2021 Arts CO+RE Research Projects Selected

Project Overview

This project is a multi-year communal process culminating in a public performance centered around a full-scale blue whale skeleton, an enormous marionette suspended and “swimming” through the air of the University of Illinois Stock Pavilion. Using collected, recycled plastic, each of the 221 bones of the 110-foot-long skeleton will be built by area students and student-led organizations—a haunting, crowd-sourced ghost whale.

The work will feature performers in old-fashioned deep sea diving costumes, large-scale video projection, a live chorus, music, and the story of the Pioneer Inland Whaling Association that toured a rotting whale carcass across the Midwest in 1881 on the flatbed of a train. Blue whales are thought to be the largest animal to ever inhabit our planet. The creature’s vast size might represent our need, our hope, and our difficult ecological moment. CETACEAN will create an emotional communal event while serving as an educational platform built to discuss environmental systems, climate change, and resilience, and embody collaborative processes, sustainability, and interdisciplinary storytelling.

Research Team

• David "Deke" Weaver, Professor of New Media
• Jennifer Allen, Choreographer, Performer Susan Becker, Costume Design
• John Boesche, Video Projections Design Terri Ciofalo, Production/Technical Consultant
• Jamie Jones, Research Consultant James Lo, Composer/Sound Design
• Jorge Lucero, Social–Practice/Art-Education Consultant, Performer
• Andy Warfel, Production Design
• Jayne Wenger, Dramaturg
• Aimy Wissa, Bio-Design/Engineer Consultant

Project Overview

This multidisciplinary community based arts-program and public art project incorporating public art, oral history, storytelling, writing, visual arts, access, and subjective, nonnormative experience supports engagement with local members of the arts and disability communities, innovative learning experiences for students, and new discoveries in intersectional arts access. With support from this grant we will pilot a public art project that exposes pre-health professional students to the lived experience and embodied understanding of disability, which will support and promote artists and individuals with disabilities living in Champaign-Urbana. Through this work, we will foster sustainable and meaningful relationships with community members who have disabilities as well as the organizations who work with them, while identifying and addressing barriers between campus and the greater community by focusing on access and inclusion. Collectively, we have conceived of a program to benefit both PACE consumers and undergraduate students, while strengthening the relationship between our campus and the C-U disability community.

This project furthers the university’s mission of discovery, engagement, and innovative learning by prioritizing learning through first-hand experience in sustainable and equitable partnerships. Issues concerning disability—from innovative medical research, lectures, and laboratories to courses geared toward learning about disability culture—often fail to prioritize and collaborate with actual individuals with disabilities. Interactions often take place in laboratory settings, which sustains hierarchies between normal/non-normal and care-giver/patient and reinforces campus/community divides. AHS prepares students for careers in the health sciences where they will interact with people, patients, and clients of diverse abilities. These students, particularly those enrolled in AHS’s undergraduate disability studies minor, will have the opportunity to collaborate with differently abled community members through co-creating a public art project meant to spotlight the experience of individuals with disabilities on our campus and in our community. PACE consumers will be supported in sharing their experience as people with diverse disabilities, and they will ultimately be contributing to awareness and change around access and inclusion on both campus and in the region. Engaging with these complex and intersectional issues through creative practice has the potential to offer transformative, reciprocal experiences for both students and PACE consumers. The final work of art will not only be the result of, but will also be dependent upon, interdependent creative explorations of our campus and the city of Urbana which will result in a public art project in both places.

Research Team

• Liza Sylvestre, Curator of Academic Programs at Krannert Art Museum
• Rachel Storm, Program Director of the Urbana Arts and Cultural Program
• John Kosciulek, Professor of Kinesiology and Community Health
• Sherry Longcor, Program Director at PACE, Inc

Champaign-Urbana Virtual Performance Commons

This project seeks to take advantage of this moment to assist artists in presenting their work digitally and train those who desire to learn to use these tools themselves.

Project Overview

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the shuttering of performance spaces at the university and in the community for arts practice and research. The means of connecting to audiences shifted to digital spaces and the once familiar ways in which performing arts had been presented were no longer accessible. This left artists largely on their own to learn to navigate new technologies, find ways to connect to their audiences, and experiment in mediums and formats they never previously employed. As the effects of the pandemic fade, there is an opportunity to build on the work done by performing artists and continue their exploration of digital mediums. Our project seeks to take advantage of this moment to assist artists in presenting their work digitally and train those who desire to learn to use these tools themselves. The project will provide artists a space where they have access to professional video and audio equipment and the expertise of a team of creative partners who will work with them to explore the possibilities and limitations that accompany adapting their work to a digital medium. Further, it will enable artists to investigate and attempt new types of performance afforded by the use of technology otherwise unavailable to them.

The need for this project is clear for both the community and the university. Nearly every stakeholder involved in this project has sought to present their work virtually during the pandemic and continue the practice and development of their craft. This has led to exploration, much experimentation, and also revealed the limitations of equipment and the importance of expertise and know-how in adapting performance to a digital medium. This virtual commons will provide access to technology, expertise, a performance space, and a production studio that will allow artists to capture performances, broadcast their work, learn new skills, and develop new concepts and approaches to their craft.

The benefits of this program go beyond just the needs of artists and extend into the audiences and communities that they are trying to reach. The creation and distribution of digital content opens access to these performances to those who may not be able to attend performances in person. It will help bring the performances to the disabled, those in isolation due to the pandemic, former community members and alumni who live elsewhere, prospective students, individuals with personal, work, and family commitments that limit their ability to attend live performance, and those around the globe who have an interest in the arts generally. The involvement of various stakeholders from the university and community in a consolidated virtual space will help to increase awareness of the arts for each other locally, with the goal of increasing engagement for all parties.

Further, the project will provide completed high-quality recordings for the performers, public broadcast of the works (online and on local television), and public online access to the performances thereafter. This aspect of the project will serve the stakeholders in several ways. Having copies of high-quality representations of their work may help some artists access future professional and creative opportunities. Public broadcast will expand the reach of their artistic performance and increase engagement with the community. Long-term public access to these recordings will give artists a place to direct interested audiences and collaborators while also bringing diverse audiences to a single space to access these performances.

Research Team

• Jake Metz, Media Commons Technology Specialist, University Library
• Charles Harris, Multi-Instrumentalist, Producer, Songwriter, Sound Engineer, Entertainment Curator, and Music Venue Owner
• Marten Stromberg, Rose Bowl Tavern Owner