UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

This practice-based academic course brought together students from different areas of Visual Arts specialization who are interested in furthering their understanding of Critical and Cultural Practices. Based on a workshop model the curriculum enabled students to situate and articulate their own art and design research in relation to larger critical, cultural and theoretical thematic contexts. Weekly seminars focused on readings and writing projects designed to help students to foster critical awareness of the content and context of cultural production in relation to a range of practices and theories. Through an exploration of both visual and textual research, students engaged with emergent models of critical inquiry in relation to their own creative critical practice. In this workshop environment, students had the opportunity to articulate key elements of their research through discussions, individual tutorials, peer reviews, presentations, and readings that are directed toward the development of text-based final projects.

SELECTED READINGS

• Karen Bard, interview with Adam Kleinmann, Mousse magazine, #34, 2012
• Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy pf History”, 1940
• Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, “An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion.” eflux Journal #2, 2009
• Judith Butler, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”, 2001
• Donna Haraway in conversation with Martha Kenney, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene”, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, eds., 2015
• Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, e-flux #75, 2016
• Rachel Jones, “On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again and Letting Be”, On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013
• Trinh T. Min-ha, “Interviewer Interviewed: A discussion with Tina Spangler”, Latent Image, 1993
• Irit Rogoff, “From Criticism to Critique to Criticality”, 2003 (online)
• Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect”, 2005, (online)
• Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene”, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment and Epistemology, 2015

Designed for students interested in focusing on or incorporating performance in their work, this studio course facilitated a broad skill and technical level for students. Through class-room workshops, exercises, readings, and discussion, students gained a thorough understanding of performance art and its implications.

SELECTED READINGS

• Amelia Jones, ed., Perform, repeat, record: live art in history, 2012
• Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of The Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 2007
• Tracey Warr, ed., The Artist’s Body, 2012

Through the convergence of diverse perspectives this course considered the art and politics of colour in the construction of aesthetic forms, philosophical phenomena and scientific artifacts. Whether thought of as chroma, colour or pigment, their affective and symbolic intensities offer us poetic access into historical and contemporary modes of aesthetic engagement. Thinking across and between artistic practices how does colour carry meaning particularly in how it manifests emotional and cultural differences? And how do visual experiments with a focus on colour whether light, hue or saturation draw and enlarge on artistic practices? Within this framework, the instructor’s lectures were complimented with visiting speakers and media presentations providing an exploration into the performance of colour in our daily lives.

SPEAKERS

Randy Lee Cutler
Mimi Gellman
Ingrid Koenig
Liz Lee + Jared Sexton
Kyla Mallett
Kristina Podesva
Ben Reeves
Sadira Rodrigues
Jay White

SELECTED READINGS

• David Batchelor, Chromophobia, 2000
• Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Colour”, Colors, (Documents of Contemporary Art), 2008
• Spike Bucklow, “Introduction”, Red: The Art and Science of a Colour, 2016
• Richard Fung, “Seeing Yellow”, The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, Karin Aguilar-San Juan, ed., 1994
• Alan Gilbert, Colour/Brown, Cabinet Magazine #25, 2007
• Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller and Noenoe K. Silva. “The Botany of Emergence: Kanaka Ontology and Biocolonialism in Hawai’i”, Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, 2015.
• Augustine Hope and Margaret Walch, The Color Compendium, 1990
• Derek Jarman, “White Lies” and “The Perils of Yellow,” Chroma, 1995
• Catherine E. McKinley, Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World, 2011
• Maggie Nelson, Bluets, 2009
• Radiolab podcast, “From Tree to Shining Tree”, 2016
• Ad Reinhardt, Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art), 1991
• Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, 2003
• Smithsonian Libraries collection “The Science of Colour”, Colour in a New Light exhibition, 2016 (online)
• Michael Taussig, “Redeeeming Indigo”, What Color is the Sacred?, 2009.

Through the convergence of different perspectives this course considered the role of materiality and matter in the construction of aesthetic forms, philosophical phenomena and scientific artifacts. In the interface between art and science vibrating matter with its affective and symbolic intensities offers us access into matter as a material mode of engagement. Thinking across and between artistic practices how does matter come to matter? And how do visual experiments with a focus on materiality whether light, time, pigment, wood or clay to name but a few, draw and enlarge ideas from the social sciences, the sciences, industry and popular culture? With this in mind, the instructor’s biweekly lectures complimented by visiting speakers and media presentations provided an understanding of a range of artistic practices through the performance of nonhuman, material, natural and cultural factors.

