May 11, 2013
Santa Fe Complex Closes. Stephen Guerin on Hybridity’s Lessons.
Written by Ellen Berkovitch // June 1, 2012 // Art, Santa Fe // 4 Comments
When the Santa Fe Complex closes this Friday night in Santa Fe, it will be capping off a four-year run in which the organization, with support from the City of Santa Fe’s economic development arm, gave a bricks-and-mortar locus to projects intended to model working hybrids of technology, science and art. Now, founding director and board chairman Stephen Guerin reflected in a telephone conversation Thursday, the physical Santa Fe Complex will no longer exist, but potential for a rethought organization that lives between a traditional nonprofit structure and a “social benefit” for-profit may yet ensue.
“All the entrepreneurs bringing projects to the Complex are still here,” Guerin said.
Over three years, from 2008 to now, the city of Santa Fe was the majority funder of Santa Fe Complex’s operating costs. Santa Fe city funding for three consecutive years amounted to about $360,000 on a $390,000 commitment. Santa Fe Complex also raised smaller periodic sums from McCune Foundation, said Guerin.
Its key members were technologists such as Guerin himself, whose company Redfish grew a new entity, SimTable, an interactive fire simulator that models the activities of wildfire using actual conditions of neighborhood and terrain. Former Complex board member Richard Lowenberg developed 1st-Mile Institute to extend broadband access to rural New Mexico (listed under the “Projects” tab on the Complex’s website.)
The Complex worked with IAIA's digital dome on a grant researching projections on non-uniform surfaces.
Art projects included “Media Hive,” a monthly event; as well as readings; art exhibits including artists-in-residence; AIGA design workshops; and collaborations including one in which SFeComplex worked with the University of New Mexico and the Institute of American Indian Arts for a $600k dome research grant, to study projections on domed surfaces.
Last fall, Lowenberg convened several local arts entities to collaborate on a letter of inquiry that would have made Santa Fe Complex lead applicant on an ArtPlaceAmerica grant.
So is the Complex’s closure ultimately a comment that the model of science and art hybridity is not, actually, feasible?
“We don’t have a strong need for pure scientists and we don’t have a strong need for pure artists.
Guerin stressed that the foundation of the Complex put technology as equal partner with “science” and “art” – and he said we need to be mindful that now as then, northern New Mexico is a world leader in simulation and visualization of complex systems.
Organizationally, Guerin cited a “no man’s land in structure”, in that the Complex neither fully embraced the culture of a 501(c)3 nonprofit, in which boards in fundraising parlance “give (money), get or get off,” or a for-profit by which innovation successes are measured in a positive-trending bottom line.
“Almost by design we didn’t have a fundraising board,” Guerin said. “The challenge was, we wanted people making a living but didn’t want (the Complex) to be a centralized organization.”
Some people did, as it turns out, make a living – and bring in, as Guerin cited, more than $1.1 million in out-of-state and out-of-country economic devleopment to Santa Fe, “not just recycling dollars,” he said. Successful projects that emerged out of the Complex included programming smart phones for the city of Boston; and making “self-organizing” city-focused applications for Venice, Italy.
Staff functions, said Guerin, were event management and space management. The last executive director, Roy Wroth, departed the post in April. The urbanist idea of renting desks and promoting a co-working culture at the Complex did not prove successful; “demand was not there,” Guerin said. (Wayne Nichols at Second Street Studios is trying the model now.)
Transient Reflection, from Ghosts in Armour
In the art-science-technology structure, Guerin specified that he was most proud of the Complex’s modeling of strong new forms of hybridity, which he contrasted to “the weak form, such as when a physicist tells an artist, ‘here’s what quantum theory is,’ and an artist tries to represent it, or going the other way, when an artist asks, ‘what can I do with magnetism?’”
Strong forms of hybridity, per Guerin’s description, manifest within a single person the characteristics of a new thinker. He cited four now-college students who grew up, effectively, at the Complex, while in high school in Santa Fe.
“We don’t have a strong need for pure scientists and we don’t have a strong need for pure artists. My preference is not to have a great technologist either. We want all three in a single person, and one to vector another.”
Technology moves so rapidly now it takes a whole community to keep up, Guerin said.
“If you have the traditional mindset, you say, ‘where are the jobs,’ and there are very few that have career potential. (In Santa Fe) you have tourism and retail and government and you have some gallery management, but if you change your perspective, it goes back to the freelance notion.” Such a freelance notion is collaborative. “If you can get on a project, it may be a world-class project that may not hire employees, but would pay high-wage labor.”
As that hybrid extends itself out from the sciences to the arts, however, are artists ready? Is there something to the culture of artists accustomed to competing for single grant opportunities, not quite in step with the culture of scientists and technologists, realizing each is part of a “high-wage” labor pool?
The question, says 1st-Mile Institute founder Richard Lowenberg, goes to how tough a job it is to be a future thinker now.
