Since its launch after the shut-down of Antioch College, the educators and artists of Nonstop Institute have been nothing if not flexible and creative. And their flexibility is being called upon once again, as Nonstop members adapt to the newest phase of the group’s existence. At the end of this month Nonstop will let go of its Millworks home, but its members will continue to sponsor cultural, educational and artistic events for the community.

And while the nonprofit Nonstop will no longer have a physical space, its members remain dedicated to their mission of providing an opportunity for civic dialogue on issues relevant to Yellow Springs, ranging from the increasingly difficult environment for liberal arts colleges, as illustrated by Antioch’s closing, to the challenges of sustainability in a small town.

“We’ve indicated over the last several years that we’re nimble and can create a cultural event in just about any kind of setting,” said Chris Hill, one of the group’s leaders, in a recent interview. “We like to do that.”

In its four years of existence, Nonstop has been busy. The group’s first phase began in June 2007, when Antioch University unexpectedly announced the closing of Antioch College the following year. When the campus closed, Nonstop Antioch, composed of most of the college’s tenured faculty and many staff members, launched its effort to keep alive the college’s educational model and traditions, even without a campus. The effort came together quickly, and in fall 2008, Nonstop educators began holding classes in village homes and churches, ultimately attracting about 100 students, both traditionally aged and older students from the community.

The Nonstop effort, organizers believe, was critical to the ultimately successful renewal of the college.

“I think Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute had a profound effect on the college revival,” said Migiwa Orimo. “While we weren’t trying to take the place of the college, we allowed those traditions and ideals to be held.”

While all Nonstop classes initially took place in a variety of nontraditional spaces in the village, the renovation of a former manufacturing space at Millworks into the Nonstop campus provided a home for the group in December 2008. New York City theater designer Michael Casselli, an Antioch alum who moved to Yellow Springs to take part in the college revival, designed the group’s space after interviewing Nonstop members on their needs.

The building was “an incredible success,” Casselli said. “People enjoyed being in there.”

After Antioch College gained its independence in fall 2009, Nonstop morphed from being a group focused on maintaining the traditions of the college to one that provides a public forum for the exchange of ideas. What connected the two efforts was organizers’ commitment to “a transparent, publically located discussion, an embracing of public dialogue,” according to Hill. “It’s really important to be unafraid to speak to each other.”

A significant aspect of sparking community conversation has been bringing to the village thinkers and artists from a larger area, according to Hill. These included the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor, whose leaders addressed the challenge of sustaining progressive artistic and cultural viability in a small town, and American Association of University Professors (AAUP) President Cary Nelson, who spoke of the challenges facing liberal arts colleges. A series on the future of higher education brought to town, in a virtual way, some of the nation’s leading thinkers on the topic. While Nonstop organizes lacked the funds to physically bring the nationally-known participants to Yellow Springs, they used Skype to enable villagers to talk face to face, in a virtual conversation, with the educators.

“That’s a good example of us creatively using our space and our professional connections to make up for the lack of deep pockets,” Hill said.

And its technical capabilities allowed Nonstop to bring this small Ohio village into contact not only with national-level thinkers, but also those in other countries, such as a program that featured video activists from Burma.

Nonstop’s desire to enhance communication also involved building relationships between artists in the region. The group developed two artist-in-residency projects, including one for emerging artists from Columbus, along with salons that focused on artistic works-in-progress.

“I feel we explored a number of kinds of projects,” Hill said. “As educators and artists we modeled what was important to us, making connections with people doing related projects in the outside world.”

That belief in the importance of public discourse fueled Nonstop leaders’ effort to continue their programs even after the college returned. The group does not see itself as in competition with Antioch College, Hill emphasized, but rather as an additional cultural resource for the community. Most involved with Nonstop have had careers as professional artists, curators or theater performers or designers, with some having received national awards in their fields.

“We are all longterm residents of Yellow Springs and, through Nonstop, are doing work that we have committed our professional lives to. We are trying to do it in Yellow Springs because that’s where our friends, families and community are located and have been for many years,” Hill wrote in an e-mail.

But the Nonstop effort has always, in the tradition of Antioch College, been faced with financial challenges. When initial funding from the College Revival Fund ended with the college rebirth, the group becme a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and received some grant funding from the Ohio Arts Council and, locally, the Yellow Springs Community Foundation. But state arts funding has diminished in recent years, and while local contributions helped, for the past two years most of the work was performed by volunteers who also have full-time jobs. And the need to make a living is taking a specific toll on Nonstop, as Hill is moving to Los Angeles soon after the beginning of the year, to join her partner, Brian Springer, who recently began a job at the Hammer Museum at UCLA.