SPEAKERS

Diyan Achajdi
Raymond Boisjoly
Randy Lee Cutler
Nick Conbere + Genevieve Robertson
Richard Hill
Cindy Mochizuki
Alywin Obrien
Magnolia Pauker
Lorelei Pepi
Marina Roy
Jay White

SELECTED READINGS

• David Abram, “Animism, Perception, and Earthly Craft of the Magician”, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, 2005
• Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, 1985
• Peter Gratton, “Vibrant Matters: An Interview with Jane Bennett”, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 2010, (online)
• A. Irving Hallowell, “Ojibway Ontology, Behaviour, and World View,” A. Irving Hallowell: Contributions to Anthropology, Stanley Diamond, ed., 1976
• Lafcadio Hearn, “The Story of Mimi-nashi-Hoichi”, 1904
• Petra Lange-Berndt, ed., Materiality (Documents in Contemporary Art), 2015
• Iona Singh, Color, Facture, Art and Design: artistic technique and the precisions of human perception, 2012
• Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism”, e-flux #36, 2012
• Michael Taussig, What Colour is the Sacred?, 2009

A year before Emily Carr University moved to its new campus at Great Northern Way, this thematic topic provided a platform for the university community to consider the past, present and future of the Art School. At this important moment in our institution’s history, we considered the Art School by exploring the practices of art education in academic, practical, ethical, and philosophical terms. What are the legacies that we are part of that we want to carry forward? What are the philosophies and principles that define us as a community? What are new forms of practice and pedagogy that need to be imagined? In order to look forward, this course looked back at historical and contemporary models that have defined the Art School and its intersection with interdisciplinarity, pedagogy, free schools, craft and applied practices, and the studio critique. Lectures brought together diverse thinkers, ranging from the formation of the German Bauhaus to dramatic demands and changes in the art world (professionalization, information technologies, and shifts in art-making). The course sought to raise fundamental questions about the education of today’s artists, and students were encouraged to be self-reflexive in considering their own education and how personal engagement informs a robust educational experience.

SPEAKERS

Randy Lee Cutler
Mimi Gellman
Matt Hern
Chris Hetherington
Hannah Jickling
Garry Neil Kennedy and David MacWilliam
Liz Magor
Kyla Mallett
Paul Mathieu
Brian McBay
Janet Moore
Daphne Plessner
Helen Reed
Sadira Rodrigues

SELECTED READINGS

• Felicity Allen, ed., Education, Documents of Contemporary Art, 2011
• James Elkins, Art Critiques, A Guide, 2012
• Christopher Frayling, “The New Bauhaus”, On Craftsmanship: Towards a New Bauhaus, Oberon Masters Series, 2011
• Matt Hern, “The Promise of Deschooling”, Social Anarchism #25, 1998
• Garry Neill Kennedy, Introduction, The Last Art Collage: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design 1968-78, 2012
• Janet Moore, “Is Higher Education Ready for Transformative Learning? A Question Explored in the Study of Sustainability”, Journal of Transformative Education Vol. 3 No. 1, 2005
• Helen Reed interview with Pablo Helguera, “Bad Education”, The Pedagogical Impulse: Research-creation at the intersections between social practice and pedagogy (online)
• Gregory Sholette “Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere”, Artforum Magazine, 2003
• Smith, M. K., ‘What is pedagogy?’, the encyclopaedia of informal education. 2012 (online)

“Art makes us perform.” In his book, Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World, artist and educator, Pablo Helguera, argued that we all invent, interpret, and perform a variety of roles in our everyday lives as they intersect with art and creative practice. Whether in classrooms, studios, galleries, cinemas, online or on the street, we can see that artists cultivate audiences through their affective actions, gestures, and works, and create opportunities for complex and dynamic inquiry. Is it politics, society, or science that allows us to draw emotional resonance from a composition of simple lines and colours? How might an artist strategize to create works that knowingly resonate for a viewer, and to what end? What are the implications of mobile and ubiquitous technology as we attempt to develop new art audiences? Exploring the intersections, collisions, and feedback loops of audience and affect provide us with opportunity to understand how art can do what it does, and what it might do next. With an eye on the development of critical dialogue and a highly usable praxis toolkit, this course introduced and unfolded the concerns and constructions of affect and audience in contemporary practices, offering an exciting public lecture series that looked at the various ways in which audience and affect inform our practices and our daily lives.

