The inspiration for the name The NZASSA company is rooted in a word commonly used in the Ivory Coast, which refers to refers to a collage of discarded material sewn together into one unique and beautiful patchwork fabric.  This African Dance Workshop is open to all participants, regardless of experience level.
www.nzassacompanylive.org

A walk through the "wilds" of Governor's Island will teach participants what wild plants you can eat and use as medicine, both on the island and all over New York.
sciweb.nybg.org/science2/Profile_45.asp

Using a small amp and pick-up attached to knitting needles, the Knitting Kitty will entertain participants with an unusual musical performance.

Jester Jaimi begs, borrows, and steals paint, boards, brushes and lumber to construct easels for artists (from amateurs to graffiti masters) to use. The sections worthy of preservation will be cut out of the boards and the remaining artifacts will be gifted back to the community.
freekfactory.com/madart/jester/partic-i-paint/

Middleground Streeter roves the grounds offering juggling performances and lessons.

The Planetary Dance, Anna Halprin's visionary work, is a unique dance through which individuals and groups can give voice to important global issues including war, oppression, pollution and poverty. As a part of Figment/NYC, this rhythmic circular dance will engage participants by teaching large or small groups a simple running or walking pattern. Accompanied by drummers, participants will dedicate their dance to a personal or social cause as a way to inform and energize the dance, spirit and community.  This dance is open to people of all ages.
www.nycexpressivearts.com

Come and learn the art of hoop dance. Hoops will be provided. No experience necessary!
GrooveHoops.com

A solo dance performance to entertain the masses.
www.davidwesdance.com

A Site-specific, Interactive, Quadraphonic Audio Installation Piece based on chance operations. Audience members are welcomed to the Castle Williams with an encouragement to move about the space. Certain unbeknownst participants are actually driving the quadraphonic audio experience. Due to the chance operations, no two performances are alike.

This Living Statue/Roving Street Mime/Clown will demonstrate to participants his ability to stand still and not blink for excessive amounts of time.
www.myspace.com/danieljester

A knitting performance of a continual piece of knitting, now over 83' long! Mary Campbell will display the already completed section while she continues to knit.
www.myspace.com/knittermary

An art installation of plastic cubes of varying sizes, sprawling out into the landscape in a unique pattern.

Queen Tipsy performs traditional and contemporary Blues and Jazz music, originals and covers.
MySpace.com/QueenTipsy

The Duck Under sculptures are a place for you to catch your breath in a crowded place. A hollow bell-shaped form is suspended four feet off the ground so that participants can duck inside of it. The interior of the bell muffles the sound and reduces the light from the outside world.
joanieturbek.com

Based on the way the first group of networked computers communicated with each other in 1969, allowing an exchange of information and the creation of a community, this project aims to create an analog community that provides infinite points of entry for participants. Typewriters, each with its own continuous sheet of paper, will be placed throughout a landscape, giving users an opportunity to write and share whatever they choose. Ideas and information will evolve slowly around each typewriter, forming partnerships and smaller communities in the form of threads and dialogues, and later leading to a larger shared experience of FIGMENT by creating a connection between all of the typewriters.
www.annietown.com

A small art car in the shape of a pill, covered in the American flag, and piloted by none other than George W. Bush. Come get your medicine!
slurl.com/secondlife/Colona/239/67/23

An interactive workshop and performance for senior adults using dance to explore the beauty and surprises of the older body in motion. Members of the company range in age from 28-78 and audience members of all ages are welcome to join.

An exhibit of pictures of hand blown glass hearts that display the rollercoaster of human emotions. The interactive piece of the art exhibition is called "Loves Me, Loves Me Not" and participants will have the opportunity to write their own experiences of the heart,both good and bad. The exhibition will take place in Building 110 on the island.
www.berylbrenner.com

Returning to FIGMENT for a second year, this site-specific dance performance set near Fort Jay on historic Governor's Island tells the story of slightly schizophrenic General, Russell Rodin, who commandeers thousands of troops in epic battles of the mind. It also features the original Royal Governor of NY, Edward Hyde, and a participatory noisemaker drum corps full of homemade instruments and costumed players.

Come visit the kid-friendly Limbonade Stand, where the ground is the limit. Exercise your body to balance all that imagination exercise you're getting! Based on your limberness and comfort level we'll put you through your appropriately-challenging limbo paces set to the cheesiest tunes around, then reward you with ice-cold lemonade when you've limbo'd your finest. Come in a group and see how low you can go or come by yourself and make new friends.  See you at the Limbo bar!