Hill has been essential to Nonstop for her leadership and the continuity she provided, as a member of the group’s leadership collective in both its first and second phases, according to Orimo. Hill also brought to Nonstop her considerable skills as a curator, an activist and a media artist.

“She has showed a tremendous devotion to this work,” Orimo said.

But faced with new challenges, Nonstop members have no intention of giving up. Rather, with a new leadership model and a return to a “nomadic” presence, they plan to continue their mission to enhance the public dialogue in Yellow Springs.

“There are some remarkable capabilities represented in this community; the challenge is finding ways to best facilitate their expression and use,” according to Nonstop member Dan Reyes. “A nomadic Nonstop certainly can contribute to and be available for helping such efforts.“

Thursday, October 20
7:00 PM
Nonstop Institute
305 N. Walnut St., Yellow Springs
donation

From a 1966 novel by Sam Greenlee, the director Ivan Dixon sold The Spook Who Sat by the Door as a Blaxploitation shoot-em-up, masking the theme of urban-based warfare for African American liberation in urban communities. Upon release it provoked violent reaction in some parts of white America, and the FBI pressured the distributor to destroy all copies. The film was a bootleg classic in the African American community for years, but didn’t officially exist until it was digitally restored from the original camera negative, hidden in a Hollywood vault, in 2004.

About The African-American Representation in Feature Films series and workshop screenings on Thursdays at Nonstop October-November, 2011: Starting in mid-October and continuing every Thursday through November 3, Bob Devine will introduce screenings of a series of important and sometimes difficult-to-access narrative films dealing with African-American representation by African-American directors and by Hollywood (1964-1989). Future screenings include works by Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, and Spike Lee. People are encouraged to attend these screenings/workshop discussions as a series, or to attend the individual screenings of specific films. To register for the workshop call 937-232-9906, or come to Nonstop the night of the film.

About the instructor: Bob Devine was one of the founding members of Antioch College’s critical Communications program, has been teaching courses in media and social change, film and communications theory for 40 years, and has been actively involved in the fields of community media, public access and participatory democratic media outside the academy. In 2005 Bob served as Interim Executive Director of Manhattan Neighborhood Network, and in 2008 he served an extended term as an Executive Consultant for O‘lelo Community Media in Honolulu, these organizations being the two largest community media centers in the country. At Antioch, Bob served as President of the College from 1996-2001, while continuing to teach in the field of communication and community media; most recently Bob taught courses and independent studies for Nonstop. Bob is the 1994 recipient of the Alliance for Community Media’s George Stoney Award, recognizing his national contributions to the field of community media, and the 2002 recipient of the Antioch College Alumni Association’s J.D. Dawson Award recognizing his contributions to the College. Bob is also the director of several dozen documentaries.

For further information contact: Bob Devine, 767-232-9906

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INVIGORATING THE LOCAL – Part 2 – 3/25/11

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INVIGORATING THE LOCAL with Brian Holmes & Claire Pentecost & the Compass Group

March 25, 2011

Chris Hill read the following introduction at this Nonstop event:

Welcome to the opening of Nonstop’s spring series Invigorating the Local: Conversations at the Intersection of Alternative Education, Open Media & Civic Participation.  Tonight is the first event in the series, and we expect there to be four more speakers in coming months, whose work converges around art making, open media practice and alternative education, and who will appear at Nonstop in person or via skype.

Tonight’s guests have all worked together as part of a cultural geography group called The Compass. All are also active as artists, critics, and teachers whose individual and collaborative work over the last decade has been about invigorating public space and accessible communications networks, addressing continental and global issues, and specifically engaging small communities in the American Midwest, drawing connections between the global and the local, the political and the poetic.  In his essay One World One Dream Brian Holmes suggests, following sociologist Ulrich Beck, that that “globalism is inseparable from a process of intensive individualism which is its other face, the flip side of the same basic currency.” The Compass Group has described their work as examining  “our collective existence on all the relevant scales: the intimate, the local, the national, the continental, and the global.” Nonstop’s Working Members and Board welcomes them in expanding their Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor project eastward by visiting us in Yellow Springs.

Our guests are a distinguished group. I want to just sketch briefly some of the projects with which they have been involved.

Perhaps it was my contact with Brian Holmes’ work in recent years that inspired this series. He has worked as a critic and editor on very important international media cultural projects such as serving as the English editor at Documenta X in 1997 in Kassel, Germany, and is a frequent contributor to nettime, an important international listserv that emerged out of a series of critical media conferences, the Next 5 Minutes, in the Netherlands in the mid-90s that cultivated important global conversations at the cusp of digital media and the emergence of the internet. His blog Continental Drift speaks in English, Spanish and French—he is a translator as well—and his recent publications such as Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society (2009) are collections of essays that mostly appeared first in Continental Drift.  In projecting where we might think about going with Nonstop, and also thinking back upon the events of the last 3 years that are part of the fabric of Nonstop and Yellow Springs, I found the following statement about connections between the realms of the intimate and the institutional, the local and the national, in his introduction to Escape the Overcode to be particularly relevant.

