admissions | programs | members | residencies | students
>> Travel info
>> Exhibition_Catalog_2011.pdf
Summer program 2011
MFA + CERTIFICATE PROGRAM
July 23 - August 12, 2011
Tanzfabrik, Möckernstr. 68, 10965 Berlin
* open to the public
Saturday, July 23 *
19:00 Thesis exhibition vernissage
MMX Open Art Venue, Linienstr. 142/143, 10115 Berlin-Mitte
Exhibition July 23 - August 12, 2011
>> Catalog
Wednesday, July 27 *
17:30 Guest talk + reception, Alanna Lockward>> site
Wednesday, August 3 *
17:30 Guest talk + reception, Merete Røstad >> site
Wednesday, August 10 *
17:30 Guest talk + reception, Dmytri Kleiner >> site
Week 1 , 07.25 - 07.29
“The History of Forgetting And The Nature of Laughing” Jean Marie Casbarian
“Framing a Practice” Radhika Subramaniam
“Between: Foreignness” Dorit Cypis
Week 2, 08.01 - 08.05
“Investigating Meaning, Articulating Praxis” Victoria Hindley
“Work of Art as Analyst” Laura Gonzalez
“Art and/or Business as Usual” Geoff Cox and Tatiana Bazzichelli
Week 3, 08.08 - 08.12
“Broken Grammar” Michael Bowdidge
“The Convergence of Sensation: Dialectic of the Eye and the Ear” David Dunn
“Salad on the House” Nicholas Estevez
“Research Methodologies” Victoria Hindley + Geoff Cox
2012
“Remembering Spaces” Deborah Aschheim and Lisa Mezzacappa 2012
“Cultural Translation” Wolfgang Suetzl, 2012
“Reciting Sites: Performance, Public Monuments and Cultural Politics” Myron Beasley 2012
“High Fidelity: on Adaptation, Re-enactment and Retelling” Ofri Cnaani 2012
“The Index: The Contemporary Taxonomist” Mary Ting 2012
“Intensities – Extended Body, Extended Voice” Lynn Book, 2012
COURSES
WEEK 1
“The History of Forgetting And The Nature of Laughing” Jean Marie Casbarian
This workshop will set out to explore and address the deep well of forgetting (selected memory / amnesia / psycho-physical trauma) and the contradictions/contraindications that might occur through the act of laughing. Assignments drawing from literature (Kundera) to neuro-scientific accounts (Sacks) to the role technology plays in using and/or abusing our ability to remember, will be addressed. | Along with daily slide presentations that address artists that investigate the idea of forgetting / laughing, scientific analysis and reports concerning the social, political, and psycho-physical repercussions and current 'condition' of forgetting and/or laughter will be cornerstones for daily sketches and assignments.
“Framing a Practice” Radhika Subramaniam
Working with curatorial, exhibition, editing and documentation issues, pedagogy and archival work in relation to
a socially oriented and creative practice and research will be explored.
“Between: Foreignness” Dorit Cypis
We see in the other part of our self that we do not recognize and so separate from within ourselves. That "other" becomes foreign, unrecognized, a denial that seeps out as bias against others. Foreignness, shaped by both political and psychological forces, is a highly charged contemporary axiom, the stranger next door, the undocumented worker, the party with whom we are in conflict, the unidentified terrorist. Who is the foreigner? How are we each foreign? | There is an ineffability of locating "I" and "you", in perceiving another's experience, the person next to us and especially across cultures of different histories and contexts. We take for granted experience, assuming that what we see/feel is self-evident when in actuality experience is a complex act, physiological, psychological, and social. | Between: Foreignness weaves together perceptual tools from aesthetics, self-knowledge tools from somatic movement and communication tools from conflict resolution to explore the psycho-social-physical aspects of identity as interior and social, psychological and political. | We will unpack the complexity of identity and experience to reveal cultural and subjective codes and to transform bias to empathy and engagement. Without critical insight towards ourselves we remain “foreign” to ourselves and separate from the foreignness of others, lacking the empathy necessary to engage creatively with difference.
