Plotform is a collective formed by Jane D. Marsching + Andi Sutton in the spring of 2012 with the aim of creating projects activating engagement with our local ecologies. Our projects activate the interconnectedness of riparian species by scrambling strategies from ecological design, craftivism, communication engagement, tactical urbanism, interspecies communication, micronations, and empathetic making.

The core team is:

Jane D. Marsching explores our past, present and future human impact on the environment through interdisciplinary and collaborative research-based practices.  Projects have been sited in museums and galleries as well as other diverse locations including: weather observatories, public parks, city streets, radio waves, and the internet.  She has worked with scientists, educators, kite builders, meteorologists, artists, and musicians, among others.  Recent exhibitions include: Galerie Lucy Mackintosh, Lausanne, Switzerland; the ICA Boston; MassMoCA; and the San Jose Museum of Art, CA. She has received grants from Creative Capital, LEF Foundation, Artadia and Artists Resource Trust.  She is also an author and editor and her most publication is: Far Field: Digital Culture, Climate Change and the Poles, edited with Andrea Polli, with essays by Marsching and ten other international artists and scholars (Intellect 2012).  She was a cofounder and member of Platform2: Art and Activism, an experimental forum about creative practices at the intersection of social issues (2007-2012).   Recent Platform2 events include: Brown Fields Bear Food: An Urban Forage through Backyards, City Parks, and Brownfields, and Wearable Gardens: Designing Wearable Devices for At-risk Plant Migration. (www.platform2.info)   At Massachusetts College of Art and Design she is Associate Professor and Sustainability Fellow, and is working to create an interdisciplinary concentration in Sustainability.    www.janemarsching.com

Andi Sutton is an artist whose practice explores the ways that performance art methodology can create new models for community development and social engagement.  Working in a solo and collective context, her projects incorporate food, agriculture, television and street intervention, video, performance, and installation. Her works have been shown internationally at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (Los Angeles, CA, USA), The Western Front, (Vancouver, BC, Canada), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA, USA), the Yogyajarta New Media Art Laboratory (Yogyajarta, Indonesia), the SMART Museum (Chicago, IL, USA), Universidad Nacional (Bogota, Colombia), the Anthology Film Archives (New York), the MIT Museum (Cambridge, MA), among others. An avid collaborator, she is a member of  The National Bitter Melon Council (www.bittermelon.org) which uses the form of a vegetable promotion board to create public projects that use the flavor and emotion of bitterness – and Bitter Melon – to spark dialogue about difference, foreignness, and community, and explore the boundaries between art and life.  Combining performance art and community development practice, the Bitter Melon focused events of the NBMC creates projects that propose alternative models for community and coming together and spark dialogue about bitterness, foreignness, and flavor.  She also co-produced, from 2007-2012, the public art and dialogue event series Platform2 (www.platform2.info) a performance happening and discussion series that promotes discourse about art and social engagement Among Andi’s art and community building work has also included a curatorial practice. From 2004 – 2006 she co-developed and co-curated the Berwick Research Institute’s Public Art Incubator Program, an artist-run residency program for artists working in the public sphere.  Sutton has received grants from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Council for the Arts and the LEF Foundation and is the winner of the MFA Traveling Scholars Award (2010) and, along with The National Bitter Melon Council, the Artadia Art Award (2007). She graduated in 2003 from a combined degree program between Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston with a BA in Women’s Studies and a BFA in interdisciplinary studies, focusing  on performance art, video, and installation. She currently works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Communications and Program Manager for the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, is a passionate cook and gardener, and can’t help but incorporate each, metaphorically and literally, into her work. andisutton.net

 

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    We have been lucky to work with amazing artists, scholars, scientists, designers, etc.  Here are some:

    Marc McNulty is a sound artist and consummate observer of neurochemical activity as the temporary residence of memory and identity. Marc composes using analog and digital systems in a data driven, yet error prone (human) manner. He deeply explores digital signal processing and the radio frequency spectrum.
    Marc’s work includes: data visualizations, multi-channel sound installations, sound diffusions and cinema for the ear. Marc has performed throughout North America and Europe.  www.earphone.org

    Katherine Louise Mitchell is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and administrator.  Her work is practiced internationally in venues including SomArts Cultural Center, 66balmy Gallery, Crucible Steel Gallery, Grossman Gallery, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), 57Delle Project Space, the Massachusetts Campus Compact Conference on Civic Engagement, the Edinburgh College of Art, and Stockwell Studios, London, England. Publications include the Vincent Curtis Educational Register: Interdisciplinary Art Education: Creativity in a Culture of Choice and HESA inprint, Helsinki, Finland.
    In 2011, she received a Montague Travel Grant and the President’s Research Grant from SMFA.  She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology and Performance from Smith College and the University of Dakar, Senegal.  She currently serves as the Community Programs Coordinator at SMFA and is a 2013 MFA candidate focusing on installation, photography, and drawing.  www.katherinelouisemitchell.com

    Keely Gilmartin is a glass and fiber artist who has been studying her craft since the age of twelve. After high school, where she took continuing education classes at the Rhode Island School of Design, Keely continued her education at Pratt Art Institute at Munson-Williams-Proctor in Utica, NY. After two years of classic art foundation, she transferred to the Cleveland Institute of Art where she began her studies of hot and kiln casted glass. In between her student careers at Cleveland and The Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Keely worked at Luke Adams Glass as a production assistant and instructor for beginning blowing classes and glass jewelry fusing. She is now finishing up her BFA candidacy at Mass Art. Keely’s work, although touching upon multiple mediums and techniques, focuses mainly on the marriage of fiber art and glass craft language. She transforms crocheted structures into glass castings and glass stringers into woven forms playing with our perception of material, fragility, and the status of common craft. After completing the undergraduate program at Mass Art, Keely will continue her studio practice in Columbus, Georgia working at Artificum Solis, a blade forging studio, and Georgia South Western State University’s glass department.   www.Keelymaecrafts.com

    Robin Hopkinson is a sophomore at Bennington College where she studies visual art and science. She is mainly a 2D artist using practices ranging from screen printing to digital photography to drawing. In 2010 she won a silver key for photography in the Boston Globe Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. However, she has experience working with metal, clay, and wood too. She is interested in learning what is considered art and how knowledge, intellectual or methodological, can influence art. website

    Kevin Sweet is a filmmaker and installation artist based out of Boston, MA.  He received his MFA in Film and Video from the Massachusetts College for Art and Design.  www.kevinjsweet.net

    Hayoon Chung is a freshman at the Massachusetts institute of Technology who plans on studying course 1, Environmental Engineering. She is interested in how different environments work, and how she can work to fix various problems that human beings have brought upon the earth.