Join us for ABOUT PLACE: A GENRE-FLUID WORKSHOP. This four-week, online course uses place as a prompt for new writing. Starting from your place on the map—wherever you are—we’ll explore strategies for generating creative work. We’ll also use the practice of writing as a strategy for engaging more deeply with place—whether you live in a city, a suburb, or on a rural back road. Through self-directed excursions and guided writing exercises, students are invited to become astute observers of their environment and to discover the terrain with new eyes. Instructors will provide weekly prompts for writing or making, along with images or texts in multiple genres to demonstrate the possibilities and range for each prompt. Students will develop a habit of curiosity, a spirit of experimentation, and an engaged relationship to their place. We encourage work in any genre—fiction, nonfiction, poetry—or something else!

This course is designed to fit your schedule. Students will complete weekly assignments and contribute to our online discussion anytime throughout the week.

Created by UNY editors Nicole Haroutunian and Nicole Miller, the course is guided by our commitment to connecting people with their environment. Through our digital journal and our programmatic events, we seek to foster community, collaboration, creativity, and diversity.

August 6-27

Cost: $200

To register and pay, email nicole@underwaternewyork.com

Photo credits: Robin Michals and Clarinda Mac Low

Working creatively with water and waterways is inherently interdisciplinary, and requires creativity and collaboration across many different sectors. Issues related to water cross social, cultural, ecological, and political boundaries.

We are inviting you to participate in the Power of Ten, an opportunity to intersect with people from different fields who are focused on water and initiate concrete cross-disciplinary collaborative projects. All thinkers and do-ers are welcome—scientists, social/environmental justice activists, designers, artists, performers, planners, architects, and more. 

The Power of Ten is a path to problem-solving, reimagining, unearthing inequity, finding new approaches and understanding how to become accomplices. In this workshop, we will facilitate a process of creative collaboration with the aim of realizing projects on, in, and around the water.

All projects will be supported by space and sharing of knowledge at the Works on Water/Underwater New York residency on Governors Island and a presentation in October, as well as potential further support through Works on Water over the coming years.

Workshop (Friday, July 13): We will work on communication, connection, and collaboration through somatic techniques, methods for talking about your work to people outside your field, and mapping resources, challenges, and opportunities. The day will culminate in creative collaboration and generating projects to be worked on over the season and beyond. The workshop is free of charge and limited to the first 18 participants to register.

Presentation (Saturday, October 13): This is an opportunity to present the current state of projects initiated in the workshop—these may be fully developed projects or updates on the work in-progress and can be a space for feedback, resource sharing, or a final presentation.

Workshop Specifics:

Friday, July 13
9:00am Meet at the Governors Island Ferry Terminal (Battery Maritime Building) 
12:00-1:00pm Lunch and explore the island. You may bring a lunch (we have a refrigerator) or purchase lunch from one of the many vendors on the island.
4:00pm End of workshop
4:30pm Return Ferry (You may stay longer; the last ferry leaves the island at 10pm.)

The Power of Ten is led by Carolyn Hall, Clarinda Mac Low, and Eve Mosher in Nolan Park, House 5B, Governors Island

Learn more about Works on Water & Underwater New York Water Residency

About the facilitators:

Carolyn Hall is a freelance dancer/performer, historical marine ecologist/researcher, certified instructor with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, and board member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance (iLAND).

Clarinda Mac Low is an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates social constructs and the corporeal experience. Mac Low is co-founder and Executive Director of Culture Push, an experimental organization that links artistic practice and civic engagement, and co-founder of Works on Water.

Eve Mosher is an interdisciplinary artist focused on collaboration, facilitation and urban waterways. She is a co-founder of Works on Water and an advisor to ArtPlace/One Water on their Water, Culture, Art program.

Underwater New York is thrilled to partner with Works on Water to host an artist residency on Governors Island during summer 2018. Visual, performing, and literary artists (individuals, collaborations, collectives) are invited to develop work and build connections to the water in one of the historic Nolan Row houses on Governors Island. We welcome proposals from artists whose interest or practice involves a deep investment in working on, in, and with bodies of water as well as artists who are interested in exploring water as a site or material for the first time. 

Other activities during the residency term:

• Documentary exhibition of selected Water Artists featured on the Works on Water interactive map: Artworks and Bodies of Water.
• Public conversations with artists and practitioners working on the waterways, including an interview-based project about water art facilitated by Underwater New York
• Launch of The Power of Ten, a laboratory program that aims to spark new collaborations between artists and professional practitioners in many fields, including science, urban planning, and government. The Power of Ten will provide space for project development, mentorship from the Works on Water team, and facilitation for projects.

WoW and UNY are excited to be on Governors Island this summer because of its embedded relationship to water and recent identity as a host to diverse artworks and arts experiments. The two organizations are curious to see how artists of all stripes use the location as a prompt for process and inquiry. 

It was our privilege to present the New York City premiere of A HELD POSTURE by multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker Hyung Seok Jeon. Thanks to everyone who came out to Theaterlab on a very cold weekend in January. We were thrilled by the response to this piece—four sold out shows!

We wanted to produce this work because we were intrigued by Jeon’s use of the water as a site of the imagination or psyche. Exploring the image impulse of sinking into the deep ocean, Jeon invited us to discover what lies at the bottom—on the ocean floor or in the deep spaces of personal and collective memory. From a white room into the abyss, the piece moved us through surprising moments of loss, reclamation, discovery, joy.

As curators of a growing list of underwater objects, we’re interested in the ways that things speak. Shipwrecked, cast-off, discarded or lost, the objects on our site invite us to imagine a provenance or a future. We were delighted by the way Jeon re-purposed and animated everyday objects by a precise choreography of analogue and digital effects. His experiments with puppetry, a live video feed, and a rich soundscape created with wireless headphones re-purposed the body as well. In A HELD POSTURE, the performer's body became an image of the natural world. In this way, Hyung Seok Jeon transformed something vast and, at times, perilous into something intimate—human scale.

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A Decade Platform, artist-built boats by Mare Liberum. (Photo credit: Marina McClure)

By Nicole Miller, for The Brooklyn Rail

In June, while art dealers and collectors flocked to the fairs in Basel and Venice—where you could nab one of Damien Hirst’s massive, bronze shipwreck fabrications for a cool five million dollars—a different sort of exhibition launched in downtown Manhattan. Works on Water is the inaugural triennial devoted to works made on, in, or with water. Unlike Hirst’s Treasures, which raids maritime mythology for luxury goods, Works on Water is rooted in the social practices of artists responding to changing urban ecologies. Presented by the theater company New Georges, with 3LD Art & Technology Center and Urban Water Artists, in collaboration with Guerilla Science, the month-long event brings together visual and performing art with environmental and social science. Through its gallery programming and off-site expeditions, curators make the case for an emerging genre that is interdisciplinary, collaborative, and community-based—a counterpoint to the global commodity-fetish.

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