WEEK 2
“Investigating Meaning, Articulating Praxis” Victoria Hindley
Meaning is produced, appropriated, celebrated, acquired, manipulated, offered, instrumentalized, shared, reproduced. To expand one’s understanding of how meaning is constructed is to expand one’s ability to see; to strengthen the ability to see is to strengthen the ability to write. Visual literacy and good writing are intimately linked. Just as meaning(s) are never static, good writing is never predictable, formulaic, or dull. | This seminar is designed to help you address the specific requirements of graduate-level writing, while emphasizing the unique advantages artists have as “see-ers” and writers. In a supportive environment of productive discussion and presentation, we’ll demystify the academic writing process. We’ll strengthen critical reading and thinking skills and deepen our capacity to articulate our observations. Because language is never neutral and always defines a way of seeing the world, we will engage in close reading of both word and image: investigating and questioning codes, representations, and constructions; interpreting, analyzing, deconstructing, inhabiting. We’ll examine how visual, textual, and material systems are implicated in meaning formation, and investigate ways to disrupt such systems in order to produce spirited, incisive writing. | Treating practice and research as inextricably intertwined, our investigations will navigate wide terrain encompassing art, literature, cultural studies, philosophy, and political science. These explorations will be further grounded with presentations on concrete skill-building: how to formulate a thesis; develop a meaningful argument; organize and structure the research paper; apply good grammar; edit, proofread, and use citations. Through collaborative exercises and analysis, we’ll engage in peer exchange and emerge as stronger writers who can more easily relax and focus on the pleasure of creating.
“Work of art as analyst” Laura Gonzalez
This course will reverse the traditional position of psychoanalysis in relation to works of art. Instead of psychoanalyzing objects – or even worse, authors – I will make the proposition that works of art occupy, in the studio or the gallery space, the position the analyst occupies in the analysis room and, thus analyses viewers. Examples, in the form of discussions around the fetish object, Jacques Lacan theory of the Four Discourses, an account of an incident occurring to Freud on the Acropolis and how these have been taken up in art will form the basis of the morning sessions. Artists such as Sophie Calle, Sahron Kivland, Sylvie Fleury, Adam Chodzko, Gregor Schneider and others will be examined. In the afternoon, student will share the work they produced in response to propositions of analysis. | The assignments will take the form of critical interventions (works of art, writing, performances, actions, films, images …) responding to a series of propositions including responses to disturbances of memory, ornaments in the field of vision, the discourse of the artwork and afterwardness.
“Art and/or Business as Usual” Geoff Cox and Tatiana Bazzichelli
The seminar investigates some of the interconnections between art, activism and business. We will examine how artists, rather than simply refusing the market, are generating 'social hacks', producing critical interventions from within. As the distinction between production and consumption appears to have collapsed, every interaction in the info-sphere seems to have become a business opportunity. In this way, the creative intersections between business and art become a crucial territory for re-invention and the rewriting of symbolic and cultural codes, generating political actions, social innovation, but also unexpected consequences and a deep level of irony and modification of prevailing business logic. | We are not suggesting these are new issues -- as there are many examples of artists making interventions into the art market and alternatives to commodity exchange -- but we aim to discuss some of the recent strategies that have emerged from a deep understanding of the network economy. Examples derive from software development and net cultures, such as peer production, free culture initiatives, gift economies, extreme sharing networks or open source business models. More specifically, we would cite the significance of radical sharing communities on the net to disrupt the business ecosystem, and offer alternatives, even if this comes in compromised form in the case of the social web. And yet, clearly value is produced from the social web too; it becomes more a question of what kind of business model is preferred and how returns, or rather benefits, are distributed. We maintain there is nothing wrong with doing business as such. | The seminar explore some of these contradictions: that on the one hand, there are alternative or disruptive business models that derive from the art scene, often as critical or activist interventions, but on the other how these practices can be easily co-opted by proprietary business logic. This is perhaps exemplified by the business idea of 'disruption-innovation', where disruption is considered to be a creative act that shifts the way a particular logic operates and thus presents newfound opportunities. Does this mean that well-meaning critical strategies of artists and activists are self-defeating? How do we develop disruptive business models that do not simply become new models for business that simply follows capitalist logic?
WEEK 3
“Salad on the House” Nicholas Estevez
Using food as its main ingredient, this workshop centers on one of our most basic physiological needs, the nourishment of the body. Participants become involved in the elaboration of conventional or impractical recipes as a way of engaging in discussions on the socio-political implications and the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities of food preparation and eating. Whether solo or in small groups, the students work planning simple recipes, shopping for ingredients at local markets, and concocting these ingredients into meals. These meals can be served in any conceivable medium, including cyber snacks or digital tapas. | Theoretical dishes are comprised of daily conversations triggered by a required menu of readings on the subjects of diets, obesity, allergies, nursing, fasting, hunger strikes, eating disorders, and famine as result of corruption and the unequal distribution of resources. Some of the artists whose work will be introduced in Salad On the House include: Patty Chan, Miralda, John Waters, Martha Rosler, Allison Knowles, Karen Finley, Carolee Schneemann and Elia Arce. Be advised that peanut butter and dairy products might be used during the sessions.
