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Thank you to all who came out on Wednesday and Saturday, April 17 and 20, to join me at the RISD Museum’s Artists Lab.

The Archive of Desire was on display, along with maps of Providence which got covered in brilliant drawings by quite an amazing group of kids and adults, and an exhibit area on the wall for ideas as they emerged on index cards. There were also tables with supplies and instructions for contributing to the Archive, and many visitors spent a good chunk of time hanging out, working on contributions, and talking.

I was pleased to give away a big pile of new, screen-printed “Listen to the Future in 10 Minutes” kits. To all of you who took them, I hope you will keep writing your visions for the future, and send them back to the Archive.

Thanks also to Holis Mickey and Sarah Laperle, my RISD Museum hosts for inviting me, supporting me and co-hosting so perfectly.

Great conversations, inspiring ideas, beautiful drawings and about 75 new entries ready to be categorized and archived. Many of them will be uploaded shortly to archiveofdesire.tumblr.com, the place to see the growing collection of scanned cards.

I hosted an artists Lab at  RISD this past Wednesday and had a blast. The wonderful Jori Ketten photographed the event and I am looking forward to posting those pics soon.

I am happy to announce a SECOND date: tomorrow, April 20, from 3-4:30pm. Join me and the fine folks at the RISD Museum for an afternoon of mapping, hanging out and Listening to the Future! Kids welcome.

Fun giveaways include a newly-designed “Listening to the Future in 10 Minutes” kit, seen in production above.

I am starting to upload new entries again to archiveofdesire.tumblr.com, where they will live in digital form until the new web site is complete. A lot of these entries were submitted during the exhibition at Brown University this December; the ones here include a special entry from Lucia Caserta who happens to be three years old. I’ll be adding 4-8 new entries every few days for a while. Follow the Tumblr to guarantee you will see them!

Three more days left to see the full (always in-progress) Archive of Desire at Brown University’s JNBC (John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage).

The exhibit features the Archive card catalog for you to peruse, a small exhibit of selected cards on the wall, a place to follow the instructions “Listening to the Future in 10 Minutes” which is a way of contributing your ideas to the Archive, a large wall map being painted over the course of the exhibit with visitor input, an altar for the ritual invocation of a thriving future, and my desk space where I have “performed” the Listening to the Future  for 16 hours so far.

I WILL BE IN THE EXHIBIT SPACE FROM 9am-3:45pm this Wednesday for more “Listening to the Future” performance and map painting. Come on by!

Here are the details on the JNBC web site.

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

-Wendell Berry from  “It All Turns on Affection”, 2012 Jefferson Lecture

I’m pleased that the Archive of Desire has been selected to participate in Tribeca Hacks, hosted by the Tribeca Film Institute, Zeega.org and MIT OpenDocs.

“The Tribeca Film Institute is holding a series of national hackathon/workshop events designed to increase understanding and broaden participation in the field of interactive storytelling. These workshops give creative media artists the insight and skills to create robust interactive projects that effectively engage with audiences and the chance to experiment with new tools and technologies. They also showcase innovation in this field for artists, funders and the public. A primary goal of the workshops is to build new relationships between media artists, technologists and designers.”

Perfect! Takes place this Saturday. Full report next week!

Thanks so much to all who contributed to the Archive of Desire Kickstarter campaign. We raised $4000 to support the next phase of the project: building an online home for the Archive. The campaign greatly increased the visibility of the project, and gnerated some new collaborative relationships that will bear some interesting fruit in the next year. But the very next step is sending out handmade rewards to the contributors and preparing for an exhibit of the Archive here in Providence. Stay tuned, and thank you!

This excerpt of an extra top-secret graph from the Kickstarter dashboard for my project shows pledge activity gaining speed in the last couple of days. I did hear that many campaigns receive more than 50% of their funding in the final week. I am stepping up my efforts, eating my wheaties, consulting the experts, and racing towards the finish. Come along!

I need YOU to help spread the urgent and exciting message: I can raise this money and LAUNCH the Archive of Desire online if we keep this momentum going! Pledge now, pledge as generously as you can, and recruit others to pledge too! Tell everyone you know, and be sure to impress upon them the dramatic tension of the final days!

And now: For every 3 new backers you bring in, you will get more original beautiful artwork as a reward.

Love,

Amy

“We use metaphors of connection as often as those of distinctness”

Drawing by Emmy Bright, printed by Amy Walsh with a gocco printer. How I love collaborating with artists in this way.

This print is a part of the miniature print portfolio on catalog divider cards made by a small group or artists in support of the Archive of Desire Kickstarter campaign. Each artist paired an image with an idea from the archive, and each image is being printed by me in color on these cards.

BACK the Archive of Desire on Kickstarter, and claim your own mini silkscreen portfolio!

The artists contributing to The Archive of Desire mini-screenprint portfolio are sending in their drawings, which will soon be silscreened by me in color. Yay!

Kickstarter backers who pledge at any level will receive between 1 and 10 of these beautiful silkscreened prints on 6×4″ oaktag index tab cards. Together they make a beautiful collection for a wall, or you can even use ‘em like a Tarot deck, pulling them at random in a little rotating gallery of your own.

Today’s submission is by the masterful Erik Ruin:

And yesterday, a contribution from genius Emmy Bright:

Both of these will be burned onto screens and printed with colored ink. Yay!

To pledge on Kickstarter, support the Archive of Desire and receive a package of beautiful silkscreen prints, go HERE NOW.