In Escape the Overcode, Holmes writes in his introduction:
“And so finally we reach the scale of intimacy, of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings, the scale that goes from families and lovers to people together on a street corner, in a sauna, a living room or a cafe. It would seem that intimacy is irretrievably weighted down in our time, burdened with data and surveillance and seduction, crushed with the determining influence of all the other scales. But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks. Only we can traverse all the scales, becoming other along the way. From the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks, it may be that intimacy and its artistic expressions are what will astonish the twenty-first century.”

Claire Pentecost teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she recently served as chair of the Photography Department and the president of the local AAUP chapter. With Brian Holmes she contributes to Continental Drift blog and an ongoing seminar with the 16 Beaver Group in NYC. She hosts a blog, the Public Amateur, that seeks to broaden discussion about transgenic plants and other investigations into science and agriculture. She is a keyholder/member of Mess Hall, an interdisciplinary cultural center in Chicago. She has also worked closely with the  Critical Art Ensemble, that published an important text dealing with cultural actions in electronic territory, The Electronic Disturbance (1994)

Rozalinda Borcila was educated in Cluj, Romania, has taught Sculpture and Expanded Media at University of South Florida, and most recently served as Visiting Faculty in Participatory Platforms at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. I have admired her work with BLW, an artists-activists collective in which she collaborated with Sarah Lewison, also a member of The Compass Group, and Julie Wyman. The group re-performed challenging political and cultural documents, usually speeches and interviews videotaped the early 1970s, a practice BLW describes as “re-speaking.”  One of the their provocative texts that remarks on this practice was published in the Journal for Aesthetics and Protest (2007).  Rozalinda is also a keyholder at Mess Hall in Chicago. Over soup earlier tonight she described her recent involvement with an inspiring alternative education project that evolved out of a neighborhood action by mothers and their children and that led to the creation of a library, that perhaps we will hear more about later.

Ryan Griffis teaches New Media at University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. His recent projects engage issues of migration and travel and include Temporary Travel Office. His site yougenics.net in informative and has links to other recent projects such as co-curating the exhibition Agriarts (2009) at George Mason University, and editing an issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #4.

Sarah Ross teaches as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at an Illinois state prison. She has been involved with the Urbana Books to Prisoners project and her website insecurespaces.net features a number of projects and articles. A recent video Experiments of Struggle profiles activists in small midwestern towns.

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Everybody has a story, whose content is subject to interpretation by its teller. In the case of Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute’s newest project, the storytellers are four area artists who have created three installations for “Local Stories — An Oral Histories Project.” The stories they tell are of the residents who live here and form the essence of the local landscape. An opening reception for the artists and their work will take place at Nonstop on Saturday, Sept. 25, at 7 p.m.

In a multimedia installation, Nonstop photographer Dennie Eagleson tells the story of Milly Bell Wallace, who lived a self-sufficient life on a farm in Medway for the better half of a century. Columbus area painter Ryan Agnew interprets the identity of the village of Yellow Springs through a series of watercolors based on walks he took through the town this summer. Local residents Jonny No and John Hempfling initiated an interactive work that encourages people to dialogue about making space for local youth and the relationship between local youth and the police.

The Local Stories project reflects an era in which the availability of personalized digital tools allows people to tell their own stories. According to Chris Hill, a Nonstop faculty member and curator of the Local Stories project, the idea coincides with a national celebration of the stories of average people. One popular example is the national StoryCorps project, which since 2003 has collected local oral histories from citizens around the country for the Library of Congress archives. Another example is the National Public Radio program “This American Life,” Ira Glass’ in-depth weekly broadcast about the “true stories of everyday people.”

“In the culture at large, because the possibility of recording is available through cell phones and simple editing tools like iMovie and Quicktime, more and more people are investigating using media” to tell their own stories, Hill said. But the availability of the tools also begs the question of which is the best way to engage an audience in telling a particular story?, she said.

Eagleson’s piece, entitled “Threshing Day, Medway, Ohio, 1934,” came about through a connection with Nonstop and Antioch College board member Don Wallace, who is Milly’s son and who lives on his family’s historic farm. Eagleson became interested in Wallace’s life as a Depression-era female farmer who canned up to 1,800 jars in a given year and provided a model of the subsistence living Eagleson currently strives toward. After Wallace left the farm in 1986, she donated four generations worth of letters, photos, music and other forms of correspondence that documented the life of an Ohio farm family to the Wright State University archives.

