Update on research paper and art project

I have been doing more research on artists who work with dialogical art work. One such group is WochenKlausur. WochenKlausur is an arts collective from Austria. They have done many pieces that deal with soicial and political issues. On such piece was Intervention to Aid Drug Addicted Women. This piece was started on a three hour cruise around lake Zurich in Switzerland. The collective gathered an unlikely group of politians, journalists, sex workers, and activists from Zurich. They were brought together as an intervention to discuss drug policy in the area. By taking the participants out of the normal setting for such debate they were able to get people to speak more honestly and freely and actually were able to address the problem and set up a home for drug addicted women to stay at during the day.
Another Group i am researching is a group from Denmark called Superflex. One of their newest pieces is called Flooded McDonals, a film piece where they flood a convincing life size replica of a McDonalds.

Flooded McDonald's from Superflex on Vimeo.

From What i have researched so far the purpose of these groups is to push and challenge the viewers and participants to question established ideas and push for greated communication between groups.
I have started reading Kester's book Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art, and it is very interesting. Kester presents and discusses various issues facing communicative art and it's aesthetic.

As for my art project itself, i have finally been able to put it together. The dimensions have changed do to the fact that during construction i realized that the piece would inherently exclude some people because the writing surface was too high for kids and people under a certain height. I am really pleased to how the frame work came together and am excited to unveil it and see how it works out on saturday at the senior show.

SF Muni vs. The Wall

So after some discussion in class about the wall in israel, and possible ways of interpreting it, i decided a good way to try and contextualize it in local way was to do an overlay of it onto the transit routes in San Francisco. I think a lot of us, myself included, take the transit system here for granted. I have been known to piss and moan about 15min-45min delays on the bus/train, but it became very apparent that i have no room to complain. With the vast expanse and complexity of the wall in Israel public transit must be hell. I didn't really visualize this until i did the overlay. After i layered the two images (sf transit map and wall diagram), i saw that a functional, efficient transit system is impossible. While the layouts of the two regions are very different, i realized that imposing an arbitrary wall over the city would reek havoc on the transit system. There were only a few routes that would be unaffected by such a wall. What was an even bigger surprise was that most of the major routes would pass through the wall 2-3 times at least. If such a system were in place i could easily see it taking many hours to get through the city if there were check points. This in a city which usually takes less then an hour.