Summer Sessions

Risk, Learning, and Creativity

July 8-12, 2012

Page Contents:

• About Haystack's 2012 Summer Conference
• 2012 Summer Conference Presenters and Workshop Leaders
• 2012 Summer Conference Schedule
• 2012 Summer Conference Registration and Accommodations
• 2012 Summer Conference Rates
• Cancellation Policy
• 2012 Summer Conference Application Form

Each year Haystack hosts a four-day Summer Conference between Sessions 3 and 4. The format of Haystack’s Summer Conference differs from that of many conferences—it is intimate in scale and allows for ample time for informal discussions with presenters. It also features a studio component, with hands-on workshops providing another way to explore the conference theme.

Risk is central to how we create and how we live. The chances we take, the mistakes we make, and the solutions we find shape how we look at the world—as learners, as teachers, and as makers. The conference will examine how we use risk and the role it plays in the creative process from scientific, educational, and artistic perspectives.

Conference presenters will each give a talk—either about a topic related to the conference theme or about their own work. These will be augmented by workshops, discussion groups, and group activities. A studio workshop component provides a hands-on way to explore the conference theme.

Conference attendees register for these studio based activities and discussion groups through daily sign-ups, which are done by lottery. Workshop sessions are repeated three times, so there is ample space for everyone.

SUMMER CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

REGISTRATION AND ACCOMMODATIONS

Registration is on a first-come, first served basis. Payment for the full amount must be included with your application. When indicating your preference for accommodations, be sure to include first and second choices on the application form. While we make every effort to assign participants their first choices, depending on availability, we occasionally must assign their second.

RATES

Rates include all meals

CANCELLATIONS

There is a full refund, less a $50 cancellation fee, for cancellations received by June 22nd. There is no refund after that date.

2012 Summer Conference Application Form

2011 Summer Conference: Design: Shaping the World and the World Shaping Us

Haystack's 5th annual Summer Conference, Design: Shaping the World and the World Shaping Us, addressed the following questions and ideas: What makes good design? Can good design make the world a better place? How does the work of the hand influence our designs? What impact do materials have on the work that we create? How have we have shaped the world through design—in our architecture, objects, and art? Design reflects the materials that we use and the way that we see the world and our designs are informed and shaped by the intricacies, simplicity, and power of nature. These and other questions and ideas were examined through presentations, discussions, and studio workshops.

Haystack’s campus, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes (1915-2004), marked its 50th anniversary in 2011. The campus has long been cited as an example of excellent design, receiving the Twenty-Five Year Award from the American Institute of Architects for its impact on architecture and design in the country. The conference was also an opportunity to reflect on the legacy of the buildings and to see firsthand how it functions as a designed environment.

Read a recent NewsBlog, posted on the Surface Design Association's website. Design Dialogue Celebrates Haystack Home @ 50 was written by Ming-Yi Wong, a participant in the Summer Conference. You can also read brief biographies of this summer's faculty for the program, along with their seminar topics and workshop descriptions.

2010 Summer Conference: The Hand

Haystack's 2010 Summer Conference, The Hand, was the school's 4th. Participants, presenters, and workshop leaders investigated how we use our hands as a way of knowing and understanding the world. Read a brief biography and description of the presenters' seminar topics or workshop leaders' sessions for the conference; watch a video of conference presenter, Michael Moore drawing as he discusses his working process; and read an excerpt from Polly Ullrich's presentation. Documents in pdf format:

• Sandra Alfoldy • Jeanne Jaffe • Tom Joyce • Michael Moore •

• Jeanne Quinn • Polly Ullrich • Anne Wilson • Frank Wilson •

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"I observe my own hands as they go about their work from the details to the whole. Hands are curious about what to draw, so their actions prompt reflections, which prompt interpretations, which stimulate imagination and engender meaning. Each new line transforms the drawing it lives within. We usually get to see a drawing from beginning to end, edge to edge, with very little hidden or concealed. What was drawn is what we get to see and know. My own drawings show me how I feel about what I know in the world."

- Michael Moore, presenter during The Hand conference, July 2010

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"Moving beyond more conventional associations with the hand...I'd like to expand on our earlier idea, explored by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben. That is, to consider art as it is lived by the artist, not as it is lived by a spectator with good taste. This notion defines art as a risky project of making and creation, and not as analysis of form. Certainly, the hand has a profound role in this notion—both literally and in an expanded meaning.

There is a powerful sense of fragmentation in our quantum and virtual culture. Contemporary art has had to come to terms with what physics has been telling us for the last 100 years. Digitalization continues to hammer home that the material world is actually a world of flow, not solid objects. That it is in a state of continuous transformation, its matter inherently active in ways that seem disconnected from our familiar physical environment. Evidently, there is something called dark matter and dark energy—which are invisible—but which take up ninety-seven percent of the universe. Does this mean there's a fundamental nothingness at the heart of the world? Visual artists are working on depicting what this might mean. [For example,] a handmade kinetic sculpture by the Korean artist U-ram Choe, who constructs palpitating, simulated universes that combine a delicate sensibility with a sinister edge.

"SG" by U-ram Choe, handmade kinetic sculpture, 2010. Photo by John Berens. Photo courtesy of bitforms gallery, New York, NY.

To compound the disorientation, philosophical theories of deconstruction from the 20th century which proposed the death of the subject or self in order to tear down oppressive definitions of gender or ethnicity—these postmodern theories now seem, somehow, stale.

But simultaneously, however, there is an increasing interest—across many fields—in the notion of embodiment as a way to think about how we put together not just our consciousness and identity, but even reality itself. This is a fruitful path. I would like to suggest that the hand, as a singular tool of the body and the springboard for activity and thinking, is best positioned to help us rethink our 21st century selves and to rethink and make the art that reflects that reality.

For art does reflect how things exist in the world in an essential way. Art contributes to our sense of what it is like to be here—it embodies our conceptual reality. It mirrors how we ourselves exist. Even though the hand refers to ancient ways of making, it embodies new, hybrid ways of being. In other words, the hand—through art—is a metaphor for the world as we are beginning to understand it. The hand is a metaphor for how we construct our sense of how the world exists."

- Polly Ullrich, presenter during The Hand conference, July 2010

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