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The Palace of Projects is a collection of proposals, crude models for works that, if carried out, promise improvement of the individual and of the world on grand scale.

Part of our task in this class was to study these proposals in their precise form and content. We examined the propositions as a form, compiling a list of problems, a list of solutions, a list of actors and agents through whom change is imagined. We compared and contextualized these projects with readings, research, discussion, and the formulation of our own class assignments.

As our final product we produced a complementary proposal to the Palace of Projects and, as a class, we created a website that simultaneously archives the Kabakovs' strategies and interprets the philosophical problems they pose. We have attempted to model these philosophical issues in a virtual space on the web. Our proposal, entitled Project 66, used the Kabakovs' work as a way to better understand the role of dreaming, imagining or proposing in the forms and the methods of science and art.

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NIGHT JOURNEY

The class was divided into three groups, each consisting of students from diverse backgrounds ranging from computer scientists to fine artists. Each group set out to present a new account of one particular piece in the Palace of Projects which was project number 13: Night Journey. The groups collaborated to describe, to characterize and to represent that project in a new way.

Group 1 created a web interface, which recreated the desk used in the project. By photographing this desk of ordinary objects as viewed in an extraordinary way (i.e., under a globe with light just above the isolated objects), these students explored Kabakov's suggestion that one does not have to travel far in order to change their experience of the world. One must only attempt to look at things from another perspective, which in this case meant exploring and magnifying the microcosmic.

Group 2 also attempted to see the ordinary every-day environment through a fresh perspective. Each individual in the group documented the journey they routinely take from home to the classroom in whatever media he or she preferred. The responses came in the form of video, writing, photography, and drawing. Depending on the method chosen, each individual's experience was uniquely altered. The method provided each student with a new perspective of the surrounding environment, which often goes unnoticed and becomes little more than a space through which to drift.

Group 3 took a completely different take on the assignment. Using a simplistic approach, they created an excruciatingly slow flash animation of a green apple's skin color as it changed almost imperceptibly over an extended time. The experience of watching this slow, and seemingly uneventful, process confronts the viewer with the passage of time; it also promotes patience attention to change on minute levels.

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ARTICULATING THE PALACE

Ilya and Emilya Kabakov's Palace of Projects is comprised of 65 Projects divided into three categories:

  1. How to Make Yourself Better? (projects 1-26)
  2. How to Make This World Better? (projects 27-56)
  3. How to Stimulate the Appearance of Projects? (projects 57-65)

The book of the project allows us to move through these projects in a linear fashion; the projects are arranged numerically. The Palace itself allows for a physical movement through the projects.

For this assignment, students were asked to add to this physical movement a movement through the projects as data, as information. As such, we presented these projects in a re-orderable and manipulable space.

Each of the three groups took a third of the projects and presented them through a set of newly proposed categories.

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MOTIVES AND METHODS OF THE PALACE

Each of Kabakov's proposals takes universal ideas and reduces them to highly personal experiences or takes and individual dilemma and generalizes in an absurd and eccentric fashion.

The aim of the last assignment was to produce a system of categories. The second assignment introduced the class to the difficulties of categorizing an artwork. The assignment worked from the general to the specific. In this assignment the task instead was to categorize by working from the specific to the general.

Each student in the class independently answered each of the following questions for each of the 65 projects in the Kabakovs' Palace of Projects - in no more than 50 words for each answer - and record their answers in a simple text format:

  1. What is the problem or dilemma posed in the proposal?
  2. What is the solution that Kabakov proposes to solve the problem?
  3. What is the human experience for which the problem provides a metaphor?
  4. What is most unexpected about the solution that Kabakov presents?
  5. Referring to the projects in the book by number, which three other projects do you think the project in question most resembles, in order of similarity, using a simply intuitive feeling you have for resemblance rather than attempting to compare systematically?

After answering these questions the students selected key words from their answers, based on what they perceived as the most relevant and encapsulating. These key words were then compiled into a database, which could later arrange the projects in reference to the words that students established for summarizing the meaning of the individual projects within the palace. This allowed the projects to then arrange themselves in relation to one other, based upon the key words shared between them.