BrushFire: Energy Plans at the Nature Museum in Chicago!
If you’d happen to be in Chicago on July 21-22, be sure to go to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. That’s were Futurefarmers are staging their innovative public art project Energy Plans. Through a series of carefully designed but playful events, they will get people talking about energy-related issues.
The public will be invited to participate in discussions with scientists in the Energy Tent. The outcome of these discussions will be a series of questions relative to the issue of “Energy” and the upcoming 2008 elections. The questions produced in these small discussion groups will be posed to larger groups in the form of a Continuum, which will look like this:
In short, a continuum is a visualization of a group discussion in which people are asked to position themselves physically in relation to certain questions. According to Futurefarmers:
Participants will be asked to place their stool on a position on the continuum that relates to where they stand on that issue. Participants will then stand on the stool to declare why they chose to stand in that position. Most likely, after hearing why each person is standing where they are, discussion and criteria shifts will influence people to change their position.
Each morning, Futurefarmers will conduct special workshops with Chicago area teenagers from the Chicago Park District TRACE (Teens Re-Imagining Art/Community/Environment) program and the Nature Museum CPS summer interns.
If you’re not able to be there but would like to participate, you can submit to the Continuum online: here. Your contribution will be used later on site during the staging of the event. The continuum will be video taped and later presented in Provisions’ BrushFire exhibition: Close Encounters: Facing The Future at the American University Museum in DC.
Here for an article.
Here for Energy Plans.
Here to submit to the Continuum.
Here for Futurefarmers.