SPEAKERS

Randy Lee Cutler
Mimi Gellman
Am Johal
Vanessa Kwan + Kim Phillips
Justin Langlois
Laura Marks
Ben Reeves
Magnolia Pauker
Daphne Plessner

SELECTED READINGS

• Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, “The political affects of plural performativity,” Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, 2013
• Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar, 1986
• Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader, 2010
• Pablo Helguera, Art Scene, 2012
• Hayden Lorimer, “Herding memories of humans and animals,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2006
• Geert Lovink, “After the Social Media Hype: Dealing with Information Overload”, e-flux #45, 2013
• Laura Marks, “Thinking Multisensory Culture”, Paragraph 31:2, Emma Wilson, ed., 2008
• Daphne Plessner, Who is the Artist’s Audience?, www.plessner.co.uk
• Juhani Pallaasmaa, The Eyes of The Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 2005

This course took advantage of the knowledge and experience articulated in public presentations at Emily Carr in order to help students engage more directly with current practices in art. The course, structured through a thematic program of public lectures, influential readings, lectures as well as seminars, discussions, written assignments and presentations, was an integrated examination of issues central to contemporary art practice.

The mouth is the gate through which the outside comes into the body. Some materials are able to open our mouths, almost against our will, by stimulating an uncontrollable appetite. How do such irrational cravings interact with willful and determined materials? What do we make of behaviours that are beyond our control? How do artists, counselors, scientists and consumers, among others, reflect on the experience of yearning and excess? What does the constant consumption of stuff – food, drugs, oil, shoes, art materials, etc. effect on human, and animal, existence? Through an exciting public lecture series, this course sought to explore the various ways in which the art and politics of appetite inform and shape our daily lived experiences and practices.

SPEAKERS

Bruce Alexander
Mathilda Aslizadeh
Susan Borax + Heather Knittel
Collen Brown
Randy Lee Cutler
Duane Elverum
Liz Magor
Marina Roy
Magnolia Pauker
Natalie Purschwitz
Paul Wong

SELECTED READINGS

• Bruce Alexander, The Roots of Addiction in Free-market Society, 2001
• Judi Culbertson and Marj Decker, SCALING down, LIVING LARGE in a smaller space, 2005
• Randy Lee Cutler, Open Wide: The Great Digestive System, itunes, 2014
• Chris Bracken, “Eating Dad”, Public 30: Eating Things, Scott Toguro McFarlane, ed., 2004
• Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957
• Elizabeth Gettelman, “No Sex Please, We’re Organizing”, Mother Jones, 2007
• Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh, “One Year Art/Life Performance: Interview with Alex and Allyson Gray”, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Kristine Stiles, ed., 1996
• David Orr, ‘What is Education for?’, The Learning Revolution (IC#27), 1991

This course examined the current and historical phenomena of the science fiction/horror film. This included the resurgence of the two genres within popular culture and the seriousness with which these film forms are examined by film critics and within cultural studies. Because the genre continues to mutate, the component of horror was considered within the science fiction film and not as a separate genre. Science Fiction film can be understood through a consideration of technological progress, feminist debates and cultural theory. As a result, the course examined the following issues: history of the genre, spectacle and disaster, representations of the feminine and cyborgs, dystopia, and cyberpunk. Questions to be raised will include: How and why is the feminine aligned with technology? Each class evaluated the social and economic factors propelling the cultural fascination with science fiction and horror genres.

SELECTED SCREENINGS

John Akomfrah, Last Angel of History, 1996
Luigi Allemano, A Better tomorrow through technology, 1996
Craig Baldwin, Spectres of the Spectrum, 2003
Lizzie Borden, Born in Flames, 1983
David Cronenberg, Existenz, 2001
Nelson Henricks, Planetarium, 2001
Richard Kelly, Donnie Darko, 2001
Stanley Kubrik, Dr. Strangelove or How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, 1964
George Lucas, THX 1138, 1971
Chris Marker, La Jettee, 1963
Georges Melies, Trip to the Moon, 1902
Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell, 1995
Ridley Scott, Alien, 1979
Ridley Scott, Blade Runner, 1982

SELECTED READINGS

• Jeremy Boxen, “Just What the Doctor Ordered”, Cold War Purging, Political Dissent, and the Right Hand of Dr. Strangelove, (online)
• Barbara Creed, “Alien and the Monstrous Feminine”, Screen 27, 1986
• Michel Foucault, “Panopticism”, Discipline and Punishment: the birth of the prison, 1975
• Annette Kuhn, ”Cultural Theory and Science Fiction Cinema”, Alien Zone, 1990
• Guiliana Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner”, Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, 1990
• Toshiya Uneno, “Japanimation and Techno-orientalism” and “The Shock Projected onto the Other: Notes on Japanimation and Techno-orientalism”, The Uncanny: experiments in cyborg culture, Bruce Grenville, ed., 2002
• Laura Borràs Castanyer, “eXistenZ by David Cronenberg: cyber-fictions for a post-humanity” (online)
• Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 1969

