Projects will vie for $75,000 commission at Minneapolis Convention Center Plaza

MINNEAPOLIS, Jan. 8, 2015 The Minneapolis Convention Center (MCC), the Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy Program of the City of Minneapolis and Meet Minneapolis, Convention & Visitors Association, in collaboration with Northern Lights.mn and the Northern Spark festival announce the 2015 finalist projects have been selected for the Creative City Challenge. The winning project from among these three will be announced in March and will receive the $75,000 commission to create the project and debut at the MCC Plaza on June 13 as part of Northern Spark, an annual dusk-to-dawn festival with tens of thousands of participants in Minneapolis.

A panel selected three projects from among the entries received in the fall of 2014. The three finalists and their corresponding projects incorporate a wide range of art, mixed media and architectural design. Each will receive a stipend of $2,500 to create final proposals and present them to a jury in late February. The finalists and their corresponding projects include:

· Niko Kubota and Jon Reynolds, mini_polis

mini_polis is a scale model of Minneapolis built in collaboration with community participants in a series of build workshops. The mini_polis team, led by local designer-educator-artists Niko Kubota and Jon Reynolds, will collect place-based hopes and memories at the workshops and create a multimedia interface within the finished city model to share these stories. The completed mini_polis will be a landscape of lighted plywood buildings, laid out to approximate the Minneapolis downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. A multimedia interactive map station will allow visitors to interact with installation: selected buildings will light up and play the model builders story, giving the viewer a peek into the experiences and hopes of a particular place they can now locate in their city.

· Perkins+Will, Shadow Swings

Shadow Swings is a series of musical swings around a central canopied area conceived by a team from the architectural firm Perkins+Will, led by Anne Smith and Doug Bergert. Like the planetary dance of Venus and Earth, during the day metal pipe wind chimes suspended within the Shadow Swings activate musical tones. Each swing has a unique pitch associated with it to encourage collaboration among participants to create a musical performance. At night, multipoint light sources embedded in a protective bench along the perimeter of each set of swings cast moving shadows from swing-goers onto a recycled canvas drum suspended overhead, transforming the space into an interactive performance surface. Shadow Swings will surprise and delight all ages as unexpected interactions gather the community together to collectively create a changing canvas of art and symphony of music simply by enjoying the conversant and visceral experience of soaring through the air on a swing.

· PLAAD, We All Share the Same Skies

We All Share the Same Skies by PLAAD, an interdisciplinary design office led by Matthew Byers and Mark Stankey, will provide visitors to the convention center, whether Minnesotans, outside visitors or community members, an opportunity to introduce or reacquaint themselves to or with our sky through three separate enclosed structures, joined by a common central canopy element. Within each structure seating will allow visitors to recline and experience live feeds of the northern sky projected on a stretched projection screen: constellations at night, the whispering sound of wind racing through pines, the quaking of a birch stand, lazy clouds drifting across a humid summer sky, or thunderclouds unleashing a downpour. Speakers located in the walls and behind the benches will provide auditory sensations to augment the live feeds - the crackle of a bonfire, the call of the loon or the chatter of the pine squirrel. Juxtaposing the northern Minnesota and urban convention center plaza environments will create a hyper-awareness of and dialogue between the urban condition and the natural environment, between individual and community.

In the third year of the Creative City Challenge, the public engagement component of this project will be been redirected to involvement in the artwork itself. The competition is challenging teams to engage the broader community to participate in a meaningful way in the design, creation and/or ongoing use of the artwork. The Creative City Challenge is open to what participation means for each team, and asked for submissions to include ideas about how to engage the public in the work, the convention center plaza, and, ultimately, the city.

Further information about the competition, finalists projects and the previous two years winning projects, MIMMI and Balancing Ground, can be found here: http://www.minneapolis.org/minneapolis-convention-center/ccc/creative-city-challenge-form/2015-finalists.

Background information

The Creative City Challenge (CCC) is a competition for Minnesota-resident architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, artists, students and individuals of all backgrounds to create and install at the MCC Plaza a temporary, destination artwork. The artwork acts as a sociable and participatory platform for summer-long onsite programming, and encourages a sense of connectedness to the city as a whole and its rich cultural and natural offerings. The MCC Plaza is a green roof that is located directly across from the MCC at 1301 Second Avenue South.

The CCCs goal is to draw visitors and residents of the city to the Minneapolis Convention Center as a central meeting space for the surrounding area, as well as to provide a compelling gathering site for the MCCs thousands of visitors. The winning project will remain on the MCC Plaza throughout the summer, and is a site of convergence for visitors to Minneapolis from around the country and the world, as well as being a part of the local neighborhood, and Minneapolis downtown.

In its inaugural year, the Creative City Challenge selected the Minneapolis Interactive Macro Mood Installation (MIMMI) as the 2013 winner. The 2014 Creative City Challenge winner was Balancing Ground.

PHOTOS AVAILABLE

High-resolution images of all three projects are available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/minneapolisorg/ for download. All images are by the individual project team, courtesy of Meet Minneapolis.

ABOUT MINNEAPOLIS CONVENTION CENTER

The Minneapolis Convention Center (MCC) is the largest indoor, contiguous, convention center in the Upper Midwest with over 1.5 million visitors annually, including 250,000 during the summer months. The MCC is more than a meeting place. It's more than a show space. It's a building all about building something elserelationships. A blend of form and function, the MCC provides aesthetically pleasing and innovative solutions for a variety of conferences, trade shows and events. With nearly 480,000 square feet of trade show space, 87 column-free conference meeting rooms, a 28,000-square-foot ballroom, and an auditorium with superb production and flexible technology options, the facility can handle any event from a small meeting to a large convention or trade show.

ABOUT ARTS, CULTURE AND THE CREATIVE ECONOMY PROGRAM, CITY OF MINNEAPOLIS

The Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy program is an initiative of the City Coordinator's office established August 2011 to leverage the creative sector towards strengthening social and economic growth in the City of Minneapolis. The goals of the program are to: promote and coordinate city resources to develop the arts as an economic generator in alignment the city goal "art and artists are economic drivers in and of themselves, to stimulate cross-sector collaboration to strengthen the arts economy and community in Minneapolis and provide presence and visibility for the creative sector in the City of Minneapolis.

ABOUT NORTHERN SPARK

Northern Spark is produced by Northern Lights.mn, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to artists working innovatively in the public sphere, exploring expanded possibilities for civic engagement and encourage pluralistic community. This years festival begins at 9:01 p.m. on June 13 in Minneapolis. http://northernspark.org

ABOUT MEET MINNEAPOLIS

Meet Minneapolis is a private, not-for-profit, member-based association. It actively promotes and sells the Minneapolis area as a destination for conventions and meetings, works to maximize the visitor experience and markets the city as a desirable tourist destination to maximize the economic benefit of the greater Minneapolis area.

Meet Minneapolis is accredited by the Destination Marketing Accreditation Program (DMAP) of the Destination Marketing Association International.

Find out more:

Online: www.minneapolis.org and http://go.minneapolis.org

On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/meetminneapolis?ref=ts

On Twitter: http://twitter.com/meetminneapolis

On Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/meetminneapolis/

MEDIA CONTACT

Kristen Montag, media communication manager, 612.767.8038, kristenm@minneapolis.org, Minneapolis_PR on Twitter.

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