A spoken word performance and workshop that transforms audience participants into spoken word artists through the use of poetry, sound, and song. After a performance of 2 or 3 original works, participants will be asked to create and perform their own spoken word art using a selected poem, percussive accompaniment, and imagination.

Disorient is an art collective and Burning Man theme camp that creates art projects and art installations using wood, scaffolding, containers, LEDs, geodesic domes, inflatable structures, video, repurposed objects, and vehicles.  At Figment, Disorient will offer a chill space with zero gravity chairs, delta shades, and a sweet sound system.
wiki.disorient.info

A set of wave-operated horns will be attached to a stretch of waterside railing at intervals of a few yards. As natural waves and ferry wakes pass by, the horns will play in ever-varying natural rhythms.
www.moonmilk.com

A completely improvised jazz ensemble, the TZ Quartet has performed at 169 Bar, ABC No Rio and the Bowery Poetry Club. It features Nonoko Yoshida (alto), Dave Schnug (flute/soprano/alto/tenor), TZ (bass) and Dave Miller (drums). No performance is the same! But all are a journey...
www.myspace.com/tomzlabinger

A series of mixed-media works that interpret the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect that designed Central Park, Prospect Park, Morningside Park, Eastern Parkway, Riverside Park and most of the major parks throughout the United States. Viewers will learn more about Olmsted and have the opportunity to use a sign-in book to describe what they see as the benefits of having parks and how parks enrich their lives. The installation will be on display in Building 110 on the island. Beryl Brenner, the artist, will be giving a lecture in Pershing Hall at 4:30pm on both Saturday and Sunday.
www.berylbrenner.com

These large scale drawings will be created on the ground using an "athletic field marker" and will be designed all through the open grass.
gravenimages.blogspot.com/

This project seeks creates a space where the boundary of land and water disappears and allows the public to walk through a field of ripples. Created by 2000+ thin bands of reflective film placed over a large area, Flutter will become a surface that becomes activated by the wind, light and the interaction of the people walking through its paths. Seen from land and water, with its ever-changing variety of light and color expressed as a floating mass of ripples, the piece can be experienced as an extension of the New York Bay into the island.

Diorama-rama will be a table/stand with supplies provided to make imagined landscapes, maps, and cityscapes of Governors Island. Participants will use xeroxed images, glue, and non-toxic water-based paints for participants to create their own vision of the island. Mixed in with displays of example maps will be images of other islands to offer perspective on different ways pieces of land are used, developed, preserved or destroyed. A digital piece taken of images of all the participant creations will be made following the event.

Day de Dada is a collective of performance artists based in Staten Island who will travel all over Governors Island collecting random words from people, then offer impromptu Mad Lib readings of their manifesto, complete with nonsense words, fetching costumes,and audience participation.
www.DaydeDada.com

The Brooklyn Children's Museum will bring several animals to Governors Island, including snakes and lizards, and will offer a child-friendly workspace.
www.brooklynkids.org

Best termed a social experiment, Say Nothing, a staged interactive video piece will challenge participants to do exactly the opposite. Participants can sit in front of a television broadcasting an image of their own face and will have a wireless microphone so that they can say anything that comes to mind.They will be challenged to verbalize their honest thoughts, memory or reaction, no matter how random. Later, this recorded "noise" will be edited and presented to viewers on the same television so they can hear the interior monologue of another person.
www.mfmcdowell.com

How does our brain know something is beautiful? The emerging field of neuroaesthetics seeks to understand the neural processes underlying the human reaction to art, such as a preference for one painting over another, or the hedonic ('pleasurable') response that a perceptual event can trigger. This talk will present recent theory and experimental data that shed light on what goes on in the brain during an aesthetic experience.

In 1979, Dianne Arndt was married in the Governors Island church. For the next 15 years, she spent time in the Club, bought groceries in the commissary, stood during the playing of the Star Bangled Banner at the 50-cent movie, and lounged on the lawns that make the island so unique. In 2008, as a reminscence to "once upon a time," Arndt will document FIGMENT throughout Filming and photographing the event. From her footage, a sequence of video and stills will be edited into a short film about her personal history of Governors Island.

