Slot Shelters

Besides wrapping up two art projects with elementary schools, I am in the process of designing a collaborative student art project for next year. I have been stewing on this idea for a while as I was inspired to expand upon ideas and processes I developed in the You Are Here Banner Project. I will be working with artist Pantea Karimi. She will be teaching some of the lesson workshops in San Jose and Cupertino. Here is a very rough draft of a Prezi presentation on the project. I will be looking for grant funding for this project and hope to be working with several Silicon Valley elementary schools and schools abroad. We have interest from a school in Hawaii and one in Mumbai, India. We are also looking for a Scandinavian school to participate.

I will be building out shell of the site soon and fleshing out this Prezi. One image that I will be swapping out is the screen grab of the Google Sketch Up; this sketch up test does not accurately represent what the students will be doing. They will be building buildings, not leaning cards. They will be using unique textures they create and the results will be a patchwork of interesting surfaces and textures on their collaborative buildings.

Likewise, the large scale slot cards will different in the final product...they will be dramatically printed (by In Printz in Sunnyvale) with the student's photos and Repper Pro patterns.

I am looking forward to working with Pantea. She has already had the great idea of creating specific themes and categories for students to explore through their pattens and photos. It have been great to have another artist to brainstorm with and who can visualize the challenges and path of the project lessons.

The project will result in: student designed slot playing cards which are downloadable from the website, Google Sketch Up collaborative buildings, and large scale slot cards for public art installations.

I first began thinking of slot cards several years ago when I saw Todd Gilens' work with slot cards and then this past year in Sweden saw Totem cards by the Dutch company, Kidsonroof. I began to brew on this idea which really jumps off of the You Are Here Street Banner Project investigation of community in pattern and photography.