What do you know about the arts at Duke?
This isn’t rhetorical. Think about it. But whatever comes to mind, if it doesn’t involve the Smith Warehouse, is incomplete. In a five-year-old evolution that is still blossoming, ways of employing the space in Smith are changing not only the University’s arts culture but the rest of the academic landscape as well.
The warehouse has come to house some of the most progressive departments at Duke: the certificate in Information Science and Information Studies and the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image. Many Visual Studies faculty members have workspaces in the warehouse as well. In addition, next year marks the beginning of the Master of Fine Arts program in Experimental and Documentary Arts, which will be housed in the carpentry shop near Smith and is Duke’s first MFA program. Though Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 will only see the first applicants applying to the program, its beginning is emblematic of the multidisciplinary, arts-meet-technology fervor that has come to define a significant portion of the artistic community here, a transformation that would be impossible without this old tobacco warehouse on Buchanan Road, perched just above Campus Drive.
The outside is red brick, top to bottom. The inside, separated into bays—the cutting-edge Arts, Culture and Technology Studios, multimedia headquarters and lynchpin of the new movement, dominate Bays 11 and 12—also sport plentiful brick. But the expansive high-ceilinged space of the warehouse’s interior is more notable for the wooden columns that give the building a grainy, organic feel. And better yet, the walls serve as galleries for student work, the lion’s share of which is created within the walls it adorns.
Speaking to professors and students participating in the arts at Duke, there is a palpable excitement regarding the potential of the warehouse—something that seems surprising in hindsight. In January and November 2009 editorials, The Chronicle’s independent editorial board leveled criticism against Smith Warehouse. It was described as “Duke’s answer to Siberia” and the relocation of the Career Center and the Global Education Office was judged unwise.
Now accompanied by the Duke Center for Civic Engagement, Duke Performances and the Office of Undergraduate Scholars and Fellows (and a new branch of the Saladelia Cafe), the building has overcome its difficult location with a necessity established by its facilitative virtues and the efforts of innovative faculty and students.
“We imagine that the CDS space, the Bay 11 and 12 space and the carpenter space as being all part of a larger arts campus,” said ISIS Program Director Victoria Szabo. “This is really a way to grow from within what we’ve really got, and to really refurbish and enhance the spaces that we’ve got so that there’s more opportunities for people to do work.”
Professor Hans Van Miegroet, department chair for Arts, Art History and Visual Studies as well as an author of the Visual Studies Initiative, credits the breakneck expansion seen in his and other departments to Smith’s space and possibilities. Before Smith, Van Miegroet said there was “nothing”: Visual Studies had yet to come into being, and in the academic environment that existed prior to the collaborative opportunities created by Smith—opportunities essential to the co-disciplinary dictates of the Visual Studies Initiative—the field was hardly conceivable.
“This is completely new, because Visual Studies is not practicing arts. Visual Studies operates at the interface of the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences,” Van Miegroet said.
The opportunities allowed by the space within the Arts, Culture and Technology Studios include film editing, virtual worlds, a painting studio, podcasting, a game studio, faculty offices, a green screen, experimental arts display space, computers connected to common server infrastructure and a host of other facilities. These are almost all methods of creation that, one way or another, weren’t around until just recently: either they weren’t technologically feasible, or they weren’t technologically feasible at Duke.
Potential is impressive, but through the lens of art, it only means so much. There needs to be a product. And so far, the students and faculty utilizing Smith have achieved surprising and impressive feats with the tools at their disposal. Unequivocally, this is a great thing for the University: the complexion of artistic endeavoring at Duke has been altered, and for the better.
The work of Visual Studies major Sarah Goetz, a senior, seems to be a fitting distillation of this approach. Last semester, Goetz edited two films for two different classes, wrote a program for interactive graphics based on webcam movement, made her own website and created a wall-sized installation out of paper based on the hormone oxytocin and the chemicals composing Adderall and Ritalin. If you’re looking for conversant artists, her works, with their multi-faceted nature, speak in a variety of academic and artistic languages. And this was all done in the space of Smith, the importance of which she stresses as a spot not only helpful but essential to Duke’s community of artists.
“At the end of last semester, during the crunch-time before finals, I could walk out of a room at 2 a.m., run into someone who was painting, run into another person who was doing Web design and then run into another person who was editing their final movie—and all of this is part of the same space,” Goetz said.
Without the Arts, Culture and Technology Studios, this would not be possible. Nor would projects like those undertaken in the ISIS capstone, including an upcoming collaboration with the Franklin Institute in the creation of a virtual world revolving around Haiti, Szabo said. It would not be possible to create an intuitive learning environment that allows convenient access to Haitian documents and history alongside tools for developing your Creole alongside sociological data and archival information alongside other students, doing the exact same thing.
“The idea is by looking at old and new media together and seeing how a space is being represented, to understand what all the opportunities are—it’s not so much creating a virtual Haiti just for the sake of creating a virtual Haiti, but it’s using all the available tools that are out there to think about new modes of representation and to take advantage of them,” Szabo said.
But Goetz pointed out that Smith Warehouse, despite its virtues, still falls far short of perfect. She cited the its distance as a serious caveat, and little things that, for a location where she spends so much of her time, create certain difficulties: the vending machines don’t accept DukeCards, the doors close at 11 p.m., the walls really aren’t great for displaying artwork—“which is kind of silly,” she said—and compared to a disciplinary headquarters like the French Science Center, it just doesn’t hold up.
Goetz is a leading voice in the new Duke Arts Majors Network, a group that she hopes will bring arts students together and force the camaraderie that the multi-departmental discipline and its chief location currently lack, though she said it’s greatly improved over three years ago, “not even close to what it is now.”
“Community in the arts is the most important thing next to facilities and teachers. For most students, it’s the most important thing,” Goetz said. “We’re trying to get [Smith] to be a place where it can actually be a second home for students, because as an art student, that’s what you actually need in your facility is a second home. It’s got to be somewhere you can spend the night if you have to. I’ve done that, and most people think I’m crazy for it. It’s going to change.”
Because of the value and necessity of the warehouse, such culture merits change. The possibilities of creation literally supersede the boundaries of the space and equipment, the students and faculty constantly coming up with new ways of doing so. Hence, “new” media. In this collaborative way, Van Miegroet said Duke has set a fresh bar. He stressed the importance of artists who can work at the joints of what would initially seem to be far-flung fields, “who can readily cross boundaries.”
“They don’t have to be neuroscientists, or they don’t have to be engineers or computation people, but they have to be conversant with it,” Van Miegroet said. “We practice what we preach. Duke is a co-disciplinary institution but you also have to do it, it’s in the doing, it’s not solely in the saying, and artists are an integral part of this. So it’s not solely how science departments can do artsy things, it’s really also how artists can fundamentally affect scientific thinking. And that’s new.”
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