Engagement Party Begins with Finishing School
Finishing School are the inaugural participants in Engagement Party.
Formed in late 2001, Finishing School is a collective identity that explores art, design, and technology through interventions that conflate praxis, play, and activism. Finishing School attempts to demystify the experience of cultural production and engage viewers through various participatory models.
One of their current ongoing projects, Little Pharma, is an interdisciplinary investigation of various alternative medicines and lifestyles as viable antidotes to some of the drug industry’s pathologies. This work involves an ongoing weblog, workshops, roundtable meetings, lectures, and a forthcoming community medicinal garden at Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles.
Past Finishing School projects have included Public Interaction Objects (2006), a series of low-tech participatory objects including meet/greet, a semi-autonomous drone designed to move through public spaces and greet individuals with multilingual salutations; The Patriot Library (2003), a working library that provides access to books, periodicals, and other media considered “dangerous” by the United States government; and Saturday School (2001), a temporary, nomadic teaching institution offering multidisciplinary classes that dissect, question, and illuminate various aspects of everyday life.
