Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is honoured to announce two exciting opportunities for our 2018 Summer Institute post-graduate research program.

Session I, June 25 – July 6, 2018: “Thumbs that Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network” with acclaimed curatorial and media artists, DIS, facilitated by Marco Roso and collaborators.

Session II, August 6-24, 2018: “Site/ation” by BUSH gallery facilitated by celebrated trio of artists, writers, educators and curators, Tania Willard, Peter Morin, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill.

Both sessions are invested in alternative frameworks and sites for curatorial and exhibition research and practice; with corollary interests in labour, including systems of value and exchange.

Plug In ICA Summer Institute Session I:
June 25- July 6, 2018
DIS: “Thumbs that Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network”

A guide for this brave new world that might help us understand how to be and how to live, love, and work in our bodies in this techno-capitalist context. – Marco Roso

For Session I of our Summer Institute research program, Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present DIS. Over the duration of the Institute Marco Roso and collaborators will facilitate “Thumbs That Type and Swipe: The DIS Edutainment Network”. The session will be grounded in discussions that centre on media and the visual arts; offering directed, one-on-one conversations with Roso and guests, as well as group activities that privilege participants and their ongoing work.

The seminar circles around a series of exhibitions organized by DIS and framed by dis.art, a new streaming edutainment platform. Through direct engagement with the artists of dis.art, the session will contemplate a series of linked concerns, including: the nature of belonging in a rootless-seeming, networked world; the changing relationship to the ways one owns, lends or gives time through occupations, bodies, or other forms of value-creation. Some of the topics DIS will covered will be: Money: what is it?; information consumption; the future of citizenship; reparations; love and humor.

Participants will engage in a series of exercises and activities in response to the themes of the Institute. These will range in form and approach, and may include the production of short videos, bike rides, city walks, screenings and guest lectures. Participants will be encouraged to produce individual work generated through our collective thinking and peer-to-peer engagement. The workshop is open to visual artists of all kinds as well as writers, critics and scholars.

DIS is a New York based collective best known for DIS Magazine (2010-2017), and curating the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2016). DIS has become an umbrella for a number of networked and collaborative platforms – all of which reimagine one format or another.

Today DIS is focused on dis.art. While remaining true to the novel approaches to critical inquiry that defined life as a magazine, DIS is now focused on redefining entertainment and education through the new streaming platform on dis.art.

DIS enlists writers, filmmakers, and artists to offer new forms of genre-bending edutainment that help cut through the atomization and polarization that defines the noisy, disjointed mediasphere. In the last century, public television programming meant that quality information, education and artistic formats could go hand in hand.

Applications are now closed. Associated programming will be posted online and on our social media. Sign up to our newsletter to receive regular updates!

Plug In ICA extends our heartfelt gratitude to our generous donors, valued members, and dedicated volunteers. You make a difference.

We sincerely thank the RBC Foundation for the direct support of our Summer Institutes.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. We thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of our 2016 and 2017 program.

Plug In ICA relies on community support to remain free and accessible to all, and enable us to continue to present excellent programs. Please consider becoming a member of Plug In ICA and a donor at https://plugin.org/support or by contacting Angela Forget: angela@plugin.org