“Broken Grammar” Michael Bowdidge 2011
To quote Wittgenstein, “grammar tells us what kind of object anything is”. In the deeper sense of this word, thinking in terms of grammatical structures provides a useful way of describing what might be termed the ‘normative structures’ of life, and of understanding the way in which context and structure can generate meaning. However the simplest way to expose unseen and unthought aspects of tangible (or intangible) everyday structures is to disrupt their grammar through processes of reconfiguration, displacement and substitution. | Using these three simple methods, this workshop will examine the disruption of grammar in the broadest sense. Initially it will encourage participants to identify, question and re-evaluate the pre-existing grammatical structures of their own creative practices, before moving on to a reconsideration of the physical, cultural and social spaces which surround us at the residency, exploring what Max Ernst termed “the consequences of a systematic putting out of place”. | Alongside the writing of Max Ernst , this workshop will also touch upon the later work of Wittgenstein, aspects of the work of Jacques Derrida and Henry Staten’s linking of these two figures, and the writing of Billy Klüver and Julia Martin on Robert Rauschenberg. Works that we will examine in relation to our investigations will be drawn from across a wide range of media and will include contributions from Stephen Butler, Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Kruger, Kasimir Malevich, Meret Oppenheim, Steve Paxton, Ad Reinhardt, and Bill Viola amongst others. | This workshop will take the form of series of interlinked and interwoven non-medium specific exercises and assignments, interspersed with brief presentations and discussions of contextual material. Throughout the week the emphasis will be placed on learning and thinking through individual and/or collaborative creative exploration and active participation, with a view to gaining a deeper critical perspective on our own practices and an awareness of the ways in which thinking in terms of grammar and its disruption can provide new strategies for creative production.
“The Convergence of Sensation: Dialectic of the Eye and the Ear” David Dunn
In recent human history most cultures have tended to parse art making into separate traditions that relate to two of our dominant sensory modalities: those that primarily correlate to our visual experiences versus those that are predominantly aural. By the end of the 20th century this dichotomy has become more problematic with these cultural traditions having hardened into distinct categories of institutional structures that support and control a fundamental schism between “visual art”—with its system of galleries, museums, and publications—and “music and performing arts”—with a system of concert venues and recorded media. Academia has even required that students usually make a choice to specialize in only one of these separate cultural traditions, becoming educated to very different aesthetic assumptions, tools, skills, collections of knowledge, and canons of critical work. | Simultaneously there has also been a somewhat less conscious lineage of art making that has attempted to juxtapose, merge, or interpolate the sense impressions of our eyes and ears. Perhaps these activities have emerged from a profound intuition that the seamless continuity of the electromagnetic spectrum is shattered by the structure of our senses and that perception is always a somewhat arbitrary interpretation of a more complexly structured universe than our sense impressions allow us to experience or explain. | Anthropological evidence has recently led some researchers to propose that Paleolithic rock art and Neolithic megalith sites were locations for various forms of multi-sensorial ritual practice. Extant shamanic practices of the Amazonian Basin are specifically directed towards the psychotropic interlacing of visual and aural experience where the song tradition is used as a kind of control mechanism for modulating visual experience. Various manifestations of visionary art throughout European history are conspicuous for their attempts at constructing some sort of multi-media experience. Hildegard von Bingen and William Blake are obvious examples. | During the early 20th century, part of the strategy of modernism was to embrace a kind of derangement of the senses where one art form transmutes into another. Futurism, Dada, Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, and the Bauhaus are just a few examples of historical events that shared aspects of this interest. A fascination with synaesthesia also became an overt focus of artists like Kandinsky and Klee and musicians such as Scriabin and Messiaen. A century later this concern for an integration of sensory modalities has become the stock-in-trade for various experimental and expressive genres including cinema and theater. We now have an arsenal of nomenclature—such as multi-media, inter-media, happenings, new media, theater-of-mixed-means, interdisciplinary arts, immersive media, virtual reality, and many other terms—with which to cloak this convergence of the eye and ear and a more general recognition of an historical need to do so, what visionary philosopher Terrence McKenna referred to as an “archaic revival.” | And yet, we still tend to educate towards the familiar dissociation of the senses, offering distinct bodies of knowledge and skill to different practitioners who otherwise desire to participate in the new technological frameworks of multi-sensorial exhibition and performance—not to mention the proliferation of popular spectacles that attempt to formulate a cross-modal sensory experience from more naïve assumptions. This workshop will focus upon how this dialectic between the eye and the ear has impacted the ways we construct descriptive metaphors in the arts and how we can strategize towards an integration of these senses in our own work.
