Weblogsky: Weekend Retreat

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Weekend Retreat

Derek Woodgate and Luciana de Castro

A belated report on last weekend's Charrette Austin retreat. Charrette Austin is the latest manifestation of my attempt, with Derek Woodgate, to create a framework for discussion about Austin's cultural and social fragmentation, which in our opinion why Austin, a good and attractive place to live, is never quite a great city. At the retreat, Natasha Vita-More suggested that we focus on two root causes of fragmentation here, poor communication and dysfunctional transportation systems. We made a little side trip, attempting to define art – is it a thing? a process? a mind set? Otherwise the conversation flowed pretty well from Derek's set of slides on "engaging your environment" and "experiensualism." He showed photos of massive projections on the sides of buildings &ndash one was particularly striking, the image of a waterfall. After much discussion about breakouts (how would we divide the group? we couldn't quite get the second division straight), a group wandered outside, I think for a smoke, and Luciana de Castro had an idea. It was just the idea we were looking for, and it was an extension of the waterfall on the building we'd seen on Derek's slides. We would project images of mass transit on the sides of buildings in downtown Austin, clearly visible to the occupants of automobiles densely packed along IH35. Are we gonna do this? I suspect so.