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Hi, my name is Tom Loeser and I'm a professor in the Art Department.
And at the moment, I'm also the department chair.
I was involved in bringing Lynda to campus last spring when she was the Artist
in Residence for the Arts Institute. We ended up having a lot of dialogues about how art fits into
the university and and how it could perhaps expand its role on the campus.
Well one of the projects I came up with something I called the Stealth Sculpture
Project.
The people who work here concentrate SO hard, focus so hard
that it's almost like nothing can break that focus. So, I thought well,
what would happen if I start putting sculptures around without any
information about what they were? The person coming upon the work has to
sort through it with less
externally provided information. I thought that was kind of a brilliant move.
Because I believe this: I believe that when you're working on a problem,
you work on it and work on it and work on it. And then there's this moment when
something else catches your eye or you're distracted.
And that, in that weird little window,
I think that that's where intuitions for good ideas come from and one of the things I
love to do is find a way to get people out of it long enough for that intuition to come. When I
set up sculpture at WID, I say this sculpture is a metaphor for a problem
you are trying to solve. What is it? And that's, I think, what
unlocks creativity.
Because if you can
identify what really matters to you and what is the problem that you
want to address, then you're going to be able to go at it and attack it. What's exciting is that
I think that what started to happen over the last year is that there really have
been
a series of interesting ways that the arts have been brought into the building and the WID
research and I think it's really exciting things are starting to happen. So, we're really excited about that.