As Chuck Olsen’s interview with Bruce Sterling from last week goes online at the NYC vlog Rocketboom and our webcast of Sterling’s discussion with Rirkrit Tiravanija hits the Walker Channel, I’ve got a good excuse to sing the praises of Education’s Sarah Peters (or “sp” as her blog name goes), whose introduction last Thursday night was superb. How she tied together a semi-itinerant Thai “relational aesthetics” artist and a cyberpunk author whose current obsession is the “internet of things” is…Things.

Tonight we are here to watch two people sit on a stage and talk about stuff. It’s a bit old-fashioned, when you think about it, since we have blogs and vlogs and videoconferencing and MySpace for social interaction and learning these days. Why haul down here and pay for parking when you can watch a lecture like this on the web (as some people are doing tonight)? I get paid to be here, so you all out there are the ones who can actually answer this question, but I think it has something to do with the necessity of human interaction. Which has everything to do with the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Rirkrit, as we all have the permission to call him, is an artist who works with environments rather than objects. He is said to have “transformed the notion of contemporary art by taking his environments out of the museum to the ends of the earth, literally.” In the early 90s he made a name for himself by creating installations during which he cooked curries for gallery visitors and staff. He has created low-power pirate radio stations in museums, a pirate television station in Italy, and built a replication of his entire New York City apartment in a gallery that was open 24 hours a day for visitors to use in whatever way they pleased. His ongoing, long-term project called The Land is a site located 20 minutes outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand that was envisioned as an open space without the concept of ownership. Activities on The Land consist of growing and harvesting rice, gardening, yoga, and performance workshops. This site was not intended to be labeled “ art,” yet with the development of so called “ relational aesthetics” and The Land’s various artist-initiated projects that blend environmental sustainability with architecture and video, the art-world has tuned-in to the endeavor. This is not to say that the art market has figured out it, as collectors are happy to purchase the soiled cooking utensils of Rirkrit’s food-based installations. But who could blame them, really. If you can’t purchase a moment, you’d do best to settle for a dirty frying pan.

Bruce Sterling, on the other hand, likes to talk about objects. His recent book published by MIT press called Shaping Things outlines his thoughts on the future of environmentally sustainable, track-able, user-alterable objects. He calls them “ spimes,” and insists that they are coming and we will need them to live. This book is the product of a year her spent as the Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Sterling is foremost a science fiction writer, a genre where his interests in technology, culture and environmentalism merge in fictional futures where massive global-warming induced tornadoes threaten the Midwest, cyber-security experts join the U.S. government to fight against terrorism, and people live in a post-television world.

Back in the present, he is the founder of the Viridian Design movement which strives to popularize ecologically sustainable design. An obsessive blogger, Sterling lives online, blogging his way between speaking engagements in Switzerland, Belgrade, and Texas, giving us web readers the impression that he is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

There are numerous connections between the ideas and practice of tonight’s accomplished guests, yet their thinking presents us with a interesting conundrum: Sterling claims that the future of spimes and the “ Internet of Things” will fundamentally change our relationship to objects, while Rirkrit’s environment’s ask us to change our relationship to other humans. In what direction are we really headed, and what sort of interaction do we really need? Let’s let the visionaries figure it out. Please welcome Bruce Sterling and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Photo: Tiravanija and Sterling in the exhibition OPEN-ENDED (the art of engagement).

Slacking off! That could certainly be the charge levelled against me. But that’s not quite the case. I took a break from the Walker blogs – Walker events, really, my main fodder for blogging – to handle the recent adoption of my retired racing greyhound, Kiba.

Good thing for me that Lara and SP are willing to take up the slack.

Not that I haven’t been thinking of, or pining away for, my Walker Art Center. Just thinking of all the Women with Vision films that I’ve missed is enough to make me raise my fist to the sky in righteous indignation. Curses!

But….she’s worth it, right?

On Monday several education department staff members leave on an excursion to accompany 15 Walker Art Center tour guides for 10 days exploring the art scene in Beijing and Shanghai. Why China? Some of the motivation for our trip emerged in the wake of the Walker exhibition House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, a show that examined the body of work of one of the most active and thought provoking contemporary Chinese artists working today, Huang Yong Ping. Huang Yong Ping was part of the Xiamen Dada movement, a conceptual movement that adopted the philosopies of the early 20th century movement of the same name, led in a large part by Marcel Duchamp.

Another exhibition influential on our travel plans is from a few years back, How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age. The “Latitudes” show examined the new globalism in contemporary art, and featured artists from around the world, including several from China, such as Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen.

As with technology, building, and everything else, the visual art scene in China has exploded in the past several years. What will we discover in China? It remains to be scene, but surely our plans to visit both contemporary galleries and artists’ studios, as well as more traditional museums and sights will provide us with a new insight into not only the work of contemporary Chinese artists, but artists from across the globe.