“There’s not an inititative being discussed that isn’t facing the same problematic issue of how do you sustain future-serving efforts in this community at this time, in this nation?
“What are the best practices and very pragmatically, what’s going on and where do we tap into this in ways that are productive?”
Santa Fe residents are invited to come out for the closing reception for Santa Fe Complex, for the Ghosts in Armour show from 6-10 p.m.
Written by Ellen Berkovitch // June 1, 2012 // Art, Santa Fe // 4 Comments
4 Comments
Thank you, Ellen, for the write-up!
Thank you to everyone in Santa Fe that participated in making SF_X happen and to everyone that has attended events. It has been a huge privilege for me to be part of this.
I’d like to add tonight’s show is also an exciting CIRE-produced event for their one-year birthday bash. http://sfcomplex.org/2012/05/cires-birthday-bash
If one reads the paragraph about the “The urbanist idea of renting desks and promoting a co-working culture”. The term “urbanist’ is Ellen’s term and does NOT refer to Roy Wroth (Who is a fantastic Urbanst, check him out http://rwup.org/ ). Our initial less-than-successful idea of renting desks was a collective decision by the board.
And as a niggly correction, the city’s original 3-year agreement with us was $495k over three years. We received $330k of that commitment with as much as a year of gaps in payment which put crazy stresses on a nascent organization. As our budget was cut each year by the city our deliverables stayed the same and increased. We exceeded our economic development goals in each of our 4 years. Given that we cut costs through our move to second street, the remaining $75K on the third year contract would have kept us open another two years.
With that said, I am *extremely* grateful for the opportunity provided by the City of Santa Fe to try this experiment. It is a huge single bet to put into an organization like us. We know the staff are in a tough spot making calls on whether to fund or not fund.
While disappointed in the City staff’s decision to terminate, i know other cool initiatives will rise up and fill in similar niches. There’s too much “in the air” in Santa Fe for something else not to channel the creative spirit here.
Ellen -
I second Stephen Guerin’s thank you for the coverage.
Despite the challenges of depending partly on a (city) government contract and all that goes with that, we *do* very much appreciate the support of the staff, especially those in place at the beginning who had the confidence in us to help get stood up.
The bash tonight will surely bring through a significant number of the thousands of people we have on our e-mail announce list to say goodbye to the space, but perhaps to renew their efforts to help continue to build and elaborate the SF_X brand, and to continue it’s mission.
My own company (Los Alamos Visualization Associates, http://www.lava3d.com), which I started after 27 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory coincided with the forming of SF_X (I am one of the founding board myself) and would have likely remained somewhat isolated in Los Alamos, serving more traditional government and corporate sponsors. Through the perspective and synergies established at SF_X, my own work has branched out widely. While I can credit some of my work directly to the Complex (and I have in response to the Economic Development metrics for the City Contract) what is more important in some ways is the diversity of my customers and projects.
SF_X has certainly helped my company lower some of the traditional boundaries between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, for the better on both sides. While my experience and expertise is primarily in the development of computer technology for Scientific and Engineering Visualization, my close partnerships include work with internationally known Holographer Fred Unterseher, Composer Panaiotis, and Photographer/Exhibition Artists Matt Wright and Janire Najera.
Some of the projects and collaborations I can attribute to the SF_X relationship includes my work with Matt and Janire whose show “Ghosts in Armour” is on display this week including tonight’s “closing ceremony”. While their work is more in the category of documentary photography and installation art, the technology we use is highly synergistic and we are developing international projects together to bring immersive experiences of cultural heritage sites to the world. Combining my company’s expertise in Virtual Reality and Visual Analytics with their expertise as photographers and artists is allowing us to do things significantly ahead of the existing technology curve but including the eye of the artist and photographer.
- Steve Smith
Founding Board member Santa Fe Complex
President, Los Alamos Visualization Associates
The Santa Fe Complex was an awesome group of people and potential. I sure hope the nation gets its head out of its ass and stops trying to follow the old “growth by conquest” model of economic development and realize that the model being experimented by SF_X and such is really the *only* way forward. The problem’s at the Complex were just a microcosm and early glimpse of the political and economic difficulties that are sure to arise soon at the macro-level of world events when a civilization has reached the end of growth. You probably couldn’t assemble a brighter and committed bunch of people that were present at the Complex to work out the specifics of that very problem.
The only thing missing that had not been sufficiently developed was the tool to bind people and projects together across time and events so that a momentum and record could develop. I personally was working on that effort and continue to due so for the larger community “at-large”, but my personal funds simply ran out in order to stay in Santa Fe.
In any case I hope that some philanthropist is forward-thinking enough or some politician risk-confident enough to provide the vision that the Complex embodied what it really needs. But who?
Sorry for grammatical and syntax errors above. Where’s the edit feature? :^)