2008 Summer Residency
Course descriptions and daily program
July 13 - August 1, 2008
OK Center for Contemporary
OK Platz 1, 4020, Linz, Austria
Session 1 courses: July 14 - July 18
Session 2 courses: July 21 - July 25
Session 3 courses: July 28 - August 1
Guest lectures
Gulsen Bal: The Creative Moment of Encounters - Curatorial Projects
July 16, 19:00 media lounge
Ruth Bianco: Issues of Territory
July 23, 19:00 media lounge
ubermorgen.com (Lizvlx + Hans Bernhard): Artist talk
July 30, 19:00 media lounge
Exhibitions
Thesis Exhibition: O.K Center for Contemporary Art, July 13 - August 1
Vernissage: July 20, 18:00
Gallery Hours: 11 - 15:00 M-F
Download a PDF of the catalog here.
Faculty Exhibitions: BV Gallery, July 14 - August 1
Openings: July 16, 23, 30, 20:00
Gallery Hours: 16 - 18:00 M-F
Exhibition webpage
Course descriptions below
Daily Program
Mondays
09:00 Faculty meeting
10:00 Workshop or seminar
11:00 Workshop studio or Seminar research
15:00 Workshop or seminar
16:00
16:30 Meeting
17:00 Critiques
20:00
Tuesdays
10:00 Workshop or seminar
11:00 Workshop studio or seminar research
15:00 Workshop or seminar
16:00
16:30 Graduate talks
17:30
18:00 Project planning sessions
20:00
Wednesdays
10:00 Workshop or seminar
11:00 Workshop studio or seminar research
15:00 Workshop or seminar
16:00
16:30 Meeting
17:00 Critiques
18:30
19:00 Presentations TBA
20:00 Faculty exhibition openings
Thursdays
10:00 Workshop or seminar
11:00 Workshop studio or seminar research
15:00 Workshop or seminar
16:00
16:30 Graduate talks
18:00 Project plans
20:00
Fridays
09:00 - 13:00 Administrative office hours at BV gallery
11:00 Workshop studio or seminar research
15:00 Workshop or seminar
16:00
16:30 Meeting
17:00 Critiques
20:00
Sunday, July 13
14:00 New student orientation with directors
15:00 Two minute intros by all
17:00 Registration
18:00 Reception
Monday, July 14
11:30 Student exhibition meetings ('08 and '09, Media deck)
Thursday, July 17
11:00 All student meeting with DUK
12:00
Saturday, July 19
09:00 Thesis exhibition installation
09:00 Student/faculty meetings
12:00
Sunday, July 20
14:00 Open source exchange
16:00 Time-based Night
18:00 Exhibition Reception
20:00
Saturday, July 26
09:00 Student/faculty meetings
12:00
Sunday, July 27
14:00 Open source exchange
16:00 Time-based Night
Friday, August 01
19:00 Graduation and reception
20:00 Graduation dinner
Saturday, August 02
09:00 Exhibition de-installation
09:00 Student/faculty meetings
12:00 Residency ends
Workshops session 1
1. "Making New" with Lynn Book
This laboratory will rely on air, imagination, representation and the flesh of action to rally creative efforts for future possibilities in transforming life. Inherent in the premise of the lab are these ideas: 1. that every and all of the myriad nows lead from the particular to the shared, 2. we can never escape but can maneuver positional relations of the personal with/to the communal and environmental, 3. quotidian experience, however mundane has liberatory potentialities enfolded in it. The power to generate ideas of the possible and actuate them, even to take the next breath, comes from life’s impetus to create ever freer forms of existence. This ideal of agency will be countered as we embrace the conundrum of subject as forever forming and reforming itself as a shifting aggregate, constructed and defined by expectations and exigencies of society – both local and global, real and virtual.
Revaluing creative imagination is an overt agenda in this workshop. We start with the idea that creative potential is enfolded into everyday choices with future consequences for self, others and the world. Utopian desire along with other histories and becomings offers a rubric for a multitude of creative approaches to re-imagine what kind of impact creative acts have in the postmodern cynical and complexly interwoven world in which we live. We will grapple daily with the idea that artful acts impact social life, with the express intention of focusing our investigative efforts on the making of the ‘new’, with all of the inherent conflicts therein.
Readings on futurity, utopias and art gestures and movements that take on social transformation will offer fodder for discussions and procedural support for performative, image and text based explorations including, creative interventions in ‘’private’’ experience and public interaction.
