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This week: Philip von Zweck sits down to talk with artist and educator Kelly Kaczynski.

GO CHECK OUT HER SHOW AT THE COLLEGE OF DUPAGE-GAHLBERG GALLERY! I heart the Gahlberg Gallery.

Kelly Kaczynski: Study for Convergence Performance (ice)
Jan.19 to Feb. 25, 2012

Study for Convergence Performance (ice) is the second work in a series that seeks to conflate the artist’s studio as a performative site of production, the space of display as the reception of image, and landscape as site for epic but apathetic metaphor. It uses the devices of the theatrical stage and the green screen; both of which operate as a “non-space” that allows the conflation of multiple contexts or sites. She uses imagery from landscapes that shift in time, such as bodies of water including glacier fields. The title of the piece refers to Robert Smithson’s idea of “the range of convergence between site and non-site” whereas the land from the originating site is placed in the container of the non-site. In Study for Convergence Performance, the site of origin and the sign of site converge as they transpose in a collapse of time.

Kelly Kaczynski is an assistant professor and assistant chair in the Department of Art Theory & Practice at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University.  Kelly is a sculptor and installation artist. Her work, while existing in a temporal-spatial platform, is deeply materials based. She received an MFA from Bard College in 2003 and a BA from The Evergreen State College in 1995. She has exhibited with threewalls, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; University of Buffalo Art Gallery, NY; Rowland Contemporary, Chicago; Triple Candie, NY; the Islip Art Museum, NY; Cristinerose/Josee Bienvenu Gallery, NY; DeCordova Museum, MA; 123 Watts Gallery, NY; and the Boston Center for the Arts, MA. Kaczynski’s work was included in the Boston Drawing Project at Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston. Public installations include projects with the Main Line Art Center, Haverford, Pennsylvania; the Interfaith Center of New York; the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston and the Boston National Historic Parks; and the Boston Public Library. Kaczynski has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and University of Chicago.

The Art of the Steal, the much-discussed documentary film about the controversial struggle over the Barnes Foundation’s extraordinary collection of Impressionist works of art, will have its Chicago premiere at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art this Wednesday evening. Located in Merion, Pennsylvania at the explicit behest of Dr. Albert C. Barnes himself, the Foundation’s collection is now slated to be moved to downtown Philadelphia, a decision which has caused a national uproar.

The film screens this Wednesday, March 10th, at 7pm at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL 60208. Tel: 847.491.4000.

Here’s the blurb and the trailer from the film’s official website:

“In 1922, Dr. Albert C. Barnes formed a remarkable educational institution around his priceless collection of art, located just five miles outside of Philadelphia. Now, more than 50 years after Barnes’ death, a powerful group of moneyed interests have gone to court for control of the art, and intend to bring it to a new museum in Philadelphia. Standing in their way is a group of Barnes’ former students and his will, which contains strict instructions stating the Foundation should always be an educational institution, and that the paintings may never be removed. Will they succeed, or will a man’s will be broken and one of America’s greatest cultural monuments be destroyed?”

I’m looking forward to checking out afriCOBRA and the Chicago Black Arts Movement later on this week. The exhibition is open for a very short period of time – February 12th through March 17th, 2010. I myself have trouble seeing shows early on in their run, and find myself scrambling to see stuff the week before it closes. Don’t be like me.  Here’s a short preview video put together by the organizers at Northwestern University’s Dittmar Memorial Gallery.

Dittmar Winter ‘AfriCOBRA’ Exhibition Opens to Public Feb. 12 from Northwestern News on Vimeo.

I was leafing through my alma mater’s quarterly magazine over the weekend and, while intending to flip straight through to the Class Notes and Obits like I usually do, I found myself absorbed instead by a fascinating profile of Pomona College Assistant Professor (and Northwestern University grad) Sarah Sood, a computer scientist whose research focuses on the emotional content of the blogosphere.

Sood is interested in connecting people via the stories they tell. For the past six years, she’s been designing programs that enable computers to identify the emotional components of blog-based narratives. The results thus far have produced Buzz, a search and retrieval system that mines blogs for interesting and emotionally compelling stories.

If you’re a Chicagoan, you may very well have seen Sood’s work in 2005 when for a period of one year Buzz was displayed in the lobby of the Second City Theater. Taking the form of a multi-media theatrical installation, it presented four talking-head avatars, each of whom related stories derived from Sood’s research. A description of the project can be found on Northwestern University’s Infolab website, excerpted below:

“Buzz is a multimedia installation that exposes the buzz generated by blogs. Buzz finds the blogs which are compelling; those where someone is laying their feelings on the table, exposing a dream or a nightmare that they had, making a confession or apology to a close friend, or regretting an argument that they had with their mother or spouse. It embodies the blogger with virtual actors who externalize these monologues by reading them aloud.”

Click the image below to be taken to a demonstration clip from the installation:

Buzz Demo

Sood also used the Buzz retrieval system to explore emotional reactions to Chicago landmarks (click here for demo):

Chicago Buzz

While installations like Buzz provide entertaining diversions, Sood’s next project promises to be far more rich in its possibilities. She is developing an “emotional-state search engine” that will seek out web content driven by one of six emotions: happiness, fear, sadness, surprise, disgust and anger. Writer Lori Kido Lopez, who authored the aforementioned profile of Sood, points out that the Buzz-based emotional search engine “is vastly different from a typical search engine.” Lopez explains,

“If you put the words “happy” and “Obama” into Google, the sites that pop up include information about Obama’s White House happy hours and a mix tape called “Obama’s Happy Ending”—neither of which have distinct emotional content. Sood’s goal is to be able to search for content about “Obama” but also to be able to specify that the stories are emotionally “happy”—and actually be able to come up with a list of articles where the writer is feeling joyous about the topic of Obama. These stories might include topics like the euphoria and love surrounding Obama’s family, or excitement toward his message of change.”

Sood hopes to have the website ready for public use by the end of this summer. I’m already thinking of emotional buzzwords and topics to pair them with…the possibilities are endless.