Local Report 2021

April 30, 2021
Presented by CultureHub

Local Report is a project first initiated in 1972 by Robert Whitman. Whitman gave coins to people in Manhattan and sent them to payphones all over the city to make a report of what they saw, which was broadcast live on local radio. As payphones gave way to cell phones and radio gave way to the internet, Whitman embraced these new tools and infused them within his practice—one grounded in exploring the elusiveness of perception and always challenging our ways of looking.

In this iteration of Local Report, students will dispatch from universities around the world including in Kenya, Serbia, Portugal, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States reporting on what they see through audio and video clips. These clips are submitted to CultureHub in New York City where they are woven into an audiovisual tapestry and presented as a durational livestream in Re-Fest and as a projected installation around the world.

Robert Whitman was a leading figure in New York’s Happenings movement from the late 1950s through the early 1960s. A pioneer of performance art and multimedia installation, he co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a nonprofit organization dedicated to collaboration between artists and engineers. Throughout his career, Whitman has aspired to transform and transcend the limitations of images by emphasizing their spatial, temporal, and dimensional qualities. Whitman’s work is held in numerous collections in the United States and abroad, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dia Art Foundation, New York; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

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