#taeyoon workshop

Program: Ace AIR Location: Ace Hotel New York Date of Stay: 07.08.18 Artist: Mindy Seu

On a recent Sunday afternoon, designer Mindy Seu and a few friends conducted an exercise/performance in the Boardroom of Ace Hotel New York entitled Distributed Web of Care: Archival Networks. Seu’s goal was to “study and create a network between six NY-based archives, to connect these online collections to their physical location and pull them out of institutional silos.” 

The full instructions are below, and you will find additional graphics and suggested readings at Seu’s teaching site.

1.Mindy will give a brief introduction to her practice and the exercise.

2. Six practictioners will explain an archive to small groups of 3-4 participants.

Callil Capuozzo: Art Spaces Archives Project

Cleo Miao: AIGA Design Archives

Laurel Schwulst: New York Times, Internet Archive Experiment

Melanie Hoff: Lesbian Herstory Archives

Taeyoon Choi: Interference Archive

Zach Coble: New York University Archives 

3.They will provide an overview of the archive and respond to the following questions: 

Where is the archive located?

Who is the audience?

What is the intent of the archive?

What are selections of key content?

Are there unique interface elements?

4. These answers will live on a set of printed cards. As a group, we will link these cards with analog materials to build connections between the archives.

5. Annotate the paper map as needed.

Mindy Seu is a designer and educator. She is currently a student in Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where her research focuses on digital archives UI and methods of digitization. Formerly, she was a designer at 2x4 and instructor for Interactive 2 at California College of the Arts.

Program: Ace AIR Location: Ace Hotel New York Date of Stay: 07.01.18 Artist: Ari Melenciano

Brooklyn-based artist Melenciano spent the night at the hotel to build a time machine and unite a few Black activists of today to imagine a future of no more racial oppression. The artists traveled to the year 2371 to explore the utopian city and society called, Afrotopolis. In this future, the artists were invited by the archivists of El Museo de Afrotopolis to create work that represents this futuristic society. The evening was filled with speculative design, race and identity analysis, and a new sense of peace to live in for the night.

Ari was joined by Christopher Lee, Terrel McIver, Tsige Tafesse, Sandra Manzanares, Tao Leigh Goffe, Roxana Santana and Romil Chouhan.

Documentation of the entire project, Building a Museum 353 Years in the Future, including photos, writing, gifs and diagrams may be found here.

Ari Melenciano is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, creative technologist and DJ. She recently graduated from NYU’s ITP, practicing at the intersection of experiential design and emerging technologies via creative computation, human-computer interaction, engineering and design. She will be returning to ITP to be a research resident. She is the creator and producer of new media arts, culture and technology festival Afrotectopia, as well as the creator of Justice Factory, a data visualization platform that highlights social justice issues and human rights violations.

[Image Description: A row of three pieces of paper with black drawings. The first (left) says “DISTRIBUTION INSTEAD OF DECENTRALIZATION” above a shape with connected vector dots. The second (middle) says “CARE INSTEAD OF CONTROL” and shows two simply drawn human figures holding hands. The third (right) says “INFORMATION INSTEAD OF DATA” and shows two stick figures surfing on a wavy line above an angular wave.]

Distributed Web of Care Website, an initiative of Taeyoon Workshop

Image documentation of the DWC website

Website Description: Distributed Web of Care is an initiative to code to care and code carefully.The project imagines the future of the internet and consider what care means for a technologically-oriented future. The project focuses on personhood in relation to accessibility, identity, and the environment, with the intention of creating a distributed future that’s built with trust and care, where diverse communities are prioritized and supported.The project is composed of collaborations, educational resources, skillshares, an editorial platform, and performance. Announcements and documentation are hosted on this site, as well as essays by select artists, technologists, and activists.Distributed on Dat and GitHub. - DWC

Program: Ace AIR Location: Ace Hotel New York Date of Stay: 07.22.18 Artist: Stephanie Gray

During Stephanie’s stay at Ace Hotel New York, the poet-filmmaker crafted a new poem, In Between Time and No Time. As the poem’s formatting doesn’t translate perfectly to Tumblr, you can view the full work here as a PDF. An excerpt:

The last moment between Chelsea and Flatiron The last moment between snail mail and email The last moment between faxes and email The last moment between Sonny and Cher The last moment between Kindle and paper The last moment between the heat and a wave The last moment between the heat of a moment

Stephanie Gray explores the experience of urban space, queerness, disability and class. She explores the mysterious ground between pop culture, fact, fiction and desire, while working between nostalgia, place and memory. She is the author of two poetry books, most recently, Shorthand and Electric Language Stars (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2015), and four chapbooks, including Under the Surface (above/ground press, 2018) and A Country Road Going Back in Your Direction (Argos Books, 2015). Gray’s work also appears in the anthology How Lovely the Ruins (Spiegel & Grau/Random House, 2017).