Read more at Love Balm for My Spirit Child.

Artist-Investigator Michelle Wilson invites you to become a shareholder in her Carbon Corpus project:

Carbon Corpus, is an examination of environmental issues and alternative economies. This project aims to not only examine how to make less of a carbon footprint, but also to scrutinize and critique the difficulties of achieving this goal in modern society, particularly in regards to food choices. I will begin this project by selling the animal-based carbon credits to my own body to “shareholders.” In exchange for their purchase, I will eat a vegan diet for the period of time they purchase.

A “share,” defined by this project, will be a week’s worth of time, during which I will eat a vegan diet. For this Initial Public Offering, a share costs $50.

All shareholders will receive a stock certificate, printed on handmade paper. During the course of the project, I may also invite some investors to participate in interviews to discuss their reaction to becoming shareholders, and what sort of permissions they feel such a purchase grants them. These interviews will be video recorded.

The project will culminate with a vegan meal for shareholders later this summer. There will be no additional charge for the dinner.

Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in becoming a shareholder, or if you have any questions regarding this project – michelle@michellewilsonprojects.com. And I invite everyone to follow the project on the blog – carboncorpus.blogspot.com.

Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,

Michelle Wilson

Carbon Corpus

Chief Executive Officer

 
Full Balcony is a crowd sourced video performance based on Shakespeare’s famous balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Cast from online submissions of professional and non-professional actors worldwide, Full Balcony will feature hundreds of Romeos and Juliets remixed into a single video installation exhibited online and at “the Bruns” – home to California Shakespeare Theater this summer.

Here’s how you can participate!

Using a webcam or the built in camera on a laptop, film yourself playing the role of Romeo, Juliet, or both simultaneously.  Send us a copy of that performance, and be part of a unique crowd-sourced production broadcast to thousands of people worldwide.

Submissions will be accepted thru June 7th, 2013.

 Full details and how to participate at www.fullbalcony.org

What is known:

- The piece is called “Cheers!”

- It will take place at the Lone Star Saloon, a queer bar in the SoMa that generally caters to bears and bear admirers. As one of the oldest bear bars in SF, Lone Star has a long history in the community which makes it very compelling for this project.

- I want to know more about two generations of gay men (separated by the AIDS epidemic) and their relationship to bar culture.

- We have two phases for the project – research in May and development of structures and material in September. There will be 6 performances in October. We will be rehearsing in the bar during business hours. Awesome!

- For this investigation, I’ve recruited two wickedly creative and wonderfully brave artists – Mica Sigourney and Stanley Frank. We enter this project with no firm ideas for what the piece will be and no structures I’m determined to explore. We will discover this in the process, either because the process demands it of us, or because we finally got to a point where these things are needed and the process was not delivering.

There are five statements I’ve been sitting with at the moment that I’m sure will inform my investigation (a shout out to Tere O’Connor who prompted some of these thoughts):

1) Being messy and disobedient are opportunities, not problems.

2) Be attentive to our impulses, though not necessarily driven by them.

3) Spend less time thinking about what might be the right answer, and more time practicing variations and seeing what emerges. Try different approaches, and let the comparisons shape the work.

4) Be mindful of product, but let the process be the driver.

5) We’re not trying to be amazing, but it’s fine if that happens.

The ten selected projects present a wide range of topics explored in various mediums, from a QR-code based, choose-your-own adventure play, to multiple responses to the ongoing problem of violence in Bay Area cities, to a crowd-sourced video of hundreds of people performing the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Each Artist-Investigator will receive a $3,000 stipend, plus $1,000 for project expenses.

This site will feature an in-depth look at each project over the next few months and more information about how to connect with the different projects as they evolve.

You can read the RFP here.

The ten selected Artist-Investigator experiments are:

Chris Black

Black is collaborating with students from Marshall Elementary School in San Francisco to develop a dance-based, site-specific performance exploring the students’ relationships to the school’s physical and cultural environment.

Arielle Julia Brown

The Love Balm Project will curate a series of site-specific performances—based on the play Love Balm for My SpiritChild—throughout Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose featuring testimonies from Bay Area mothers who have lost children to systemic violence.

Desdemona Chiang

Chiang will create a short (30-minute) interactive “play” engaging individual audience members in a choose-your-adventure structure via mobile technology and QR code.

Debby Kajiyama and José Navarrete

The Anastasio Project is a mobile, multidisciplinary street performance work using the stories of Rodney King and Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas as inspiration to investigate race relations with East Oakland youth.

Jo Kreiter

Kreiter is launching a site-specific performance project in partnership with Quesada Gardens Initiative, College Track, and 10 young women ages 14–18. The project responds to the transformation of one street in the Bayview District of San Francisco, where neighbors have radically remade their block from a junkie paradise to an inspired greenway that encompasses several community gardens. She will be assisted by dance artist Jennifer Chien. As part of the project, the public can attend aerial dance performances by youth on July 13 at 12 and 2pm in Quesada Gardens.

Susie Lundy

Sky Burial is a publicly installed, community-processional project composed of 131 hand-crafted, mixed-media wings exhibited throughout Oakland at each homicide site, commemorating individual murder victims of 2012. The wings will be on display at La Peña Cultural Center in April and May 2013 before they are installed throughout the city in June. There will be an opening reception for the exhibit at La Peña on April 20 from 5-7pm.

Kegan Marling

With a whiskey-ginger in hand, choreographer Marling inhabits two local queer pubs to listen to stories of bartenders and regulars about gay role models and growing up during the AIDS epidemic—all the while mining for performance structures relevant to how each community absorbs art.

David Szlasa

Full Balcony is a crowd-sourced video performance of the balcony scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Michelle Wilson

In Carbon Corpus, artist Wilson sells the animal-based carbon credits of her body in order to scrutinize and critique environmental issues, food systems, and alternate economies.

Dan Wolf

Corner Collisions will be sounds, songs, and scenes collected from and performed on nine street corners in the San Francisco Bay Area.