In her installation, Eagleson documents the family’s life through archival material as well as interviews with family members, photographs and sound recordings of the farm. The result is a portrait of a woman that stretches Eagleson as an artist using new media to communicate a story, she said.

The collection of watercolors entitled “Wildflower Honey” by Columbus-based painter Ryan Agnew also tells a local story, but in a more abstract way. Agnew spent many days this summer walking through the downtown, the cemetery, the Glen, Antioch College campus, sometimes talking to people he met, intending to absorb the essence of Yellow Springs and its life cycles. During his visits he painted the natural world around him, including birdhouses of the Glen, gravestones in summer light, and the bees in a beehive, all of which, he said, communicated the uniqueness of a village that is a source of inspiration, healing and wholeness.

The third installation is an interactive work in progress entitled “Public Prohibited/Minor Infractions: The Control and Criminalization of Youth Culture in Yellow Springs, Ohio.” The work is a partial documentary about youth perspectives on their loss of public space and their relationship with the local and area bodies of law enforcement. The work is also meant to be an invitation to dialogue within the art space at Nonstop and online about the danger of accepting a historic pattern of disenfranchising certain groups of people, No said. The issues speak to artists No and Hempfling, both former Nonstop students and founding members of the Yellow Springs Community Youth Council, created to address the lack of opportunity for civic engagement among youth.

“The project is an attempt to make sure that as a community we’re being self reflective and paying attention to the way we treat one another, especially those who have historically been marginalized,” No said.

Local Stories, funded in part by the Yellow Springs Community Foundation, is an artist in residency project and a continuation of last winter’s artist in residency at Nonstop, Hill said. The artists were chosen by jury, and the intent was to get a diverse spectrum of approaches and to engage artists from both within and outside of Yellow Springs.

“In some ways the work has to speak for itself, but different ways of approaching the work draws different kinds of insights out of it,” Hill said.

After Saturday’s opening, the Nonstop gallery will host open hours on Saturdays 1–4 p.m. through October. Visitors may also check the Nonstop Web site for additional open hours or make an appointment to view the art by calling Nonstop at 319-1075.

For Immediate Release

7/30/10

Antioch College presents a Faux-Real Theatre / Nonstop Institute Collaboration

CASTING NOTICE: THE FAUX-REAL THEATRE COMPANY, A NEW YORK BASED ENSEMBLE, IS SEEKING 6 MALE ACTORS FOR THEIR UPCOMING PRODUCTION OF OEDIPUS REX AT ANTIOCH COLLEGE
Rehearsals begin August 13th and the show runs from August 20th – August 22nd at the Antioch Amphitheater. If you are interested in being in the show please emai: fauxrealtheatre@aol.com or call 917-687-4998 as soon as possible.

The Faux-Real Theatre Company, a New York based ensemble is seeking six actors for their August, Yellow Springs production of Sophocles’ OEDIPUS REX (translation by Robert Fagles). Antioch College will be presenting the show which is a collaboration between the Faux-Real Theatre Company and the Nonstop Institute of Yellow Springs. The show will combine eight New York based actors from The Faux-Real Theatre Company with six local actors from Yellow Springs and the neighboring areas.
Rehearsals will be from Friday, August 13th – Thursday August 19th. Most of the rehearsals will be in the evening although there may be one or two daytime rehearsals. The performances will be on August 20th, 21st and 22nd, 6:00 PM at the Antioch College Amphitheater.

The Faux-Real Theatre Company is a not-for-profit ensemble that has been creating theatre in New York City and the neighboring areas since 1994. Shows created by Faux-Real have included William Shakespeare’s Haunted House (which ran seasonally in NYC for 10-years) FUNBOX (which ran throughout NYC for 2 years), The Tinderbox (which was performed in playgrounds throughout NYC over the course of two summers) and Htebcam (a backwards reincarnation of Macbeth). Faux-Real‘s style of performance is extremely physical and combines classic theatre techniques with elements of modern experimental theatre.

If you are interested in being in the show, please contact Mark Greenfield at fauxrealtheatre@aol.com or at 917.687.4998. We are interested in working with actors of all experience levels, so if you are excited by the prospect of trying something new, but don’t have a lot of experience, we are still interested in hearing from you. If possible, please email a photo of yourself along with either a resume or a short list of any theatrical experience you may have had. No payment or fees involved.

Never ones to be constrained by conventional thinking, members of Nonstop Institute are taking an unusual approach to bringing interesting thinkers to Yellow Springs. In their series of talks this spring on higher education, Nonstop used high-tech but low-cost methods to create dialogue between members of the community and some of the most provocative thinkers in the nation.