A boogie rock band.
myspace.com/mightyfine

Live Music.
www.thecreamsicles.com

A multimedia project featuring a 16-foot-tall American Willow Tree, created from wood, metal, and other materials.
www.arboranimus.com

This lecture will examine the part that collective art projects play in the immediate and continuing recovery of disaster stricken communities and their populations. Despite new international relief systems, recovery begins at home. There are four major examples that will be considered in this discussion: Belfast's Era of The Troubles and Minsk's Soviet-Afghan War as man-made disasters, and New Orleans' Hurricane Katrina and Tokyo's Kanto earthquake as natural disasters. New York after September 11, 2001, Prague during the fall of Communism and Myanmar's current crisis after Cyclone Nargis will also be addressed.
www.michaelmastroianni.com/

Organ Grinder Lola! She will crank her street organ and sing MORITATEN, bloody 19th century ballads of madness, murder and mayhem! With detailed illustrations for the general edification of the public!

The Large paper sculptures are created on site and installed among the trees. Layers of translucent papers, flower like images, repetition, all contribute to take a part in the Cycle of Nature.

A slide-accompanied discussion of the artist, Lucy Orta, and her collaborative and participatory work as a model for a politically engaged and aesthetically sophisticated art practice. Coming out of Europe in the early 1990's, Orta's work was first received in connection to the theory of Relational Aesthetics. This discussion will reconsider her work through a feminist performance trajectory that connects her to the public actions of such pioneers as Suzanne Lacy, Adrian Piper and Lygia Clark. Such a reframing underlines the important political and even Utopian aims of artists such as Orta, who use the empathetic potential of participatory art to imagine a more just, more equitable and more beautiful world, and questions the political implications of an art world that would prefer this work be considered as purely theoretical in its achievements.

Lettuce Lane is an interactive pathway planted with lettuce seedlings that participants will harvest for making their own locally harvested salad. Instructions will be outlined for harvesting, and identification guide will instruct participants to identify variation in the taste and shape of up to 8 different types of greens.
www.stateofprogress.org

Marie Roberts, professor of art at Fairleigh Dickinson University, native of Brooklyn and artist-in-residence at Coney Island, USA, will lecture on the history, art and unique culture of Coney Island. Coney Island has long been a place where people come to garner inspiration to make art. For Prof. Roberts, Southern Brooklyn holds both the bones and the narrative of her ancestors. Through a 21st century sideshow she has found a way to fuse her life as an artist and her life as a Southern Brooklyner. Prof. Roberts appears as part of the "Coney Island in the House" project at FIGMENT, along with performer Adam Rinn, aka Adam the Real Man, and artist Africasso. Marie's famous Coney Island sideshow paintings will also be displayed on the island.
www.bitterwonder.com

A grouping of recent works by an artist to deliberately create random sequences of media for the sake of communication through dissonant association rather than a thematic common ground.

A series of three steel spherical sculptures that are internally incorporated with solar panels and lights. They absorb the sun's energy during daylight hours to light up at night as the sun sets.
www.thealanzisero.com

A workshop in which participants will learn how to knit the plastic from plastic bags, making a practical recyclable resource into a fanciful piece of art.
www.NancyRakoczy.com

This is a two-part environmental project including a sculpture installation and a performance piece. The sculpture installation is made from non-recyclable plastic six-pack rings from beverage cans. Approximately 300 are stitched together using fishing wire into a twin-size hanging 'plastic blanket'. The blanket design is replicated from 1950s chenille bedspread patterns and glows in a direct light source, such as sunlight. The performance piece involves the artist wearing a plastic six-pack ring on her face as a mask and encouraging others to wear them as well. The goal of this project is to create environmental awareness of everyday personal consumption via a visually aesthetic, luminous work of art.

Figment's very own Curatorial Advisor, LadyBee, Burning Man's art curator, will show several years' worth of images from Burning Man and talk about community-based interactive art, the Burning Man art grant program, and the history of the event. She will discuss community building through art making, emphasizing projects that embody that concept, including: Serpent Mother, Crude Awakening, and Homouroboros. The talk will focus on recent art, primarily from 2006 and 2007. www.burningman.com
www.burningman.com

A three part Coney Island experience, including a traditional Coney Island Circus Sideshow complete with a dialogue and a history of some of Coney Island's sideshows and performers from the past. This one-man sideshow entices participants to "enter the tent" via a bally pitch, swallow swords, hammer nails into his face, place his hand inside animal traps, eat lit cigarettes and razor blades, and demonstrate magical illusions. Authentic sideshow banners painted by Deborah Rinn, will be displayed on the staging area, along with banners from Marie Roberts.
www.adamrealman.com

This lecture will discuss Jamaica Flux 2007 and the way in which it challenges traditional ideas about where art should be displayed and explores the relationship between art, commerce, urban renewal and community. By facilitating an inclusive dialogue between artists, curators, art historians, community residents, business owners, and visitors to Jamaica, Queens, the project examines issues such as identity and cultural heritage, immigrant experiences, capitalism and technology and their impacts on contemporary art practices and the historic specificity of place and time.

