery space.

Bibliography

Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Autonomedia Anti-copyright, 1991.

Bishop, Claire. “UK in the 1970s: Community Arts and APG,” CUNY Graduate Center, Oct. 28, 2008.                       

Bourriard, Nicolas  Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. France: Les Presses Du Réel, 1998.

Bradley, Will, and Charles Esche, eds. Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader. London: Tate Publishing, 2007.

Claeys, Gregory, and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds. The Utopia Reader. New York : New York University Press, c1999.

Coates, Stephen, and Alex Stetter, eds.  Impossible worlds.  Basel ; Boston : Birkhäuser, Publishers for Architecture, c2000.

Goodwin, Barbara, ed.  The Philosophy of Utopia.  London ; Portland, OR : F. Cass, 2001.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

Johnson, Steven. Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Madoff, Steven Henry. “Service Aesthetics.” Artforum Volume: 47 Issue: 1 (Sept. 1, 2008): 164-5.

Morris, William, “The Socialist Ideal” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader. London: Tate Publishing, 2007.

Rakowitz, Michael. “Across Histories Artist Talk: Michael Rakowitz,” EFA Project Space, New York City, NY, Nov. 20, 2008.

Rothstein, Edward.  Visions of Utopia.  New York : Oxford University Press, 2003.