Ingenuity Festival—An Amazing, Green Festival Machine
Sustainability and technology bond together with creative flare to highlight this year’s Ingenuity Festival of Art + Technology—held July 25-27 at Playhouse Square in Cleveland. The weekend-long festival returns for its fourth event, offering a unique juxtaposition of urban streetscape stages alongside traditional performance venues, and a busy programming schedule featuring an eclectic mix of live music, interactive exhibits, art galleries, performances and more.
From stages and displays to workshops and installations, a significant portion of 2008 programming turns attention towards environmental awareness, with several projects reinforcing “green” ideas and promoting conservation tips. “In our mission to celebrate the City of Cleveland and its vast resources, environmental concerns are directly relevant to Ingenuity,” says festival director James Levin. “To continue to provide a high quality, livable city for artists and scientists to live, work, exhibit, and stay inspired, it’s one of our duties to lead by example and offer ways for festival participants to get informed and become active themselves.”
This year’s festival includes work inspired by such subjects as recycled materials, energy issues, the Cuyahoga River, and war—themes then merged into sound installations, 3D video, song and even robotics demonstrations. Ingenuity’s complete showcase of new work is wildly multifaceted and diverse, but here’s a quick glimpse of festival offerings from a “green” perspective.
Ingenuity Festival Village
Spanning several city blocks, including dozens of food and beverage tents (equipped with recycling receptacles), and three outdoor stages, the “Festival Village” hosts weekend-long entertainment exhibitors. The weekend officially begins at 6 p.m. Friday with a live music set featuring Aphrodesia, a mission-driven global pop ensemble from San Francisco, whose high-energy powerhouse performances have rounded the country in a vegetable oil-powered tour bus (see Q&A sidebar). International art collective Spurse, with collaborators David Jensenius and Sean White, present an ongoing sound installation. Crooked River in First and Third Persons seeks to activate the complex history and personal stories of the Cuyahoga River through a series of “songlines,” audio and video data collected from various means of research, and made accessible via web, cell phone, and radio broadcast outlets within the festival.
Family Village presented by the Ohio Lottery Commission
Children and grown-ups can gain hands-on experience through an amazing array of experiments, technologies, workshops, and fun-filled creations which will occupy two floors in the high-tech Idea Center at Playhouse Square. In addition to various tactile activities throughout the building, Atlas in Silico creates a grand-scale interactive video experience involving only the viewers body movement to trigger effects inspired by global ocean data. This data conveys messages about energy production and carbon-dioxide emissions, along with implications regarding the management of greenhouse gas levels.
Tech Center and Gallery
Environmentalism is a key component in this year’s expansive “Tech Center,” located in the Halle Building. Among the scheduled exhibits are: Innovative Vehicle Design, from students at Regina High School in South Euclid, in which the all-girl team of pre-engineering students exhibit their collaborative work with teachers and professionals to build an operable, three-wheeled electric car with safety features. Environmental Health Watch, whose efforts to inform Northeast Ohioans about environmental research and policies, will offer a tutorial on energy efficient housing, including an exhibit called the “House of Pressure”—a model home demonstrating air-sealing techniques. In Gregory Little’s installation, Ornithology—A Synnoetic System for the Birds, the artist creates computer models of the effects of global warming and other environmental factors on the flight patterns of migrating birds. The American Bird Conservancy predicts doom for more than half the migrating species in the Great Lakes region if the Earth’s warming trend continues.
As in previous years, an area of the festival will be specifically designated for bicycle parking. Festival attendees are also encouraged to utilize public transportation. Free bus service from Public Square to Playhouse Square will be available throughout Ingenuity, with RTA offering a glimpse at the forthcoming “Health Line” down Euclid Ave.
For more information, to purchase passes or to view a complete schedule of events, visit www.ingenuitycleveland.com. General admission to the festival costs $10 for a Day Pass or $15 for a Weekend Pass. Children 12 and under are admitted free.