“Cultural Translation” Wolfgang Suetzl, 2012
Cultural translation has over the past few years become a theory applied to a host of phenomena in culture and politics. An offspring of postcolonial theory, it has its origins in the work of Homi Bhaba and his notion of hybridity as a post-dialectical cultural theory. Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler have taken cultural translation into economic and philosophical contexts. Cultural translation seems to offer a way out where key concepts of modernity such as universalism, dialectics, the subject, etc. have failed. Does cultural translation offer an approach to a form of being that no longer confined by essentialism? Does the negotiation of difference through cultural translation is it the expression of a loss of an actual political horizon, of a willingness to abandon political questions in favor of a permanent negotiation of cultural difference? The seminar examines these questions, and looks at how artistic practice affects the translatability of culture. We will translate a text, identify untranslatable parts. Translate untranslatable texts.
“Remembering Spaces” Deborah Aschheim and Lisa Mezzacappa, 2012
What is the truth of the memory of a space? How do we experience spaces with our bodies and senses, and how do we remember these embodied experiences? Recording technologies allow us to create convincing mechanical and digital reproductions of sight and sound, yet our reliance on recorded experience often reduces the complex three-dimensional world of sensation to the inputs of a flat screen and a pair of earbuds. How can we devise new ways of observing, recording and recreating spatial experiences that get at the deeper truth of the phenomenological and narrative experience of a space? Can we create a more complex embodied relationship between the experience and its reproduction? | For this workshop, we will use the city of Berlin as both the subject and the field laboratory for our experiments. We will consider the city as a kind of palimpsest, richly textured in the sensory present and fertile ground for a more archaeological excavation of collective memory and historical narrative. We will devise strategies for field recordings, interviews and mapping exercises, and consider the role of point of view in shaping experiences in the city. We will consider some ideas about how we understand space from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, mnemonic strategies that rely on spatial perception like the “method of loci” or “memory palace” and egocentric vs. allocentric systems of spatial cognition. We will also consider the social construction of cultural-historic space, spaces as landmark and ruin, ethnographic approaches to space, and the contested interpretations of the meanings of space. | Back in the studio, we will develop ways of making one space feel like or evoke another space. Our strategies for recreating space will include experiments with installation, the potential of digital and analog recording, captured vs. synthesized sound and image, four dimensional spaces (3D space plus time), and the importance of spaces you experience without seeing (the space behind you, the spaces above and below eye level), ambient sound, vibration and other tactile/sensory phenomena. We will consider what constitutes true site-specificity. We will also pay attention to more subjective aspects of individual experience: the intersection of interior mental space and the world the body moves through, the simultaneity of embodied space and the virtual space of the iPod, cell phone and mp3 player, and the haunted landscapes of narrative space.
“Reciting Sites: Performance, Public Monuments and Cultural Politics” Myron Beasley 2012
This seminar contemplates and interrogates the cultural politics of public art and its construction of Memory and history with performance theory. Considering performance in the context of localities, and localities in the context of performance, we will explore the ways in which the personal meets the political in geographies of enactment specifically with public monuments. We will ask the following historical and theoretical questions: What role do monuments and memorials play in societies? What are the politics of memorialization? And perhaps more probing, this seminar would be interested in the intersection of such monuments and how the individual “reads” them and /or recites them in daily life. This seminar will draw from readings from ethnography, performance theory, and theories of identity formation and negotiation with theories of memory and public art. We will us four public art sites within the city of Berlin and read from such theorists as Benjamin, Conqueergood, Nietzsche, Pierre, Winter, Althusser, Hall, and Kwon
“High Fidelity: on Adaptation, Re-enactment and Retelling” Ofri Cnaani 2012
On the crossway between performance, cinema and visual arts, this course will examine the use of adaptation and various strategies of reenactment and retelling in recent new-media works—which transform original source material, including classic literature, film, dance, painting, or even e-mail—into new works of art. What exactly is being reenacted, and what is the effect of the (re)presentation? What meaning is resurrected out of this duplication? | The course offers a close look at different answers to these questions by investigating the ways in which a specific source is updated through shifts in form, content, or context in order to introduce new aesthetic or political intentions and perspectives. Through critical discussion, lectures, and personal assignments students will reflect on these timely (and timeless) questions. The course is guided by the work of artists such as Lars Von Trier, Robert Willson, Pierre Huyghe, Omer Fast, Andrea Fraser, Robert Longo, Guy Ben-Ner, Isaac Julien, Jeremy Deller, Artur Zmijewski, Maurizio Cattelan, Jerome Bel, and Catherine Sullivan, as well as by concepts and pronouncements by critics and visionaries, including Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Baudrillard, Andre Bazin, and Mieke Bal.
