An Updated Map

We have over 280 signatures on the petition now. That's sometimes only the head of the household. 

Map of the Opposed

This map shows all of the citizens of Camden Point who have signed the petition against the KCP&L transmission lines. Everyone has been helping me get the right places colored, hopefully we can make it nearly solid red by the end of the week.

An Essay about this Blog!

Living in Camden Point: an Art Blog

Green Sculpture KCAI:

For Zach Springer

By Alex Asher

Fall 2010

On the surface, this project seems very different from my usual studio practice. I am an animation artist when it comes right down to it. I dabble in many other mediums as well, but animation is my chosen subject of major study at the Kansas City Art Institute. Most of the work that I make has a certain narrative quality to it, and when I look at the overview of my blog, Living in Camden Point, that is what I see: a narrative. It is a specific, non-fiction work, about the people of Camden Point and how we interact with each other in a small town, as well as outside forces.

The art of blogging is a considerably new type of media. It comes from the term, “weblog,” coined by Jorn Barger in 1997, and shortened to “blog,” by Peter Merholz in 1999. Personally I did not know what a blog was until just a few years ago. It was just another obscure term that I had accepted as meaning something that goes on in the Internet and has no concern for me. I was wrong. Blogs affect us all whether we know it or not, someone is writing about the everyday business of their own lives, and others are responding to their prompts. Their lives affect ours, just as the metaphor of a single raindrop affecting the smooth surface of a pond. Recently I found that there are different types of blogs, including art blogs. Art blogs can cover many different topics such as reviews, critiques, gossip, auctions, news, essays, portfolios, interviews, and journals. I think that my own blog, Living in Camden Point, falls under this last category. It is a journal of sorts, covering my own family history, and the history of the town I live in, Camden Point. Though recently it has also become a political blog, as I have been blogging about recent issues that are affecting the residents of Camden Point today. I suppose it has also encompassed gossip from the various people that I visit with. There is always news of new things happening in Camden Point every day, no matter how big or how small.

The blog is a new type of media, just like animation. Animation’s history is very short compared to most other forms of art that have been around since the beginnings of human civilization. The beginnings of animation as we know it started about a hundred years ago. That is quite young in art standards. It still has a hard time being considered art in most circles. Blogs are very much like animation in this way. When a person says that they have started a blog another will likely not assume that it is a fine art project, but a form of personal commentary. I suppose that it is just that, but it can be so much more. Most art is commentary on one subject or another, but I want this to really get people thinking about the world that they live in.

Blogs offer readers the ability to leave their own comments about what I have posted, and from these I am given new perspectives on my work as well. That has been one of my favorite parts of this project. I love finding other’s opinions on what I have to say. They can tell me that they like what I have to say, or they hate what I have been doing. I have found that people will leave comments that they may not have been able to say in person, but have no scruples with leaving hidden on a deep, dark webpage that everyone in the whole world has access to. They even have the option of leaving an anonymous message, to which I will always wonder as to whom they were, and do I know them?

Even though the form of this project purely digital and available to anybody that has access to the World Wide Web anywhere in the world, this project is actually quite site specific. When this project was first introduced I found myself rather worried at the prospect of having to do a semester-long project working in the Kansas City community. I was not thinking outside the box, for although I live and work in Kansas City while attending the Kansas City Art Institute, it is not my community. I have very little ties to the city itself, only to the school and its people. My community is Camden Point. I grew up here; my family is from here; everything that I know and love is right here in Camden Point. Sure, I like to take a vacation every now and then, but this is where I want to grow old. After I realized that Camden Point was an option for this project I jumped on the opportunity and did not let go.