2. "Fake/Authentic" with Thomas Helyar-Cardwell
This course will address issues of authority in contemporary artwork and mass production. In an age when notions of originality are highly contested, desire for the apparently authentic has reached crisis level. In the play of mulitplicity is the idea of an original or real item redundant? How can we, as contemporary practitioners, open up new spaces for investigation between the original and the fake? Session themes will include the concept of the authentic object and its copy or re-presentation, the counterfeit sign and chains of signification, and the politics of the fake. The project will culminate in two group-produced and curated exhibitions to be sited somewhere in the locality. The physical nature of these will not be proscribed, but rather will emerge from the week?s discussions and studio practice sessions.
3. "Sculpting In Time" with Leon Johnson
Beginning with theories proposed by Guy Debord, and The Situationists, students working in small design teams will renegotiate public and private spaces and create performative, typographic, and cinematic alternatives to “known place”. Hidden, lost and excavated histories and memories will be re-activated and translated as “performed futures”, "impossible maps" and “sonic alternatives”. We will read and discuss a range of texts and view excerpts from an inclusive number of makers.
This course aspires to cultivate intimate creative relationships with place, bodies, memories and histories in the service of producing speculative futures. It is in the broad and inclusive multiplicity of our alliances and negotiations with place that new narratives, and narrative structures, might be discovered.
4. "Collections, Obsessions, and the Display of the Other" with Mary Ting
The collection, documentation, study and display of other creatures, cultures, and objects rare and curious dates back to earliest civilizations. This custom continues with equal fervor today and as system model is often utilized in popular culture and contemporary art forms.
The workshop will combine presentations of historical and contemporary models with daily hands on activities suitable for all art forms. lof historical collections such as wonder cabinets, medical libraries, natural history museums to contemporary art forms that mimic, comment, subvert and utilize these systems and display methods. Historical models such as wonder cabinets, medical libraries, natural history museums will be examined for their cultural and political significance and the ongoing obsessive desire for the consumption of other cultures and life forms. Contemporary examples that mimic, comment, subvert and utilize these systems and display methods. Students will discuss and examine these models, systems, research, and create a work specific to their medium and interests.
Seminars session 2
5. "Group Effort" with Geoff Cox
Radical changes in the nature of work have lead to the current tendency to regard curatorial, artistic and cultural work as indicative of the ways in which all work is increasingly (forced to be) creative, flexible and precarious - making artists exemplary contemporary workers. Through selected projects of contemporary artists and art collaboratives we will explore the increased sharing of skills and expertise as well as the rising importance of communicative interconnections in what the autonomists call the 'social factory'. The course will introduce concepts and examples of contemporary interdisciplinary arts praxis and help participants to develop strategies for research and future creative production that is informed by historical and theoretical references. .
6. "Freeze-Frame: Technology, Narrative and Time" with Carolyn Guertin
This course will examine the effect that photography, film and digital media have had on our conception of time. Imaging technologies have transformed how we see the world, and in turn have altered the kinds of stories that we tell. Exploring the historical evolution of the image, we will look at how the ability to stop time and view the individual frame has changed modes of looking. We will focus on stillness in motion pictures (as they used to be called), and will pay particular attention to slow-motion, the instant replay, repetition, the freeze-frame and the hyperlink as techniques of contemporary art. Films and digital media works we will discuss will include La Jetée, Vertigo, Memento, Night Watch, Dark City, The Matrix, Patchwork Girl, Or A Modern Monster, A Figurative History and Artificial Changelings.
7. "Activist Media" with Wolfgang Sützl
Ever since the advent of modernism, the significance of media in art has shifted from media of creation to media of communication, culminating in contemporary technical and media art. As a result, the place and the time of art have changed, and consequently, its social and political status. Now more than ever, artists are political actors as well as the targets of political action.
Activist media refers to a way of creatively working with media in which the political and artistic are intersected as fully as possible. The seminar investigates the role of activist media in the current political and cultural landscape, undertaking a historical as well as systematic analysis: following a brief consideration of the historical precedents of activist media from ancient Graffiti and medieval Carnivals to pamphlets and posters, the seminar will focus on the electronic and hybrid media of the present.
Throughout the seminar, we will examine activist media projects by groups such as the Critical Art Ensemble, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Public Netbase, 0100101110101101.org and others.
8. "In 1971" with Aaron Levy
In this course, we will explore a series of exemplary artworks and theoretical works from 1971 that attest to what have since become crucial issues for our generation: the desire for a new epistemology of art, and the desire to contest disciplinary borders and institutional boundaries. In particular, we will explore how conceptual art of the early 1970s, at its most basic conception, is an edge condition, a place where boundary negotiations take place. A liminal zone on the edge of the political sphere, art at that time is defined both by acts of institutional complicity as well as the artistic desire to radically modify institutional authority as such.