This method differs in several ways from the more customary approach of a passive audience listening to a talking head. The Nonstop series, via Skype and iChat, electronically connected the experts, who were sitting in their homes and offices around the country, with the discussion participants in Yellow Springs. The guest speakers, who generally give about a 20-minute introduction before an hour-long interactive discussion with audience members, seemed eager to engage, according to Nonstop member Dan Reyes, an organizer of the event with Iveta Jusova.

“I sense that they’re excited about being taken off the beaten path” for the events, Reyes said in an interview last week.

Nonstop will this month bring via teleconference its most well known guest yet, the political philosopher and activist Michael Hardt of Duke University. Hardt is the author, with Antonio Negri, of a trilogy of influential works on the political and cultural landscape, Empire, The Multitude and The Commonwealth.

The event takes place at 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 17, at the Nonstop campus in Millworks, 305 North Walnut Street. It is free and open to the public.

Published in 2000, Empire was a publishing blockbuster that went through 10 printings, unusual even for a commercial book, but unheard-of for a 500-page academic tome published by the Harvard University Press.

“How often can it happen that a book is swept off the shelves until you can’t find a copy in New York for love nor money?…Empire is a sweeping history of humanist philsophy, Marxism and modernity that propels itself to a grand political conclusion: that we are a creative and enlightened species, and that our history is that of humanity’s progress towards the seizure of power from those who exploit it,” according to Ed Vulliamy of The Observer. Emily Eaken, reviewer of the New York Times, wrote that the book “is filling a void in the humanties.”

Hardt and Negri’s thesis is that the modern influences of technology, globalization and new models of production are breaking down barriers both within and between individuals, leading to new political and cultural opportunities. On a global level, they believe, formerly dominant nation-states are losing power and unorganized masses of people, which they call “the multitude,” are gaining it. Overall, they see the trend as empowering for individuals and for democracy.

“They see the old boundaries breaking down as both a time of crisis and a chance to rethink the culture,” Reyes said. “Hardt has food for thought for us, regarding how to move forward into a new realm of possibilities.”

Hardt’s analysis covers culture as a whole, and the upcoming dialogue will consequently cover broader territory than the previous discussions that focused on higher education, Reyes said. However, the Hardt event will, like the earlier events, encourage participants to re-consider the status quo and open up to new paradigms.

“When this works, it has a great impact,” said Nonstop member Brian Springer, regarding the Nonstop dialogues. “If it’s really good, it can change your intellectual spirit.”

While organizers were somewhat surprised that someone of Hardt’s stature agreed to take part in an event sponsored by a tiny group in a tiny town, they feel his acceptance has to do with his being intrigued by Nonstop. All of the participants, including Hardt, waived charging a fee to Nonstop after hearing about the group and its mission.

“We’re interesting to him because he’s interested in institutions that are in the process of becoming, that are thinking outside the old playbooks,” Springer said.

No one could accuse Nonstop of not thinking outside the playbook. Formerly called Nonstop Antioch, the group of about 20 working and board members are mainly former faculty of Antioch College. When Antioch University shut down the college in 2008, Nonstop members organized to offer classes without a campus, with the former faculty teaching in churches and homes, and reaching out into the community. They did so out of a desire to carry on the traditions and values of Antioch College, several said at the time.

Part of the Nonstop members’ decision to focus their spring dialogue series on higher education was their desire to understand the forces that led to the college closure, according to Springer, who believes that while the Antioch closing was an extreme and unusual manifestation of the threat to higher education, the same forces threaten many institutions today. Speakers in the series included Cary Nelson, an Antioch College alumnus and president of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, Ashley Dawson of the City University of New York, who spoke about her research into threats to academic freedom, and Sheila Slaughter of the University of Georgia, who discussed the effects of economic forces on higher education.

The series was “an attempt to understand how cultural forces created the conditions that led to such a catastrophe” as the Antioch College closing, Springer said.

While some of the original Nonstop members are now working at the revived Antioch College, the college’s new staff is small, and everyone could not be rehired — many of the former college faculty remain at Nonstop, Springer said. The effects of the decision to close the college are still reverberating, including that many of the former college faculty are about to lose their unemployment compensation, he said.

While Nonstop was originally funded by Antioch College alumni, it is now totally funded — its estimated 2010 budget is about $30,000 — by grants, gifts and supporting memberships, according to Springer, and its all-volunteer staff donates about $300,000 in donated labor yearly.

While Nonstop members are encouraged that the college alumni successfully reclaimed the college, they believe that they still fill a significant role in the community. Because they are mainly former longtime academics, they have a wealth of interests and expertise, and they want to continue making contributions to the Yellow Springs community.

“I see Nonstop as a complement to the revitalized college and to the humanities department at McGregor,” Springer said. Because the group is small, “it has more mobility to move and change” than do traditional institutions.

