Event details
Saturday, June 8, 2024
2–3 pm

Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Included with museum admission, registration is recommended.

Blind Dates Recursive 06

Question: What can't be owned? What do we own together?
Facilitated by Fred Schmidt-Arenales 

Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist and filmmaker. With his projects, he attempts to bring awareness to unconscious processes on the individual and group level. He has presented films, installations, and performances internationally, including at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; SculptureCenter, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Kunsthalle Wien. His film Committee of Six (2022) was awarded a Jury Prize for Best of the Festival at the 2023 Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago.

Listen to an audio recording of the program here: 

About the program series

Blind Dates Recursive is a series of participatory public conversations held at Dia Beacon in conjunction with Rita McBride: Arena Momentum (on view through January 2025). These engagements take place on McBride’s Arena (1997), a modularly structured tribune that is activated by the presence of audiences and performers alike.

Inspired by the artist’s decision to make the digital design files of Arena freely available through a copyleft license, which allows for the public to access and reinterpret the work, Blind Dates Recursive provides an ongoing, open forum to consider and enact the shifting nature of authorship.

Each month, an invited facilitator poses a question and draws on their unique field of expertise to act as an instigator, listener, and moderator of the responses and conversation. Participants are encouraged to think out loud and in dialogue with each other during the hour-long session, at the end of which the facilitator will guide the group to collectively form a new question. The new question will be posed at the next session by a new facilitator. In this way, like a game of Telephone, Blind Dates Recursive generates iterative gatherings and an evolving public dialogue over the course of the exhibition.

The public is encouraged to participate on a recurring basis.

More information on the full program series is available here.