installation, critical spatial practices, participatory projects, software, performances
Things That Are Possible, Digital Arts Research Center (Santa Cruz), 2010

building is an art collective, installation, and series of interventions by Kyle McKinley and Nick Lally with Ann Altstatt, Karl Baumann, Pou Dimitrijevich, Theresa Enright, Miki Foster, Nik Hanselmann, Jessy Lancaster, Madeline McDonald Lane, Lucas McGranaham, and Sophia Strosberg.

Artists’ Statement:

Building anything is a process. Building something good usually involves a lot of people’s ideas and labor. building is what we have called the people and the process of building something good in this building. Each Friday at 2pm, building gets together to talk, eat snacks, and make building. building builds on itself: last week’s building is this week’s built, but this week’s built is the place to build next week’s building. The interests of building include ghosts, software studies, coffee, walks in the woods, things that turn, critical spatial practice, the politics of representation, edge sites, flea markets, poesis, precarity, female-fronted punk bands of the 70s and 80s, and building. However, building interests are always building. The process of building results in traces of those interests. It also involves traces of the art/works of Nick and Kyle. All those traces are the building where you now stand. What will be building tomorrow?

Winner of the Alumni Award for Best in Show

bike-a-logues podcast

Bike-a-logues is an ongoing exploration of what it means for cyclists to be in dialogue about the things they think about while cycling through particular spaces and places. As installed in building, participants cooperate to pedal stationary bikes in order to listen to excerpts of interviews with friends of mine about how their spatial imaginaries are formed by cycling. The podcast is to be listened to while riding bicycle. Preferably at UC Santa Cruz. The voices you hear are: Ann Altstatt, Stuyvie Bearns Esteva, Nikolai Berkoff, Kelly Brown, Timothy Krupnik, Sophia Strosberg, and myself.

Bike-a-logues postulates that there is a special relationship between the cyclist and the places that (s)he travels through. The cyclist experiences the landscape, bodily, by pushing up hills and rolling over bumps: (s)he begins to feel all the land forms that surround her/him as a continuum of intimately related undulating moments.
The thoughts that the cyclist has while traveling through a place might become wedded in her mind to a tree, a signpost, a cottage in much the same way as, for a collector, thoughts and stories become associated with particular objects. The collector might keep these objects in a box, or hang them on her wall for display. How does the cyclist come to collect his or her thoughts, his or her stories?
Bike-a-logues assumes that such a special relationship exists, but takes as its task research into what that relationship looks likes, where its strengths are, and, also, where its fissures are. The question of how cycling participates in the production of space is an open-ended one, and, from the standpoint of Bicilogues, a question that is currently in flux; how is the space produced by cycling different when the cyclist is given the task of recording his or her relationship with places? When in dialogue with other cyclists?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download