WE LOVE TO IMPROVISE

magazine

JULY 2010

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Cover: Drumming icon Leon Mobley kicked off a European Tour with Damian Marley and Nas at Paris’ “Le Zenith” on June 28th, 2010 (Leon produced the original MIMA song entitled “Mulheres” in Rio de Janeiro that can be found in the videos section of the MIMA website).

NEWS

PAGESPARIS 3-4CREATE TODAY 5-7STREET ART in Paris 7ANNOUNCEMENT: Breaking down borders 9

Photographs by Christoph A. Geiseler 1-10

Edited and Published by Christoph A. Geiseler

CONTENT

NOTEWORTHY

Paris 1 July 2010FRANCE

Dear MIMA:

July 1 marks 100 days until we celebrate our 10-year anniversary in New York City. The most important thing is for us not to lose sight of the long view, or what happens after October 2010. Now is when we start talking about and planning projects for 2011. Now is the time to start dreaming. If you could be anywhere a year from now, where would it be and what would you be doing?

I have very high hopes that the MIMA conference at Princeton will cre-ate a media buzz for our organization and the wonderful work that everyone has been doing over the last several years. We will trumpet the creation of our teaching Methodology and the professional development of our staff. We will give birth to a new website in the coming months and usher in a new era of communicating our dreams with the outside world.

CHRISTOPH A. GEISELER MIMA Founder and Executive Director

the magazine JULY 2010

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Once a year on June 21, the streets of Paris ring with the sounds of thousands of

musicians playing whatever they want. This is called “Fête de la musique”. Anyone

and everyone can play anywhere, but, ironically, it only starts in the evening.

What can we do to help?

INSPIRE: Fête de la Musique permits the public to unite as a music community.

TRANSFORM: Nighttime musicians can also play at monuments in daytime.

CREATE: Tourists form a captive audience for a music video or public spectacle.

CELEBRATE: Film and archive the day’s work and celebrate your work at night.

PARIS

The US Embassy hosted a day-long symposium at the residence of the US Ambassador Charles Rivkin on June 24, 2010 to unite 100 cultural entrepreneurs and leaders of local Arts organiza-tions in Paris. Create Today sparked an intercul-tural dialogue about start-up challenges facing entrepreneurs in the United States and France and focused on the link between technology and Art; how can technology be used to raise money and garner support for new cultural initiatives?

Panelists at “Create Today” included Rhode Is-land School of Design President John Maeda, Fred Benenson from Kickstarter.com and Presidents and curators of French cultural institutions like the Mayor’s Office, the Parc de la Villette and the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art.

I sat in the last seat of the panel, representing MIMA.

John Maeda gave the keynote presentation, sprin-kling his talk with anecdotes about his career as an artist in the USA and Japan, and as the for-mer director of MIT’s renowned Media Lab. John joked around; “When I went to study with my mentor in Japan, he said I should become a pro-fessor. When I asked him ‘Why?’, he responded, ‘so you can teach your students to grow up and then conquer you one day.”

PARIS JOURNALCREATE TODAY

US EMBASSY EVENT

by Christoph A. Geiseler

Create Today sparked an intercultural dialogue about start-up challenges facing entrepreneurs in the United

States and France

John Maeda explained that sci-entists are looking for new ways to connect science and Art. “It’s about body control, and therefore we have to understand the body.” He ex-plained that DESIGN is about making solutions and ART is about making questions. “Art humanizes technol-ogy and makes it understandable,” he said. “The right combination of intu-ition, design, emotion and Art lead to innovation.”

Fred Benenson from Kickstarter.com described his company’s innovative platform for funding and following creative projects online, which pro-vides an alternative to the typical “grant-making” process. The issue at stake is the “value exchange” for Internet users who can financially support creators and projects that wouldn’t ordinarily be able to find funding. He said, “people want to feel that they’re supporting something they care about, and project creators do not necessarily want to give up equity to get their projects off the ground. Kick-starter provides indi-viduals with a great sense of freedom.” The French panel-ists, like Leanne Sac-ramone, a curator at the Cartier Founda-tion, discussed the importance of giv-ing a voice to undis-covered artists and using the ample spaces throughout

Paris to provide them with a stage to present their new works.

As I sat before the crowd and waited for my turn to speak, I started daydream-ing about my youth as a participant in Karate tournaments. In a Karate tour-nament, you compete to receive the highest scores from the judges by out-performing the people before you. Usu-ally, expectations are very high in the beginning of an event, and, over time, the audience gets tired and the judges become less impressed. If you do some-thing radically different, you can catch everyone off guard and overcome de-pressed expectations. As the youngest and final panelist, what could I do dif-ferently?

“DESIGN is about making solutions and ART is about making questions”

—John Maeda

I invited everyone to get up. I quickly launched a MIMA teaching exercise that is perfect in a classroom setting with kids, called “Oh eh le le”. The activity is a “follow-the-leader” exercise designed to teach musical call and response and break the ice. After several minutes of chest-pounding, clapping and singing in the Am-bassador’s residence, I felt a tectonic shift occur inside the space. Everyone started laughing and singing, “O ele palua palue”. The divide between panelists and audi-ence immediately disappeared and every-one was finally comfortable enough to ask questions and share personal anecdotes. I explained the importance of bringing people together in collective group set-tings; “Chaos, order and silence are foun-dations of an improvised and interactive experience. Music exercises can help non musicians focus on the “body” and feel at ease next to people they do not know. It is important to build a feeling of com-munity and solidarity wherever we are so that we can promote meaningful human relationships.”

A group of French rappers at the event grabbed the microphones and started complaining about the glass ceiling that lies very low in French society, particularly for minorities. In marginalized communi-ties in France, individuals lack easy access to information, so technology gives them an advantage in school or in the job mar-

ket. Individuals still suffocate, however, in a social greenhouse because modern me-dia streams into their lives like the after-noon sun, yet they have no room to grow or escape.

I started to think to myself about ways to help people overcome difficult challenges in the job market in a society like France, particularly where technology creates a vacuum. I realized that if the system can’t change over night, we need to help train talented local leaders to stand up for change and spread positive social val-ues. We need to equip teachers with the skills to manage chaotic classroom situ-ations. Independent musicians need to learn about cultural diplomacy and how to use interactive performances to inspire disadvantaged youth to fall in love with the Arts. French social entrepreneurs can learn about nonprofit business strategies that work in other countries. We should offer French university students with on-line support networks, which could also reinforce mutual understanding between cultures.

John Maeda eloquently summed up the feeling of the event in several words: “people always look for painkillers, but it seems like we can only provide vitamins. Technology can help you cut in line when you are waiting for support and funding, which is one way of speeding up the painful waiting game.” At this point I chimed in, “technology is great to cut in line and speed up the waiting game, but just make sure you have all your papers in order when your name gets called.”

I felt a tectonic shift occur in-side the space. Everyone start-ed laughing and singing, “O ele palua palue”

STREET ART IN PARIS

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