“We’ve become a flexible set of intellectual resources,” he said.

Nonstop members believe that the Yellow Springs community is an excellent place to apply those resources.

“This is an interested place. It’s vibrant and the people are curious,” Reyes said. “It’s not hard to have conversations here about topics that might be difficult somewhere else.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com

Application deadline: June 8, 2010 – Apply Now

Nonstop Institute seeks proposals for its upcoming residency program Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project. The selected projects will incorporate an oral history (or histories) grounded in the lived experience of Yellow Springs and neighboring locales and can be expressed in a range of art disciplines and presentation formats. The proposals can be focused through subjects including but not limited to a person, a neighborhood, a period of history, or any of a community’s shared natural, cultural and civic resources. Application deadline is June 8, 2010.

The final installations can be 2-d or 3-d work, media-based, text-based, performative, interactive or combinations of these ways of engaging subject matter and audiences. The four selected residency artists (can also include documentarians, writers, cultural geographers, others involved with oral histories) will have access to workspace at Nonstop for 7 weeks starting June 14. Opportunities for dialogue among residency artists and producers is an important component of this on-site residency project. The final projects will be installed and exhibited in Nonstop’s spaces in early August, using either a section of Nonstop’s 2000 sq ft exhibition space or its virtual website space. Components of the projects can also occur as a performance or screening in Nonstop’s main space.

Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project invites applications by artists and documentarians working the southwestern Ohio region and will consider proposals by producers at any stage of their careers. Project jurying will be based on both the specific proposal for Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project and examples of past work. Four proposals will be selected, and at least two of the four will be current residents of Yellow Springs. Each artist selected will receive up to $150 for supplies. Further information and application forms will be available starting May 13 at this webpage.

This project is made possible in part by the generous support of the Yellow Springs Community Foundation.

For further information please contact Chris Hill at 937- 767-2327 or chris.hill@nonstopinstitute.org .

Purpose

Oral history making involves the recording, preservation and interpretation of historical information, based on the personal experiences, recollections, witnessing and opinions of individual speaker(s). Oral history making is grounded by an interview process characterized by open-ended questions and documented responses. For Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project Nonstop seeks proposals that will use a local oral history (or histories) as a major component of the artist residency. The proposed projects should be grounded in the lived experience of Yellow Springs and neighboring locales and can be expressed in a range of art disciplines and presentation formats. The proposals can be focused through subjects including but not limited to a person, a neighborhood, a period of history, or any of a community’s shared natural, cultural or civic resources. The final installations can be 2-d or 3-d work, media-based, text-based, performative, interactive or combinations of these ways of engaging subject matter and audiences. Components of the projects can also occur as a performance or a screening in Nonstop’s main space, or reside on Nonstop’s website. The proposals can be focused through subjects including but not limited to a person, a neighborhood, a period of history, or any of a community’s shared natural, cultural and civic resources.

General Information

Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project artist residencies will be housed in the former office area of the Nonstop Institute at 305 North Walnut Street, Yellow Springs, Ohio. The residencies will begin June 14, 2010. The floor plan and a brief video documenting the evolution of the space will be available on the website. Nonstop offers free studio space to eligible artists for a 7-week period, followed by a publicized exhibition of the final projects. Artists also have access to the facilities on a 24-hour basis with wireless Internet access and a shared meeting space. Selected artists will receive up to $150 for supplies. Other amenities include a viewing area for DVD, a shared Macintosh computer and a kitchen area with a microwave, refrigerator, water cooler and a coffee maker. Any special technical needs associated with the work should be described within the application.

Eligibility

Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project invites applications by artists working in the southwestern Ohio region and will consider proposals by artists working in all media and at any stage of their careers. A minimum of two residency artists selected will be Yellow Springs residents.

Selection Process

A panel of arts professionals and artists will review applications and select artists for the residencies. Artists will be selected based on the quality of their submitted work samples and their ability to integrate the conceptual framework of this project into the proposal for the residency. The selection process will be completed by the June 12, 2010. All applicants will be notified by email. Please do not call the office for selection results.

Useful Materials:

Residency Studios Floor Plan
Application Information (PDF)
Press Release

Deadline for applications: June 8, 2010

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GENERAL APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:

Applications consist of 2 parts:

1) Application Information must be submitted online (see form below).

2) Work Samples can be submitted online (see form below), or delivered by U.S. mail (see details below).

Work Samples can be submitted online (see ADD button below) or submitted on CD, DVD, or VHS tape and sent to Nonstop via U.S. Mail. Please submit work samples online if possible.

All submitted applications must be posted to the webpage on or before June 8, and all Work Samples must be posted to the website or received at Nonstop on or before June 8. Applications received after this date will be disqualified. Someone will be present at Nonstop to receive in-person delivered Work Samples from 3-5 PM on June 8.