Originated as a method of drama therapy, Developmental Transformations is also used in groups to create community connection and allow adults to reclaim their playful healthy selves. This workshop engages participants in playful improvisation together through movement, sound, and role play. No prior experience (in anything but being alive) is necessary.

Sculpture: Beautiful human riding a Bicycle

A workshop for building Intrepid Cameras designed to record video of various types of urban explorations not always available directly to humans. The workshop participants will be divided in groups and can propose their own Intrepid Camera Missions, or they may choose to build cameras that can be, for example, thrown from the top of buildings to document the landscape vertically (like school egg-drop projects), attached to moving vehicles, or flown around the city on other urban adventures. All materials must be brought by the workshop participants, who will be encouraged to create solutions from cheap, recycled materials and use low end cameras available to them. Limit: 30 participants.
www.lenara.com/intrepidcam

"Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition" is a photography exhibition that invites the Brooklyn Museum's visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate in the exhibition process. Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book, "The Wisdom of Crowds," in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click! explores whether Surowiecki's premise can be applied to the visual arts. Is a diverse crowd just as "wise" at evaluating art as the trained experts? The exhibition panel will be held at FIGMENT. Panelists include James Surowiecki, Jeff Howe - contributing editor at Wired Magazine, Eugenie Tsai - Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Shelley Bernstein - Manager of Information Systems and organizer of Click!. The panel will be moderated by Nicole Caruth - manager of interpretive materials at the Brooklyn Museum and also a freelance writer and curator.
www.brooklynmuseum.org/click

Creative bodypainting transformations inspired by sacred symbolism, visionary art, and cross-cultural shamanic traditions. Nelia, a Ukrainian-born graphic designer, offers body art that demonstrates a deep insight into the truest essence of the person being adorned, using the language of color and shape to create new levels of awareness and delight.
www.nv-design.com/sacred_art/index.html

A site-specific environmental installation with sculptural forms resembling hands hanging from the boughs and wrapped around trees on the lawn of Governors Island. Simultationally, "Shaking Hands" embraces nature, while reflecting public attention to environmental concerns.
www.mollynekarnofsky.com

LIPS=LOVE are a pair of giant wooden lips coming out of the ground. One is my personal collection of lips drawings, stories etc, while the other is an interactive piece where anyone can come write stories of their first kiss, post pictures of their mouths, and celebrate the magic and art of kissing.

performance with art

The Structures and Culture Moveable Museum explores the traditional homes of three modern nomadic peoples. Visitors perform the work of a cultural anthropologist, discovering what architecture and everyday objects can reveal about culture.
www.amnh.org

A troupe of slghtly wacky, period-dressed Dutch Troubadors wander around the Nutten Island (once called Island of Nuts), serenading passersby and participants with songs of ancient revelry. The troupe will engage with participants and attempt to enlist them to join their band as they ramble about the island from event to event.
aesthletics.org

The Poetry Brothel is a new and dreamlike twist on a poetry reading, based on the concept of a brothel. Here's how it works: The poets play "whores" and the visitors play "customers," but instead of physical intimacy, the poets offer the intimacy of their poetry by giving private, one-on-one readings. Of course, every good brothel needs a furtive "front" or cover business; this one is part saloon and part salon, offering a blackjack table, live portrait painting, and tarot card readings, with spectacular and covert performances from our poets, performers, artists throughout the event.
www.thepoetrybrothel.com

An earthly angel sings heartfelt songs about love, loss, trust, and indigestion, accompanied by guitar and her vocal celtic warble.

Audience members can recite/read songs as serious poetry in the beat fashion - think karaoke style renditions of WHAM!'s "wake me up before you go-go" crossed with meaning and poignancy.

A literary pamphlet and performance piece. The Dance Away Your Debt pamphlet is filled with creative writing and art, following themes drawn from early and contemporary American religious and political pamphlets. The primary goal of New Acquisition is to expose the creative work by emerging female artists and writers via mass distribution of pamphlets and to further engage the audience in dancing away their own debt!
www.newacquisition.org

A small teepee and signs installed without stakes.
elcelso.com

Three electric keyboards come together to create one amazing sound in this energetically healing musical performance. 