“The Index: The Contemporary Taxonomist” Mary Ting 2012
The collection, documentation, categorization, 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 a system model utilized in all forms from popular culture, military studies to contemporary art forms. | The workshop will combine daily presentations of historical and contemporary models with discussion and activities suitable for all art forms. Colllections and historical sites such as the will be examined for their methodology, cultural and political significance and influence upon contemporary systems. Contemporary art forms that mimic, comment, subvert and utilize these systems and display methods will also be examined. Students will discuss and create a work specific to their medium and interests.
“Intensities – Extended Body, Extended Voice” Lynn Book, 2012
This workshop would create an environment of extended exploration of the body and the voice with a focus on transforming the ordinary into the extra-ordinary through physically and conceptually activated means. The multimodal and immersive engagement would demand rigorous commitment to performing the matter of self, thereby inventing selves as an overt objective of each workshop session. By investigating embodiment beyond what is ordinarily a conditioned and fundamentally unchanging and represented ‘self’, the participants will elaborate extensions of their bodies, their voices and any other media that they perform their art practice through. Much like the ‘prepared piano’, we will add on, manipulate, aggregate, stratify, pixilate and magnify bodies (including hyper and quasi bodies), and voices (including sounded, recorded and textualized voices). Immersive practices to be explored include adaptations of ‘Viewpoints’ (Overlie, Bogart), ‘Delicious Movement’ (Eiko and Koma), ‘Plastiques’ (Grotowski), ‘Voicing Body’ (Book), ‘Tremoring’ (Fitzmaurice), and others.
Summer program 2010
PUBLIC EVENTS
Sunday, July 25
FAILURE TO YIELD - MFA Degree Show
18:00 Vernissage at ConcentArt, Kreuzbergstr. 28, Berlin >> website
Exhibition hours: July 26-29, Wednesday through Friday, 18:00-20:00
>> Transart Exhibit Catalog 2010.pdf
Tuesday, July 27
18:00 Visual Essay Presentation: Sarah Bennett
Tanzfabrik, Möckernstr. 68, 10965 Berlin
Wednesday, July 28
18:00 Faculty Presentations
Jean Marie Casbarian, Nicholas Estevez, David Dunn
Tanzfabrik, Möckernstr. 68, 10965 Berlin
Sunday, August 1
SPACES IN BETWEEN - Transart International Collective Exhibition
18:00 Vernissage at ConcentArt, Kreuzbergstr. 28, Berlin
Exhibition hours: August 3-5, Tuesday through Thursday, 18:00-20:00
Tuesday, August 3
18:00 Lecture: Wolfgang Suetzl “Life Itself. Subverting Biopolitics”
18:30 Lecture: Maja Lenhardt “Confronting Prejudice”
Tanzfabrik, Möckernstr. 68, 10965 Berlin
Wednesday, August 4
18:00 Faculty Presentations
Geoff Cox, Myron Beasley, Ofri Cnaani
Tanzfabrik, Möckernstr. 68, 10965 Berlin
Tuesday, August 10
18:00 Lecture: Hannah Hurtzig “Presentation and talk on projects by Mobile Academy”
Tanzfabrik, Möckernstr. 68, 10965 Berlin
Wednesday, August 1
18:00 Faculty Presentations
Mary Ting, Laura Gonzalez, Lynn Book
Tanzfabrik, Möckernstr. 68, 10965 Berlin
Friday, August 14
16:30 Graduation ceremony and reception
Tanzfabrik, Möckernstr. 68, 10965 Berlin
MFA AND CERTIFICATE PROGRAM
July 25 - August 13, 2010
Tanzfabrik, Möckernstr. 68, 10965 Berlin
Week 1 , 07.26 - 07.29
Workshop "Within Walking Distance" Nicolas Dumit Estevez
Workshop “Naming the Invisible" Jean Marie Casbarian
Workshop “Biophilia and Extreme Art" David Dunn
Week 2, 08.02 - 08.05
Seminar "Social Media & Art 2.0" Geoff Cox
Seminar “The Fourth Dimension: Video, Space and the Broken Screen” Ofri Cnaani
Seminar "Critical Theory/Critical Art: Artist as cultural worker, theorist, philosopher” Myron Beasley
Workshop “Seeing and Writing” Victoria Hindley
Week 3, 08.09 - 08.12
Workshop "Borderlands" Mary Ting
Workshop "Art and the Other in Psychoanalysis” Laura Gonzalez
Workshop "Performativities: Body Works and Public Plays" Lynn Book
COURSES
WEEK 1
"Within Walking Distance" Nicolas Dumit Estevez
The entire city of Berlin will be given preeminence in order to serve as the encyclopedic tool for a series of theoretical discussions and practical exercises in strolling, journeying, parading, pilgrimages, processions and the like. Each day participants take to the streets to put in motion individual or group actions dealing with, but not restricted to, the topic of walking as well as their condition as bipeds: from window shopping to strolling through managed nature (e.g. parks). Participants comb block after block for the purpose of becoming familiar with what may be to some an uncharted land. In the classroom, the group engages in conversations triggered by brief presentations on the works of artists/scholars and by the students‚ daily experiences as pedestrians. These indoor activities are combined with crawling, tiptoeing and walking in spiked pumps.