Representations of body in twentieth century art demonstrate the shifting terrain of our corporeal and psychic realities. The body is no longer an expression of a unified and stable self but rather a mutating force moving toward narratives of interiority, fragmentation and metaphor. How is the body perceived, visualized and rendered in Modern and contemporary art as well as related cultural theories of these periods? Designed around the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exhibition Visceral Bodies and the instructor’s own research on metaphors of digestion in visual culture, this course looked at a range of artistic practices that visualize the phantasmagoria of bodily incarnations.

SELECTED READINGS

• Chris Bracken, ‘Eating Dad’ in Eating Things (Public 30), Scott Toguro McFarlane, ed., 2004
• Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman, All Too Human Towards a New Process Ontology, Theory Culture Society, 20
• Jennifer Fisher, ‘Oral Logics of the Museum’, Eating Things (Public 30), Scott Toguro McFarlane, ed., 2004
• Linda Nochlin, “Renoir’s Great Bathers”, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye, 2006
• Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism”, October, Vol 12, 1980g

Modernism and phenomenology have a shared history that underscores investigations into the structures of experience and consciousness. How a work of art is made by the artist and received by its viewer suggests a complex consideration of bodily knowledge, appearances, affect and subjectivity. Looking at the relations between phenomenology and modern art, this course considered a line of thought that traverses dialectics, romanticism, surrealism, participatory practices, embodiment, relational aesthetics and interactivity. The ways we experience things informs the meanings that phenomena have in our subjective experiences, representations and mediations of lived reality. The course covered key readings on the subject, visual examples from modern art history as well as embodied experiments in experiential knowledge construction. Students learned to investigate models of engagement and interactivity through their own critical writing.

SELECTED READINGS

• David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, 1997
• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1994
• Claire Bishop, ed., Participation, 2006
• Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 2002
• Rudolf Frieling, ed., The Art of Participation: 1950 to now, 2008,
• Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 1993
• Max Hollein and Martina Weinhart eds., Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism In Contemporary Art, 2005
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962
• James Meyer, ed., Minimalism, 2000

This course considered twentieth century art that has been inspired by, or has commented on, the sciences. It reflected on how scientific developments are used and reconfigured by artists working today. Over the course of the twentieth century, artists have responded to science: its historical forms, its contemporary developments, and its future possibilities. The arts have engaged scientific discoveries, theories, and paradigms with criticism, humor, skepticism and awe. Through readings, presentations and class discussion, this course examined scientifically engaged art in its cultural context.

SELECTED READINGS

• from Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible, Art, Science and the Spiritual, 2002

Perceptions and practices around the body in twentieth century art demonstrate a shift in how our material and psychic realities are understood and represented. The body is no longer an expression of a unified and stable inner self but rather a mutating force. This course looked at the development of how the body is perceived in Modern art and related cultural theories. Designed around the publication, The Artist’s Body (themes and movements series, Phaidon Press 2000), this course looked at the range of artistic practices where the body is explored through paint, gesture, ritual, absence, prosthetics and boundary transgression.

SELECTED READINGS

• from The Artist’s Body, 2006
• Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Cruelty, 1933
• Georges Bataille, Primitive Art, 1929
• Joseph Beuys, Statement on How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965
• Gilles Deleuze, The Body, the Meat, and the Spirit: Becoming Animal
• Coco Fusco, The Other History of Intercultural Performance, 1994
• Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto… 1985
• Julia Kristeva, Approaching Abjection, 1980
• Miwon Kwon, Bloody Valentines: Afterimages by Ana Mendieta, 1996
• Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, The Dematerialization of Art, 1968
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, 1961
• Stuart Morgan, Matthew Barney, Of Goats and Men, 1995
• Robert Pincus-Witten, Theatre of the Conceptual: Autobiography and Myth, 1973
• Francois Pluchart, Body Art, 1974
• Carolee Schneeman, Interior Scroll, 1975
• Kristine Stiles, Survival Ethos and Destruction Art, 1992
• Margaret Sundell, Vanishing Points: The Photography of Frances Woodman, 1996
• Lea Vergine, BodyLanguage, 1974

This course considered the challenging and difficult topic of the sublime, a concept that became important in the eighteenth century in relation to the arts to describe aspects of nature that instill awe and wonder. According to twentieth century French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the sublime, as a theme in aesthetics, was the founding move of the Modernist period. In this course we examined the philosophic underpinning of modernism alongside an historical evaluation of the sublime and the fundamental gap or aporia in human reason. What does it mean to express and aestheticized the inassimilable boundaries of human reason and how does this inform the multiplicity and instability of our current postmodern world? Through active weekly discussions students developed a conceptual understanding of the sublime as an aesthetic experience through an historical and modernist lens. They also generated critical research and writing informed by the weekly readings that include Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Okwui Enwezor and Marina Warner among others.