If you are mailing in Work Samples (on CD, DVD or VHS tape), please mail to:

Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project
c/o Nonstop Institute
305 North Walnut St., Suite C
Yellow Springs, OH 45387

IMPORTANT—IF YOU ARE SENDING A CD, DVD or VHS TAPE and would like it returned, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) with proper postage. We will not be responsible for return of materials that do not include a SASE.

If you have any questions, please contact Chris Hill (937) 767-2327 or inquiries@nonstopinstitute.org

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APPLICATION FORM, RESUME & WORK SAMPLES

Please fill out the online application below. Notice that there are limits to the number of characters for the Artist Statement, Project Proposal, and Special Needs. We recommend that you write out these statements in Word or a similar program that has a Word Count first. The online form will not accept statements that contain more than the stated number of characters. Please note that the application form below cannot be saved between sessions.

After you fill out the Application form, please notice that you must also submit a RESUME and WORK SAMPLES, and instructions for submitting these elements of the Application continue below.

1. CONTACT INFORMATION—Please include phone contact info along with the rest of the requested info.

2. ARTIST STATEMENT—Write a statement about your work, your art-making or journalistic process, and how this residency opportunity will support your current work (limit= In 1500 characters).

3. PROJECT PROPOSAL—Describe your project proposal, or the process through which you will engage the ideas, subjects, topics and materials that relate to the Purpose statement of Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project artist residencies program (limit= In 1500 characters).

4. SPECIAL NEEDS—Include any possible technical needs that may be an issue with regards to the presentation of the work. There is no guarantee that your needs will be met, but we will do what we can based on our limited resources (limit= In 1500 characters).

5. RESUME—Your resume should be uploaded using the ADD FILES button below (as PDF or .DOC file). Your resume should include your name, address, phone number and email address along with your exhibition, screening, performance, and/or publication history and educational background.

6. WORK SAMPLES— Online work sample submissions can be uploaded using the ADD FILES button below. Please submit strong examples of your previous work. These Work Samples can be images, sound files, text files, or media (see specific instructions for each of these types of Work Samples below). Where possible, we encourage you to submit Work Samples that will give the reviewers some sense of how your past work connects to the project you are proposing for the Local Stories/An Oral Histories Project residency. We encourage you to submit ONE TYPE of Work Sample that is most relevant to the project you are proposing. If you think you need to submit more than one type of Work Sample (for example, both image files and sound files), then please contact inquiries@nonstopinstitute.org before June 5 so that we can speak with you about your decision and anticipate your submission. Please do NOT send original artwork.

a. IMAGE FILES—You may submit up to 20 images. Maximum size in any direction: 1000px. Image resolution: 72 dpi. Each image file should titled with your full name and a number that will correspond to the accompanying Image Script. Upload your images online using the ADD FILES button below. Image Work Samples must be submitted online.
IMAGE SCRIPT—The Image Script is a separate document (that should also be uploaded with the ADD FILES button) and that is numbered according to the Image Files submitted. You must submit the following identification for each image: Your Last Name, First Name, image number, Title, Dimensions, Materials, Date completed, and a brief description of the project (please limit to no more than 50 words for each project sample).

b. SOUND FILES—You may submit up to 12 minutes of sound files that represent up to 5 different projects (as excerpts or complete works). Please submit MP3 files only and submit online using the ADD FILES button. The reviewers will listen to the first 5 minutes. They may decide to listen to up to 12 minutes. Please number the submitted files in the order that you want the reviewers to start their listening. Your strongest work should be labeled #1. It can be an excerpt of a longer project. Please give careful consideration to what the reviewers will hear in the first 5 minutes. Each of the sound files should be titled with your full name and a number that will correspond to the accompanying Sound Script.

SOUND SCRIPT–The Sound Script is a separate document (that should also be uploaded with the ADD FILES button) and that is numbered according to the Sound Files submitted. If you submit an excerpt of a longer work, please indicate that the submission is an excerpt and indicate both the length of the excerpt and the length of the complete work. You must provide the following identification for each sound file submitted: Your Last Name, First Name, selection number, Title, excerpt duration, date completed, your role in the creation of this work and any information on collaborators (for example: John Smith, editor with Jane Doe recordist OR John Smith, composer and post-production, with Jane Doe and Peter Jones, musicians on violin and bass), and a brief description of the project (please limit to no more than 50 words for each project sample). Sound submissions must be made online.

