2008 Summer Residency
Course descriptions
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, 7PM media lounge
ubermorgen.com (Lizvlx + Hans Bernhard): Artist talk
July 30, 7PM media lounge
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. "Under the Weather "with Marji Vecchio
This class will investigate weather in its relationship to art. A regular subject of the news, how we relate to weather seems to represent all sorts of political and social weight. In this class we will consider the religious doom-day, the idea of the forecast and prediction, the scientific dreams to tame weather, etc. We will challenge the mythological aspects of weather alongside the fear of global warming alongside how weather is considered to dictate people’s moods, etc. A category rich in content, this class will also investigate the innumerable uses of weather to better understand the forms each student uses. As a student in this class, you do not have to use weather as a subject in your work, but rather be interested in the possibility of understanding how form and content might become irreconcilable, especially inside the center of a tornado, or during Noah’s Flood.
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. "Art-Work-Net" with Geoff Cox
Any analysis of the work involved in making art must recognise the importance of communicative interconnections in what the autonomists call the 'social factory', and the increased sharing of skills and expertise. These developments present new contradictions characterised not least by the prevalence of free labour in the cultural realm (and in the production of free software in particular). Terms like 'work-net' are introduced to help establish the action involved in the interconnections of 'net' and 'work' to stress the flow between agencies (as part of the 'net-work'). Similarly, the issue of 'code-work' is developed by drawing attention to both the work involved in writing code, as well as the work that code does itself once executed. Finally to 'art-work', the seminar examines the recent tendency to regard curatorial, artistic and cultural work as indicative of the ways in which all work is increasingly creative, flexible and precarious - making artists exemplary contemporary workers.
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. "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.
12. TBA with NN
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
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
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
Sunday, July 13
14:00 New student orientation with directors
14:00 Student exhibition meetings (08 and 09)
15:00 Two minute intros by all
17:00 Students orient students
17:00 Certificate student orientation with directors
18:00 Reception
Saturday, July 19
09:00 Thesis exhibition installation
09:00 Student/faculty meetings
12:00 Yoga retreat
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 Yoga retreat
Sunday, July 27
14:00 Open source exchange
16:00 Time-based Night
Saturday, August 02
09:00 Exhibition de-installation
09:00 Student/faculty meetings
12:00
