Pilot Studies
Pilot Studies
Pilot Studies is an ongoing publishing project, initiated by InCUBATE and involving a wide range of collaborators, to gather strategies and perspectives on how to organize and support noncommercial, grassroots and community-based creative projects. Pilot Studies takes the form of short booklets containing reflections, essays, how-to guides, and interviews, written by artists, arts administrators, and creative thinkers across the country. We launched PilotStudies at the Open Engagement conference at Portland State University in May 2010. Since initiating this project, we realized that in order to make Pilot Studies an actual resource for creative organizers locally and nationally we need to both distribute it widely and to give this project a sustainable infrastructure of time, space and money.
We started InCUBATE with a few simple ideas and questions about money. How could we better understand the lack of funding for alternative and innovative cultural work? Is it possible to develop new infrastructures to qualitatively affect artists' lives? And through organizing projects locally and nationally over the last three years, we realized there was a network of people asking the same questions.
The way artists, organizers and administrators go about acquiring necessary resources is just as creative an endeavor as how those resources are then utilized. We see artists in different contexts talking about support structures they want to create and sharing strategies on how to organize independently. We've been a part of discussions amongst people working in institutions about the challenges inherent to bringing those on the outside in. At the same time, there seems to be an incredible amount of enthusiasm these days for projects developing alternative economies, education, food, artworlds, and other infrastructures that organize daily life. The question then becomes, how can we bring these conversations together and produce new possibilities built upon these different beliefs and experiences. How we can get more ambitious?
Therefore, we propose to use the Propeller Grant to continue writing, commissioning and publishing further issues but also to expand the project’s scope and format in a number of ways. We will:
(1) Commission 8 new issues of the publication.
(2) Host free and public talks by guest authors of future booklets.
(3) Design and launch a dedicated Pilot Studies website to make available free downloadable pdfs of each issue, as well as recorded interviews, blog posts, and public event info.
(4) Host a monthly Pilot Studies reading group. All sessions will be free and open to the public with the intention of working through the ideas, philosophies, and histories central to the nature of the Pilot Studies program. Furthermore, this reading group will allow us to establish a type of experimental curriculum and collection of texts regarding practices of radical arts administration.
There are also many topics we want to explore and projects we want to highlight, including the new Community Supported Art program in Minneapolis, artist projects that are experimenting with bartering and other alternative economies, and debating the pros and cons of becoming a low-profit limited liability company (L3C) rather than a traditional non-profit 501(c)3. We feel like it is especially necessary to present these creative projects and ways of making-do alongside each other in order to inform and expand the boundaries of art administration as a creative practice.
Pilot Studies is a way of presenting these investigations in printed form that can represent the cultural activity in Chicago to itself and a national audience but can also function as a platform to collaboratively pool resources, share histories on what has already been done, and imagine the conditions for an ethical and critical art world that would support its constituents. We hope that the open-ended and multifarious framework of Pilot Studies will provide a place of reflection for people involved with the arts and allow them to imagine what kind of art communities we want to maintain and build for ourselves here in Chicago.