Within Walking Distance seeks to engage its participants in dialogues beyond traditional pilgrimages, covering the route traveled to Lourdes by twenty first century virtual devotees or the cybernetic adoration by Catholics of the Most Blessed Sacrament, hosted on the website of the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters (Pink Sisters). Seminar presentations include trips to sites of disasters, some of which have resulted from the hand of terrorism. Also to be addressed by the class is tourism, and pilgrimage-like movements of people, such as that of Caribbean balseros and yoleros on an exodus to the promise land of capitalism, the United Sates.
The writings/artworks of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Rebecca Solnit, Michael Kimmelman, Paulo Coelho, Superior Concept Monsters, William Pope L., Dora García, Gustavo Artígas, Richard Long, Papo Colo, Jonny Farrow, Teresa Hincapié, St. Teresa of Avila, Vito Acconci and Loty Rosenfeld are introduced along with documentation on the steps taken by wandering saints, Peace Pilgrim, the Old Leatherman, Rollerena, and Arthur Blessitt, who walked through a myriad of nations while carrying a 12 foot cross.
"Naming the Invisible" Jean Marie Casbarian
Workshop Description: Is invisibility only contingent on its visibility? Do we assume that 'things not seen' lack a palpable response to what we otherwise know and understand as existing in time and space? This workshop will not only investigate the concept of invisibility as a tangible presence, but will explore the power behind (non)presence in what it reveals, be it through the (non)matter, (silent)voice, and (dis) engaged presence of what does not come into view or vanishes before our eyes. Notions of invisibility throughout political/social/spiritual/scientific landscapes will be explored. Tarkovsky's 'Stalker', Tacita Dean's 'Banewl,' Calvino's 'Invisible Cities', and the consequences of HG Wells, 'The Invisible Man' and/or Saramago's 'Blindness' are potential trajectories into discussion/assignments surrounding invisibility.
Goals: This process-based workshop will support projects in all disciplines, though emphasis will be placed on the development of aesthetic skills critical to the creation of time-based works involving image, sound, and performance. Slide/Film 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.
"Biophilia and Extreme Art" David Dunn
As first proposed by Socio-Biologist and Myrmecologist, E. O. Wilson, the term Biophilia has been put forth to describe an innate predisposition in humans to reflect or replicate conspicuous patterns from the natural world as the basis for aesthetic sensibility and choice. The assumption is that we inherently tend to favor patterns and sensory constructs from nature as the generative basis for art because we have been predisposed to do so as an epigenetic byproduct of evolution. In other words, we have been „programmed‰ to do so as an adaptive survival advantage and our sensory awareness is organized to optimize such factors. This idea is the flipside of the argument that we have also inherited certain aversions to those biological phenomena that represent a consistent threat to our survival such as snakes and spiders. We may be “hard-wired” to fear them and find them repulsive.
However, much of the art of the past century, from Duchamp to Cage, has been consciously dedicated to not only challenging traditional or philosophically constructed concepts of beauty but has aggressively maintained that the project of art is to seek out phenomena and aspects of daily life˜experiences and artifacts neglected or banished from our cultural processes of normalization and ideas of beauty˜and revalue them through changing the frame or context in which we would otherwise experience them. While supporters of the concept of Biophilia might argue that even the most abstract art cannot dissociate itself from nature˜ultimately mirroring deep aspects of natural process even if it claims to do otherwise˜some of the most controversial of contemporary practitioners claim that art is a strategy for the fulfillment of another stage of human evolution. Therefore, art should not merely reflect our evolutionary inheritance; it should be a tool for our further evolving that nece ssitates the abandonment of traditional aesthetic preferences through the creative and conscious construction of what it means to be human. Technology˜either through electromagnetic or biological engineering (Stelarc and Kacs)˜inevitably becomes the arena where such experiments in extending the senses and reorganizing the human body take place.
One of the most problematic issues for 20th century biology has been that we have no operable or truly satisfying definition for the condition of life. While we can describe the structural constituents of living systems, such as atoms, molecules, cells, organs, and morphology, etc.), such a lexicon of factors does not account for the dual ontological status of a living thing (the difference between life and death) that seems to hover in a liminal state between existence and non-existence. Some thinkers (Maturana and Varela) have proposed that living things are unique precisely because they are characterized by their operational closure: a state of autonomous being that is self- maintaining irregardless of its specific structural components that are constantly being replaced over time. In the light of such knowledge, one implication that has emerged is the notion that we can have much more flexibility in how we participate in our own ontological status as living systems. Can we actively design new aspects of our organizational status and shape our evolutionary future?