A workshop in which participants will be taught basic African dances and rhythms, accompanied by African drumming. These dance lessons will show people how to use the elements in their environment to become more in tune with the earth, the universe, and how to balance out energies within.
internationalafricans.bravehost.com

This work uses concepts from developmental psychology to look at relationships between dancers in performance. The piece starts with the dancers in solitary play and continues through parallel play into group play to explore how these different ways of interacting can help to maipulate choreography. The piece shows the difference between active and passive involvement between performers exchanging movement and then words.
www.anddancers.com

The Artist seen from afar, as if from a passing boat in the harbor. The Artist seen from afar, as if from a passing car in a Coney Island dark ride. The Artist as Magician. The Artist as Mystery Cult Clown, as an internationalist Buffoon. The Artist seen from another planet on his own planet of rarified creativity. The Artist revealing and disguising the creative process at the same time. Artist Spyglass is an installation that allows the viewer to observe The Artist engaged in the Act of Creativity through a spyglass. The piece combines references to Classical and Baroque culture, as well as influences from popular culture, 20th century Italian painting and the classic amusement park environment.
www.kehoe-design.com/this_moment/newwork.htm

The "Wave the Dagger" project focuses on the speed and maneuverability of skateboarding as an act and community, as well as a portal into Tubular and radical art practice. It is a series of spontaneous events of skateboarding as well an examination of the formal aspects of trash covered in homemade plywood ramps and boxes, and bodies trying desperately to traverse them on damaged skateboards. It is a contemporary riff on works of Minimalism such as Richard Serra's famous "Throwing Lead" of the late 1960s.

This performance of live electric flute music and dancers features an Electric flute producing Grand Canyon echoes, shimmering highs, and a profound bass in floating melodies with samples of a Latin drum ensemble. The accompanying modern dance includes pop dance movements. 
www.EclectixNYC.org

This is a sound and noise piece derived from two years of working in fast-paced kitchens in Seattle, WA. Recordings of the frenetic pace in the kitchens offer a huge pool of sounds with which to compose this abstract, dynamic piece that explores sounds as their own entities, free of meaningful association.
www.fionamoocow.com

Based on a technique of physical theater, this puppet show tries to show that happiness occurs in the tiny things that we almost we do not see.

Based on a project from 2007 in which the group collected reclaimed wood from dumpsters around the city for an artistic project, Conscious Cycle 451 will recreate this environmentally friendly artistic endeavor by showing a film of their wood reclamation project and offering a small, self-standing wooden wall with canvas on which two artists can paint in collaboration each day of the event.
www.myspace.com/consciouscycle451

Fresh off his debut at the Mermaid Parade, this 15-foot-tall Seahorse sculpture made of fabric and carved foam goes mobile around Governors Island. Accompanied by costumed attendants, the Seahorse nods, winks, and showers the crowds with a spray of cooling water projected from a power washer buried deep in his snout. Since he is the gender of his species that carries the young ten seahorse babies are trapped in his belly. Birth is imminent... but where and when the balloon babies will emerge is anyone's guess.
www.horseflesh.weebly.com

Shadyvil, a Burning Man theme camp, offers a silk-screening station complete with several screens, designs, and plenty of ink. Bring your own t-shirt and learn how to silkscreen it with a new design.
caebuttons.com

A two-part mini lecture series on culture jamming as a method to communicate to the masses. The two speakers will explore culture jamming - a mocking of the homogeneous nature of pop culture, often through guerrilla communication - in the context of a resistance movement and an art movement. Culture jamming can reawaken a sense of wonder and fascination about one's surrounding environment, inspired by the frequent intentional ambiguity of the culture jamming technique, which stimulates personal interpretation and independent thinking. The speakers will discuss its successes and failures in communicating its message through several examples.
www.wylielaw.com

A drum & dance circle open for spectators to watch or join.  Dance lessons will be incorporated, as well as a yoga lesson at the conclusion.
www.agapearts.org

The artist, Anya Liftig, will weave herself into the environment of Governors Island using only her body and reclaimed materials. 

A lecture presented in conjunction with the project "Don't Wave the Dagger," which focuses on the speed and maneuverability of skateboarding as an act and community, as well as a portal into Tubular and radical art practice.

Enjoy flying handmade kites with images of the artist's shadow on them. Michelle Provenzano will be available to help participants learn how to fly the kites.
michelleprovenzano.com

Design and build a bicycle-powered ice cream churner!