Tag: ICI

Who We Are

Who we are

Staff, Interns and Residents:
Lise Patt, Associate and Director
Sue-Na Gay, Assistant Director
Nick Adams, Facilities Manager

Associates
Deborah Cullen Morales, Associate and Keeper of the Seals
Christel Dillbohner, Associate and Explorer-at-large
Axel Forrester, Associate and Acquisitions
Antoinette LaFarge, Associate and Archivist
Sande Sisneros, Associate and Fabricator
Martin Gantman, Associate and Critic-at-large
Arnaldo Morales, Associate and Machinist
Daniel T. Walkup, Associate and Fabulist
John Galt, Associate and Tomfoolery
Hu D. Seidz, Historian and Ephemera Custodian
Gero Leson, Associate and Map-Maker
Melinda Smith Altshuler, Associate and Corroborator
Danny Redfern, Associate and Apocrypha
Deborah Paulsen, Associate and Solicitor General
J. Todd, Associate and Arcana
Yolanda Macias Mckay, Associate
Lothar Schmitz, Associate and Philosophy
Robert Allen, Associate and Conjurer
Anna Ayeroff, Associate and Excavation
Steven Eighmey, Associate and Builder

Support for the ICI and its Associates has come from:

The Getty Foundation
The Surdna Foundation
The National Endowment for the Arts
The Murdy Foundation
Creative Time
Robert Farber Foundation
The Murdy Foundation
Visual AIDS
The New Museum, New York
The Solomon Guggenheim Museum
The Montgomery Museum of Art
Soro, LLC

And the numerous members, supporters and collaborators who have given time and resources to the ICI over the years.

 

The ICI website switch over to cloud hosting

At the beginning of February 2012, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry’s (ICI) website switched over to the cloud.  What is the cloud, you may ask? It is not to be confused with Apple’s iCloud, which stores your music, photos, documents, and wirelessly pushes them to all your Apple devices. The cloud is a type of website hosting.  Data is stored on clusters of servers, instead of a single stand-alone server. This provides increased reliability, reducing the risk of downtime by removing a single point of failure.

The ICI website uses Laughing Squid, an independently owned and operated cloud-based web hosting company from San Francisco that specializes in hosting for individuals, artists and bloggers. When the ICI first set up its website with Laughing Squid, they hosted our site on a single stand-alone server.  Recently, though, they switched over to only offering cloud hosting. Due to this, the ICI website had to also make the journey of switching over to the cloud.

The process took several days, and the ICI’s social media consultant, Kelly Lee Barrett, spent some time preparing for the move by reading Laughing Squid’s instructions and other help forums, as well as getting advice from a long-time ICI associate and computer/web/graphic/art extraordinaire Antoinette LaFarge.  Essentially, the task was to create a mirror site, and when that mirror site was ready, the old site disappears.  You can only test the mirror site in a limited way, so backup of the entire website and databases was necessary.  Laughing Squid’s step by step instructions were fairly simple, yet certain important information was left out regarding the aftermath of updating information in our WordPress blogs. This caused the ICI site to not work properly. We were left with blank white pages saying database errors!  It seemed that the “cloud” was causing a dark storm over ICI.

Thankfully though, since the old site was backed up, we were prepared  to restore everything from scratch if need be. With the help of Laughing Squid’s costumer support, we were finally able to solve the database error problem, and get the site actively running again. The ICI is still ironing out the wrinkles that came along with the switch over, and we would like to apologize for any glitches that arise. We are, however, very excited about our new cloud hosting, which includes a more affordable rate while providing more disk space, bandwidth and better email!

ICI Bylaws and AIDS

Seventeen years ago, the ICI drew up the legal papers required for Federal incorporation as a non profit arts and cultural organization. Recently we were reviewing these papers for an internal audit and were reminded that our strong commitment to AIDS awareness was actually written into our bylaws. Here is an excerpt from the section titled PURPOSES:

2. To sponsor an annual event focusing attention on HIV disease for as long as AIDS continues to be a national and international crisis. This public event will educate the general public as to how the disease is culturally described and discussed and will allow an open forum for ideas and opinions about these methods.
3. To create, maintain, and made available to the public, a database containing the names of people who have died from AIDS and AIDS-related illness.

Overall, we have met our goals through an array of events on December 1. This year we’ll take to the streets with Forget Foucault.

Our database of AIDS deaths is relegated to binder notebooks containing page after page of NYT obituaries. Although the names are not available to our virtual supporters there is something poignant and memorable about the aging newspaper clippings. While their scumbled surfaces point to the duration of time since their passing, they also embody a palpable feeling of loss that might elude a strictly digital database.