More recently, some post-modern art workers (Dave Hickey, for example) have embraced the notion that a return to a more naïve formulation of beauty, after decades of purposeful neglect, is itself a radical innovation. Meanwhile the sciences have proposed novel ideas about the very structure of perception (theories of self- organization, emergent properties, and complexity) that provide us with a very different framework for understanding what we might mean by the assumption of an “objective” world. Such propositions not only challenge what we may mean by the concept of beauty but also the very concept of nature itself. Simultaneously, some mathematicians now propose that the essential property of successful mathematical description (as the most rigorous manifestation of human language) is precisely something that can only be regarded as a quality that comes very close to our most traditional and seemingly prosaic ideas of aesthetic beauty.
Presentation and talk on projects by Sarah Bennett
http://sarahbennett.org.uk/
WEEK 2
"Seminar 2.0: An Update on Art, Social Media and It's Publics" Geoff Cox
Nowadays, technical, political and aesthetic processes increasingly utilize software but also can be seen to 'be' like software. The seminar investigates this line of thinking through an engagement with art and curatorial practices (whether using a computer or not) that draw upon systems and network theory, ideas around open systems and self-organization, critical curatorial practices, the use of social media, and the radical practices of coding cultures in as much as they might invigorate the concept of the public sphere (or commons).
“The Fourth Dimension: Video, Space and the Broken Screen” Ofri Cnaani
This course offers pathways through the visual language of nonlinear narratives, split screens, fragmentary visual planes and their relationship with space and spatial design. We will read, view, and discuss contemporary examples from selected projects by artists, filmmakers, designers, and architects who speak to these issues. Through critical discussions, students will gain a fresh look at new practices of art-making that make use of emerging technologies. Topics include: non-linear media, object and new media, from white cube to black box, moving images and architectural space, nontraditional spaces, and video art in public spaces. During this four-days seminar, students will develop a proposal for a thematic exhibition inspired by the main themes studied in class, helping to contextualize their studio practice in a greater framework of contemporary culture makers and thinkers.
“Critical Theory/Critical Art: Artist as cultural worker, theorist, philosopher” Myron Beasley
This seminar examines the artists as cultural worker. As the domain of critical theory is about the unraveling of streams of repressive discourses and hierarchies in our contemporary world, it has been artists who have fostered ruptures and fissures in the more than often flow of normality. This seminar ponders the concept of “cultural worker” and laments the domain of theory by exploring the intersections between critical theory, art and politics. Specifically we will engage in the ruptures, the fragments of knowledge and the making sense of the residue of “social change” while not forgetting the problematization of the aesthetic. We will engage with international and intercultural interdisciplinary artists such as Thiong’o, Fusco, Ana Mediata, Tania Bruguera, David Hammon, Pope.L and Lung with critical theorists such as Fanon, Butler, Foucault, Munoz, Moten, Adorno, Barthes, Dorothea Olkowski, and Benjamin.
Writing Workshop: “Seeing and Writing” Victoria Hindley
Writing about art at the graduate level presents distinct challenges. This workshop is designed to help you cope with the specific requirements of MFA-level writing, while emphasizing the unique advantages artists have as writers. In a noncompetitive environment of productive discussion and presentation, we’ll demystify the academic writing process. We’ll strengthen critical reading skills and analysis strategies. Because language is never neutral and always defines a way of seeing the world, we will engage in close reading—investigating assumptions as we simultaneously deepen our capacity to articulate our observations as artists. These investigations will be further grounded through concrete presentations on how to create a meaningfully considered and thoughtfully structured argument. We will additionally address issues of grammar, editing, and citation—tackling specific problem areas raised by participants and taking care of them once and for all. Through collaborative exercises and analysis, we’ll engage in peer exchange and emerge as stronger writers who can more easily relax and focus on the pleasure of creating...and writing! In four daily sessions, you will investigate your own writing as well as the writing of established theorists.