When I started this project I knew that I wanted it to be open to the public, but I also wanted it to be based in my small community. Going online seemed to be the most public place to post my art.[1]  It is an odd place for someone from Camden Point to be posting about Camden Point. Most households out here do not have Internet access, and those who do usually have a hard time getting it to work. Our middle age to older population does not even know how to navigate the Internet, so I decided the Camden Point needed someone to get her people established on the World Wide Web. Young people are on Facebook all the time, even if they have to visit the local library in order to get online. I often post links to my blog on Facebook just to draw people in. It has finally started to work. I get comments from my friends to my friends parents to people I hardly know living on the other side of the state. Camden Point has finally made it to St. Louis! That is only the distance across one state, but that’s pretty good for a small town no one has even heard about in the Kansas City area, being only forty minutes away.

This project is going to be a work in progress for as long as I can keep updating. It has already been a changing, and evolving, concept. When I first started it I figured it would only be about the history of my hometown and how my family ended up living there.  This changed as I quickly ran out of new information and realized that Camden Point has a living history as well as a past. I started my research with genealogy. Genealogy is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history through oral traditions, historical records, genetic analysis, and family records to obtain information about a family. “The pursuit of family history tends to be shaped by several motivations including the desire to carve out a place for one’s family in the larger historical picture, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generation, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling.” I think that my motivation was mostly the self-satisfaction part. I grew up with the need to collect things, and collecting information for a family tree was something too good to pass up. I found many interesting things, but realized that I had been collecting them in my head and not as a hard copy to share with others once I had forgotten all the details. I had more fun telling the stories of exciting lives and deaths of my ancestors, than actually recording them into a form that could be kept for future reference. This was a bit of a problem, and I decided to move on. Besides, I have found that sometimes it is not as much fun to listen to other’s stories of family history as it is to find your own.

Eventually this turned into more of a public, living history project in which I shared anything that was of interest to me that had anything to do with Camden Point. Public history refers to historic preservation, archival science, oral history, museum curatorship, and other related fields. This blog does not quite fit the definition, but I think that being a new type of media used in a new way, it may very well fall under the definition in the future. Another part of this project is the oral history of Camden Point. Oral history is the recording, preservation, and interpretation of information based on personal experience and opinions, offering eyewitness stories of the past. I think that my blog falls under this category quite well. I am recording Camden Point’s history on the Internet. This considerably new tool of documentation will last as long as the website is allowed to exist online.

The Internet is a funny thing. It can bring people together, but it can also push a person so far beyond the social sphere of real life that they never leave their computer screen. I would like my blog to be a window into both worlds. Perhaps it will draw the recluses away from their computers and encourage them to look into their own communities and meet the people who live there, instead of someone else glued to their computer screen on the opposite side of the world whom they have very little chance of ever meeting face to face and having a real relationship with. Those who are still social in the real world might find that they could share their own thoughts and experiences with the world through the highly accessible ways of the blogging.

The National Archives has started a project to record sound bites of interviews and storytellers, recalling the highlights of their lives. These records will be invaluable some day, looking into the everyday life of a person living in the year 2010 and beyond. Perhaps, someday people will look back on my own project once it has grown to its full potential and be able to experience what life was like in Camden Point in the twenty-first century.  The future of this project is, as of yet, unknown to me. I would like to continue with it for as long as I am interested and try to push myself beyond that as well. I would like to keep it personal to my heart, but not get so opinionated that no one else wants to read it.

Other projects such as Bill Hankins’ Landmark People, and Peter Feldstein and Stephen G. Bloom’s The Oxford Project, helped me define my art through their own. Hankins’ book is actually about the local people of Platte County, where Camden Point is located. I have always loved the idea of this book: collecting stories, and the people who experienced them both in and around my hometown. It reminds me of how connected we are up here in a rural community, in contrast to people who live in the city who are so disconnected even with their own neighbors. Feldstein and Bloom’s book reminded me that although we may share a lot in common with each other living in the same basic area, everyone has a different story to tell. I have so many exciting stories to tell about my own life that Camden Point must be exploding with them! “Would you please tell me your story?” I ask.

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[1] I have started another blog to archive my studio art in animation. It seems to be the best way to make my art public and get new and exciting opinions that I would not get otherwise from simply whipping out the computer and showing those whom are close enough to me that I am comfortable taking up their time in order to ‘show off.’