It has become something of conventional wisdom to say that 1968 is an axiomatic year, and that the worldwide political events of that period ultimately gave rise to a profound reassessment of intellectual paradigms, one that has since swept through virtually every domain of the humanities. Art historians such as Hal Foster have argued that the period around 1968 “may be our 1848, a revolutionary moment that remains a historical crux, one that defines the political field [ ] for years to come,” while curator Janet Kardon has similarly suggested in a topical exhibition that one finds in that particular year that “the moments that contain the penumbra from which ideas emerge—and the new ground that these ideas open--prove the most compelling.” This course diverges from conventional wisdom in that it has been constructed around a somewhat heterodoxic and hypothetical point of view: distinguishing the politically traumatic and compelling events of 1968 from their later symbolic realization in the cultural happenings of 1971, we will explore how 1971—a seemingly arbitrarily chosen, inconsequential year--may in fact be the axial moment of contemporary art history. If 1968 is the populist apex of a certain revolutionary fervor, 1971 represents its eruption in conceptual art of that period, the latent manifestation of what was still unsayable in 1968, namely the value of individuality, an emphasis not on the collective or the masses but on the individual as such. The explicit political activism of 1968 is of less interest to us, then, than its later symbolic re-instantiation on abandoned city streets and on one’s own body, through less publicly recognized mediums and more private forms of communication by artists such as Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Shusaku Arakawa, Hans Haacke, and Braco Dimitrijevic.
Workshops session 3
9. "Expanded Remix" with Jeff Thompson
While remixing is traditionally the altering of existing music, it can also be used as a way of framing studio practice – a process of interacting not just with existing media (sound, video) but also with the physical world. This class uses the expanded process of the remix as a way to investigate and make work.
Projects will not necessitate working in the computer or with media; performance, curation, public interventions, and other related practices are ideally suited for this course as well, though students working in all media are welcome.
Designed for a residency format, existing materials that can be gathered in Linz will be used as source material. Assignments will be supplemented with critiques, discussion, and readings.
10. "As the Means Justify the End: Experiments in the Ephemeral" with Jean Marie Casbarian
This workshop will investigate the idea of impermanence and those artists that have used transitory materials to set their works and practice in motion. From Richard Serra's Verb List of the late 1960s to Sam Taylor-Wood's, That White Rush (2007), we will explore this intersection between the process of doing and the by-product which we create.
As thinkers, we will create a forum in which to discuss the context of the materials we use (organic vs technological) and the actions used to make them. As artists, this process-based workshop will support projects in all disciplines including, but not limited to, moving and still image, sound, performance and sculptural practices. Slide/Video lectures and readings will provide a deeper context for daily, hands-on studio work as we consider theoretical and practical problems inherent to interdisciplinary forms.
We will look at a rich repository of artists who address the idea of impermanence and Process Art (Smithson, Hesse, Serra, Taylor-Wood, Hirst, etc) and the writers that discuss them (Buskirk, McEvilley, Krauss, etc)
11. "Inside/Outside" with Michael Bowdidge and Sophia Lycouris
In this workshop the notions of inside and outside act as a locus where two modes of practice intersect with and interact with each other in order to explore these notions while simultaneously developing a reflexive critical synthesis of practice.
Bringing together skills which support improvisational performance and techniques of working sculpturally with found objects or parts of such objects towards assemblages, the workshop aims to address how notions of inside/outside are experienced and articulated at a bodily level and what happens when the focus of the investigation shifts into an action area outside the boundaries of the physical body, for example when an (artistic) object is constructed or appropriated.
Practical exercises which are integrated with brief introductions to relevant theorists and practitioners form the spine of this programme, allowing for the development and acquisition of non-medium specific creative strategies and new ways of discovering, approaching and exploring the many different continua that can be mapped onto inside/outside.
The theoretical components of this workshop are intended to collectively support the opening up of a reflexive space in which practice can be thought differently.
12. "Two Kinds of Truth" with Klaus Knoll
Looking at current and historic examples from various genres we discuss agenda, strategies and epsitemologies for explicit and implicit claims to truth for works of art. Students are invited to make at least one piece of "fake" documentation and one docufiction in any media. We will explore photography and film as the quintessential media of documentary art making but also include other methods from interview and oral history to sketch and audio recording.
