Tag: ICI

Hummingbirds in the Garden

Over the last few summers, we have watched the fervent nest-building activity of the hummingbird population that favors our secluded, lush garden. Their bricolaged nests are small enough to fit in a human child’s hand and are often built on the thinnest branches of a tree where they become invisible to the human eye. Each year, we would stand watch over these nests as soon as the mother bird began her quiet occupancy (in itself, a sight to see) but we never saw any chicks; their birth was becoming as legendary as an elephant’s death.

This year, we left for the three day 4th of July weekend with mom still sitting quietly on her nest. When we returned the following Tuesday, the mom was gone and the nest was empty. We later found out that Steven Eighmey, our plant manager, had stopped by the Institute on July 4th. While most humans were lying on beaches or flipping burgers in backyards, the hummingbirds in our garden were getting ready to leave home.

So here, finally, our first documented graduating class of hummingbirds from the ICI garden.

ICI at San Francisco Art Institute

Lise Patt, Founder and Director of the ICI, & Deborah Cullen, our Board President, traveled north to lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute on March 25, 2011 as part of the school’s Graduate Lecture Series. The pair presented “Collective Camouflage: The Non-Profit Organization as a Tactical Artist Medium,” during which they argued that a non-profit organization can empower (not burden) small groups of like-minded artists. Utilizing the ICI’s trademark ‘performance lecture’ format, the hour presentation was a layered ‘enactment’ of an ICI laboratory brainstorming session. Patt’s planned but unrehearsed interventions into Cullen’s powerpoint presentation resulted in some unusual and sometimes humorous interpretations of the ICI’s long history. How else can you characterize the juxtaposition of  a powerpoint slide depicting a small cavalcade of L.A. policemen investigating our ‘guerilla’ presentation of the AIDS Bottle project at LACMA in the late 1990s with Cullen’s description of spitfire beetle larvae that group together to pass themselves off as bumble bees and Patt’s visual disruption of both these elements, enacted in the corner of the powerpoint slide with a live feed of her white gloved hands measuring a rock that bears an uncanny resemblance to a human penis.

The lecture was a perfect end to a stimulating and inspiring day spent in the studios of the SFAI graduate students, many of whom Patt and Cullen hoped to recruit as ICI ‘associates in training.’ Check out the SFAI Graduate Lecture series and visit the school’s website to see some of the exciting new programs at SFAI including their low residency MFA program.

 

Mission Statement

The ICI is anchored by the belief that building worlds is a creative act. We understand art as a uniquely open field of possibilities inside society where it acts as a reflection of complex and sometimes hidden relationships, as a catalyst for imaginative speculation and as a stimulus for creative solutions to some of the most difficult challenges of our times.

ICI research is grounded in the belief that vision has become the dominant mediator in many of society’s most time-consuming interactions. Recognizing the pitfalls but also the potential of contemporary visual traditions, ICI examines the many contingencies of visuality including the most topical concerns of modern societies but also vision-based beliefs that have just passed out of the public consciousness even though they continue to influence many aspects of culture production. By understanding the complexity of our current visual practices—both the guiding forces of new enterprises but also the forgotten beliefs that still guide current technologies—ICI projects typically emerge from the intersection of these two trajectories and utilize processes that analyze but also actualize our current visual paradigms. Favoring the messy toolbox over the single tool, creative tinkering over the execution of a pre-made plan, the stories and lessons gleaned from the detritus of material culture over strict adherence to du jour theory, the ICI offers culture producers an environment for collaborative, long-term projects whose methodologies rely not just on innovation but on excavation and renovation as well.

 

Laboratory Blackboard


It’s a brain.A visual think tank. An organization that was formed around an idea rather than a medium or a method or a politics. A spiritual and intellectual comfort zone.Not an exhibition space. A space that exists but not here; always over there, somewhere else. Not a Museum,but we have a permanent collection. We’re more like a warehouse,a self-generating archive We’re something like a museum of natural history, or a reliquary with ancient bones wrapped up and hidden.Like a hidden museum.We havePublications,books, with collections of essays that follow different themes. They’re sometimes very esoteric We’re amateurs in the old sense; like the 19th century, like the Renaissance.We’re a group of artists, writers, and scientists who work collectively with no ego; a combined entity. Artists and writers who give up authorship to gain collective authorship. Can be public. Can be activist.THE AIDS CHRONICLES. ICI is ephemeral; a gaseous substance.Something that unfolds.something that must be presented. It’s a place of performance; an archeology; projects dig at something. Visitors have to dig into what¹s there. ICI is a mythical undefinable possibilityit provides opportunities for the unexpected. It is a secret society. A drinking society. A home for lost idealists.