SIMPARCH is an American artist collective that was founded in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1996. Presently this group is organized and maintained by Matthew Lynch and Steve Badgett. Their practice involves large-scale, usually interactive installations and works that, as the group’s name suggests, examine simple architecture, building practices, site specificity and materials that may be salvaged, recycled or generally brought together with a kind of d.i.y. attitude. Often collaborating with other artists, builders, art critics, graffiti artists, filmmakers, and skate boarders, and musicians, SIMPARCH works at providing sites which allow for social interaction and experimentation with design and materials.

Margin Release: New Media Lectures presents RICK PRELINGER at Oberlin College and Conservatory, on Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009.

EVENTS:
Noon, @ Cat in the Cream: Rick Prelinger will give a presentation about his ideas and his work

8PM @ West Hall: Rick Prelinger will present a film screening entitled The Archives Meet the People

All events are free and open to the public.

BIO
Rick Prelinger, an archivist, writer and filmmaker, founded Prelinger Archives, whose collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years’ operation. Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,000 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse.  Rick has taught in the MFA Design program at New York’s School of Visual Arts and lectured widely on American cultural and social history and on issues of cultural and intellectual property access.  He made three laserdiscs and fourteen CD-ROMs with the legendary Voyager Company, and sat on the National Film Preservation Board for five years as representative of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. His feature-length film “Panorama Ephemera,” depicting the conflicted landscapes of 20th-century America, opened in summer 2004 and played in venues around the world.  His “Field Guide to Sponsored Films,” was published in 2006 by the National Film Preservation Foundation.  He is co-founder of the Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly private research library that is open to the public, located in downtown San Francisco.

ARCHIVES MEET THE PEOPLE
As archives become aware that they too are cultural producers, they’ve started to push their collections out to the world.  At the same time, archives have become hip - artists and makers are using archival footage in ways no one ever imagined.  But lots of archival material is hard to fit into classic categories.  Home movies, industrial films, found footage, fragments are easy to screen, but few are thinking about how outing archives affects screening and exhibition, and how archives’ new visibility is changing these once-quiet institutions.
This screening will include a range of unusual material, including (possibly) amateur film, medical film, Depression-era city portraits, space-age modern consumerist hymns, and never-before-seen footage of Black Panther Party rallies in 1970.

Please post your responses to our first three readings here.  (Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, and Mark Tribe, Art in the Age of Digital Distribution.)

In this class we will focus on the duality of distributable media and site-specificity.  We will consider these forces as “intertwined” AND “opposite” ways of thinking about and making art.  To this end, we will begin with a focus on the emergence of various distributable medias, from the mail to video to the internet to the MP3.  Archivist, librarian, writer, filmmaker, and thinker Rick Prelinger will visit us during this section of the class.  Our class project in this section will be to make a “book of the future,” in an edition of 20, which we will launch at the Cat in the Cream when Roger Conover, executive editor of MIT Press, comes to lecture. Next, we will focus on site-specificity, and art work that grows out of a sense of place.   During this time, we will be visited by Simparch.  During the Simparch residency, we will construct a project at a site TBD.

GRADE BREAKDOWN :
**Attendance** is of the utmost importance in this class.  After two absences, your grade will drop a letter for an additional absence.  Everyone is also required to be at the lectures and projects that are central to the class.
**Projects** will take place twice this semester, and you are required to take part in both.   (Future of the book project, and Simparch project.)
**Blogging** will take part throughout the semester.  You are required to post substantial, thoughtful posts at various intervals in the semester.  Blog posts are due BEFORE class meets on the days indicated.  In other words, your post MUST BE ONLINE when you get to class that day in order for it to be counted as on time.

FEB

M 2—Introductions

W 4—In Class:
Viewing: Ant Farm, Eternal Frame
Reading:
Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Marshall McLuhan: Medium is the Message

M 9—In Class:  Discussion.
Viewing: Stranger with a Camera
Reading:
Mark Tribe: Art in the Age of Digital Distribution

W 11—**BLOG POST # 1 DUE: Reading Response**
In Class: Discussion.
Reading:
At a Distance: Mail Art

M 16—In Class: Visit the art library’s mail art collection
Reading:
Vanity Fair: Oral History of the Internet
New York Review of Books: Google and the Future of Books

W 18—**BLOG POST # 2 DUE: Future Book Brainstorms**
In class: Discussion.
Begin brainstorming about future book.
Reading:
A World in Three Aisles: Browsing the Post-Digital Library, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

On the Virtues of Pre-Existing Material by Rick Prelinger

M 23—Discussion.
Future of the book proposals due.
Final organization for Rick’s visit.

W 25  **Rick Prelinger Visit**
No class.  Lecture at noon @ the Cat in the Cream.
Screening in the evening, TBD.

MARCH
M 2—**BLOG POST # 3 DUE: Rick Prelinger Response**
Future of the Book Workshop

W4— Future of the Book Workshop

M 9—Future of the Book Workshop

W 11—Future of the Book Project DUE

M 16  **Roger Conover Visit**
No class.  Lecture at noon @ the Cat in the Cream.  Book launch party for our Future of the Book book.

W 18
No class.
**BLOG POST # 4 DUE: Roger Conover Response**

__________spring break__________

M 30—Introductions to Simparch and site-specific art

APRIL
W 1—In Class: Viewing at the Art Museum, Spiral Jetty
Readings: Robert Smithson, CLUI, Situationsite INternationale

S  4—Symposium on the Future of the Book, Mudd Library

M 6—Prepare for Simparch

W 8—Prepare for Simparch

M 13 ** SIMPARCH visit**

W 15** SIMPARCH visit**

M 20—**BLOG POST # 5 DUE: Simparch Response**

In Class: Documentation workshop

W 22—In Class: Documentation workshop

M 27—Viewings TBA

W 29—Viewings TBA

MAY

M 4—Viewings TBA

W 6—Viewings TBA