c. MEDIA FILES (MEDIA PROJECTS, PERFORMANCE DOCUMENTATION)—You may submit up to 12 minutes of video on a DVD or VHS tape. The reviewers will watch the first 5 minutes. They may decide to watch up to 12 minutes. Please order/number the submitted projects in the sequence that you want the reviewers to start their viewing. Your strongest work should be labeled #1. It can be an excerpt of a longer project. Please give careful consideration to what the reviewers will watch in the first 5 minutes. Each of the video projects should be titled with your full name and a number that will correspond to the accompanying Media Script.
MEDIA SCRIPT–The Media Script is a separate document that should be printed out and accompany the numbered media work samples/chapters on the DVD or the sequential selections on the VHS tape. If you submit an excerpt of a longer work, please indicate that the submission is an excerpt and indicate both the length of the excerpt and the length of the complete work. You must provide the following identification and description for each media project submitted: Your Last Name, First Name, selection number, Title, excerpt duration, date completed, your role in the creation of this work and any information on collaborators (for example: Jane Doe, editor and sound with John Smith camera, OR Jane Doe, writer, performer, with Peter Jones and John Smith, media documentation, editor), and a brief description of the project (please limit to no more than 50 words for each project sample). Please submit media projects and media documentation of performances on DVD or VHS tape. Please test your DVDs and make sure that they play without problems. With VHS tapes, please make sure that when you submit them they are rewound and cued to the beginning of the first selection.

d. TEXT FILES—You may submit up to 25 pages of text. Please submit text-based Work Samples online. Your strongest work should be labeled #1. It can be an excerpt of a longer project. Each of the text-based projects should be titled with your full name and a number that will correspond to the accompanying Text Script.
TEXT SCRIPT–The Text Script is a separate document (that should also be uploaded with the ADD FILES button) and that is numbered according to the Text Files submitted. If you submit an excerpt of a longer work, please indicate that the submission is an excerpt and indicate both the length of the excerpt and the length of the complete work. You must provide the following identification and description for each text project submitted: Your Last Name, First Name, selection number, Title, excerpt length, date completed, and a brief description of the project (please limit to no more than 50 words for each project sample).

We understand that these directions on how to submit Work Samples involve careful attention to details. If you have any questions, please contact inquiries@nonstopinsitute.org. We will be monitoring this email address daily.

From this past week our second guest in this series, Professor Sheila Slaughter (University of Georgia, co-author with Gary Rhoades of Academic Capitalism and the New Economy), engaged the Nonstop audience in a discussion concerning the manner in which the new economy mode of academic capitalist thinking has become enmeshed with many dimensions of higher educational practice. Executive leaders, administrators, boards of trustees, but also many faculty are involved in enacting the current ascendancy of what Slaughter calls the “academic capitalist knowledge regime” over the “public good knowledge regime.” Whereas the public good regime views education and knowledge as a legitimate and reasonable expectation for all and to the benefit of all, the academic capitalist regime views education as a private service, and it handles knowledge as a commodity to be packaged, patented, marketed and sold.

Slaughter elaborated on a significant theme in her book concerning the essentially false promises academic capitalism proponents frequently make about turning students into “empowered customers.” In actuality, the marketing-centered university, perpetually hungry for tuition revenues, attends little to a broad consideration of individual educational needs and more commonly circumscribes student choice to the economic advantage of the organization. Despite aggressive promotion of representations to the contrary, academic capitalism in practice is not a good option for students, nor is it a good option for faculty labor, which faces increasingly less stable conditions of employment. Academic capitalist commercialization agendas quite frequently fail to cover the expense of the substantial additional administrative apparatus demanded as the cost of doing business. Slaughter provides us a great deal of food for thought and an occasion for exploring alternative ideas in efforts to move ahead.

Coming up on April 29 at 7 p,m., Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, joins Nonstop for the third teleconference installment in this series. Along with his long-standing work as a distinguished professor of modern poetry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Nelson is widely recognized as a committed advocate for socially-just institutional practice and higher education reform. His 25 books include the 2010 volume No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom. Nelson has worked tirelessly to expand the traditional academic dialogues concerning intellectual freedom and shared governance to include meaningful consideration of graduate student employee efforts in union recognition, as well as calling attention to the systematically exploitative conditions increasingly common in many colleges and universities’ reliance upon part-time and short-term-contract faculty who are responsible for a great deal of many institution’s educational work but enjoying virtually no job security. As AAUP president, Nelson has aimed to better enable that association for taking on the significant challenges facing American higher education today.

Frequently situated as a voice of social conscience in national debate on higher education, Professor Nelson remains attuned to his educational roots in Yellow Springs. As an Antioch College alumnus he understands the importance of the educational traditions long situated in this community. He has in recent years generously shared his ongoing educational research with Nonstop, and we are pleased to welcome him back to discuss the current situation for progressive liberal education and possible paths ahead.

by Dan Reyes & Iveta Jusova

originally appearing in 4/22 YSN “Other voices”