Lecture: “Life itself. Subverting Biopolitics” Wolfgang Suetzl
Following the decline of tactical media as a guiding concept in resistant media use, many of the key concerns articulated in this movement seem to have migrated to the cross section of informatics and the life sciences. Paralleling a paradigmatic shift of interest from hard/software to “wetware” in information technology, and from territorial to biopolitical regimes in politics, activists, artists and scientists began developing networks of collaboration across disciplines, institutional settings, and economic frameworks, questioning the workings of biopower by introducing discontinuities in an emerging hegemony of knowledge. While the history of dissident biopolitics originates long before the computer, tactical media have served as a tool and inspiration for interventions in areas such as precarious labor, technologies of security, asylum policies, health care reforms, politics of the body, gendering and racial profiling, genetic engineering, cellular research, nutrition, biopharmaceuticals, and many others. Biopolitical activists have surprised the mainstream by engaging in dissident practices at the very core of scientific knowledge formation and the related constructions of political/social realities, while outside the laboratories they have challenged established categories about food, plants and animals through direct actions.
Lecture: “Confronting Prejudice” Maja Lenhardt
The staff of the Jewish Museum Berlin visited the juvenile penitentiary in Berlin. It is the biggest correctional institution of its kind in Germany. The number of inmates amounts to about 500 young men in the age of 14 to 24 years. Many of the convicted offenders are of Arab, Turkish, and East European origin. For one week between 5 and 8 museum guides were present in the prison giving tours through a mobile exhibition and holding workshops, reaching about 100 inmates.
The idea for the contact was met with great concern by the prison staff. Among them skepticism prevailed that such a visit would be advisable. As they suspected, the inmates would behave improperly, they would not be interested in a museum, and worst of all, they would express anti-Semitism. Because of its Nazi history, anti-Semitism is a taboo issue in Germany. This trauma burdens communication about Jewish topics and furthermore tends to reproduce itself. Initially there was strong doubt by both, guides and inmates that respectful, frank discussion would be possible but despite their initial fears guides and inmates cooperated smoothly and engaged in frank discussions rather than hostile confrontation.
WEEK 3
"Borderlands" Mary Ting
This workshop explores the poetics of borderlands, both real and imagined, and the balancing acts that comes with these territories. We will travel in invisible places, traversing the margins bet childhood and adulthood; the blatantly commercial to the proudly aesthetic, and from the raw and raggedy to the digital cool. The workshop will examine and discuss process of negotiating the act of memory lost/memory regained; ambiguity/specificity, navigating conflicting desires and the inhospitable difficult places that work often travels in.
This workshop will focus on daily exercises designed to inspire, provoke and instill new strategies to transform ideas. These specific exercises utilize the emotive powers of memory and the oral/written word and encourage spontaneous, experimental approaches. We will utilize exercises used in creative writing and choreography. The workshop aims to actively get to the borderlands between temporal and spatial, inner and exterior spaces. While mining our own innocence and experience, we will make objects, things, gestures, maps, sketches, poems, rants; spontaneous expressions and responses on a daily basis. Presentations will be included but the emphasis is on generating new ideas, approaches that emphasize reflection over narration. The process will include both collaborative and individual opportunities for all types of work. Participants will generate by the end of the course a resource of images, text, and linear and non- linear narratives for future projects.
“Art and the Other in Psychoanalysis” Laura Gonzalez
Psychoanalytic ideas have particular relevance outside of the consulting room, mainly the art school and the wider Academia, the art gallery, and everyday spaces where we interact with objects. The discipline has a particular way of thinking about problems, the self and society in relation to an Other. Since its inception in the late 19th Century, psychoanalysis has had an impact on how we make, view and think about art, space, cultural artefacts and our relation to them. This, together with received ideas bearing on cultural, artistic and psychoanalytic practices, is what will be explored in this workshop. The workshop is open to students with no prior knowledge of psychoanalytic theory or practice. It will also be useful, however, to students with knowledge of those areas as the key aim is to promote psychoanalytic thinking in relation to the students’ practice. The workshop will centre around four major topics, which will be explored focusing on one per day: Artistic and psychoanalytic acts; The construction and break of the subject; Interpretation and transference;
and Voice and Gaze.
"Performativities: Body Works and Public Plays" Lynn Book
Performing Being, performing Doing, performing Showing Doing, performing Explaining Showing Doing – this basic rubric for looking at performance from a broad, anthropological orientation will serve as a framework to study the multitude of performativities in everyday life. From ‘private’ rituals to social relations we will explore how the artists’ body becomes a laboratory, a landscape for conducting living inquiry and cultural criticism by which the body is a stage, a tool, a site, for confrontation, reinvention and transformation.
Partiality and subjectivity begins and continues with the body, as our lived experience moderates every moment, every encounter. Some of the categories of interest for our study will include: Gesture, Ritual, Representation, Participation, Extended and Quasi Bodies, Concentration and Social Change Practices. We’ll also examine cyber-techo-bodiedness through discussion and performed experiments.
Presentation and talk on projects by Mobile Academy” by Hannah Hurtzig
http://www.mobileacademy-warsaw.com/deutsch/2006/hurtzig.html
