Artisode; 1.6; Patrick Nagatani

real big it tastes so good it's a miracle Big big look at this feeling Leonardo is artists going out and establishing a relationship with the environment. Leonardo has a ball and it's become more ephemeral. It's more involved with things that are actions and processes, less products. It's moved even further from this notion of art that is an object to commodity, something that you can put in your house in a match as the couch.

But it was fundamentally about people moving out of the gallery, out of the studio, and making the environment the studio. When I started the Leonardo's program, which was to take students out and give them a chance to interact with the world, my feeling was that they were part of the, you know, no child left and doors generation. And so we try and give them direct physical contact with real sites that they learn with their bodies, not just with their minds. They're not studying slides on a wall, they're actually walking on the spiral jetty. And we try and give them a time experience that they just can't have an American culture, where you're going from your lattes to your cell phone, to your text messaging, to three classes a day to your job, to your roommates, and that sort of rapid turnover really doesn't give you right brain much of a chance to be creative.

So we try and create a sort of open, continuous seamless time, where people can work on the same projects for days on end, where they can wander, where they can get lost, where they can find themselves again. And ideas can come to them in a way that really is more on the creative right brain side than on the logical left brain. The students today come with a much more playful position. They see humor as being a very integral part of our relationship to everything. And they're not burdened by this need to make monuments and to do, quote unquote, serious work. I would say that this generation is more willing to be just really out front about the fact that they are, in fact, playing, and that's not something to be ashamed of, there's content. We have slowly pulled back from engaging with the environment,

and we think of ourselves as being the problem, so we pull back more, and so then it becomes the other. And at this point, we don't have skills, we don't have knowledge, we don't know the cycles of the moon, we don't understand why we have summer vacations, and we're just completely removed from the kind of natural cycles. And so it's easy to become fearful of them. And then if you have a government that's selling fear as a mode to control us, that's another easy way to control people is they could be afraid to go outdoors. We're going to have to figure out a new relationship to this planet, and it's not about making stuff, there's plenty of stuff. We have to think about how we as humans can be in balance with our planet. And so doing things as artists that start to speak to a much gentler approach to the environment, leaving less trace, making less things, and a more intimate involvement,

actually looking and hearing and seeing and smelling the world that you're in, that seems to me that's something that I can bring to this period.