SELECTED READINGS

• from Simon Morley, ed., The Sublime (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art), 2010

This course was designed as an exploration of performance in contemporary theory, art and popular culture in the context of feminist, gender, and critical race theory. The interdisciplinary syllabus was made up of writings drawn from art history, critical theory, and popular culture. We focused on developing skills to critically analyze networks of representation and power traversing local and global contexts. Students learned about critical criteria, content analysis, and representations of gender, race, and sexuality. Close attention was paid to the structure of each text in relation to the multiple and intersecting identities of readers and writers in the contemporary world.

SELECTED READINGS

• Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”, Theatre Journal, Vol. 40. No.4, 1998
• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, 2009
• Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones, eds., Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, 2012
• Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook, 2011
• bell hooks, “Moving Beyond Pain”, 2016, www.bellhooksinstitute.com
• Walter D. Mignolo, “Looking for the Meaning of ‘Decolonial Gesture”, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, 2014
• Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E Truman, “A Walking-Writing Practice: Queering the Trail”, Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World: WalkingLab, 2018

Figures, Tropes + Metaphors examined the different ways in which visual representations have shifted the terrain of our corporeal and psychic realities. Looking at a range of approaches this course considered the various models for how images operate in the communication of emergent states of the human body, the creaturely animal and thing power. How are these forms rendered and visualized in Modern and contemporary art as well as the related cultural theories of these periods? Designed around the instructor’s own research based practice on figurations and metaphors, this course looked at a range of artistic endeavors that visualize the phantasmagoria of bodily, creaturely and material incarnations.

SELECTED READINGS

• Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 1969
• Rosi Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human Towards a New Process Ontology”, Theory Culture Society, 2006
• Randy Lee Cutler, excerpt “Open Wide: An Abecedarium for the Great Digestive System” 2014
• Donna Haraway, SF, Speculative Fabulation and String Figures, Documenta Series 033, 2012
• Lee Henderson, “Valérie Blass”, The Walrus, 2011
• Leah Sandals interview with Valérie Blass, “Valérie Blass: Particle Collider”, Canadian Art, 2009
• Etienne Turpin, “Robert Smithson’s Abstract Geology: Revisiting the Promontory Politics of the Triassic”, Making the Geologic
• NOW: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, 2013

Farmacy sought to explore the relationships between art, food, agriculture and medicine. There is a long and rich history of artists taking up food as a material from still life painting, artist cookbooks and garden projects to the meal as a performative and sculptural practice to name but a few examples. How do artists understand medicine, healing and an ethics of care in their engagement with food? What are the ways in which hospitality, conviviality, embodiment and affect inform our relationship to nourishment? Designed around the instructor’s own research based practice, this course looked at a variety of endeavors that visualize Farmacy as an artistic sensibility. Through a range of art historical and contemporary examples this course examined strategies for living a creative and conscious life where the production and distribution of foodstuffs have an integral effect on human, plant and animal existence.

SELECTED READINGS

• David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, 1997
• Joseph Beuys, “I Am Searching for a Field Character” (1973) and “An Appeal for an Alternative” (1982), Utopias, Richard Noble, ed., 2009
• Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, “An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion,“ e-flux #02 2009
• Randy Lee Cutler, “Informal Communities: Celestial, Terrestrial and Subterranean Movements”, The Grow Project and the Bulkhead Urban Agriculture Lab, Holly Schmidt, ed., 2014.
• Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza and Us”, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1988
• Agnes Denes, “Wheatfield: A Confrontation” (1982), Utopias, Richard Noble, ed., 2009
• Donna Haraway, SF, Speculative Fabulation and String Figures, Documenta Series 033, 2012
• Lee Maracle, “Goodbye Snauq”, West Coast Line, 2008
• Michael Pollan, “The Food Movement, Rising.” The New York Review of Books, 2010
• Michael Pollan, “Rules to Eat By.” The New York Times Magazine, 2009
• Vandana Shiva, The Corporate Control of Life. 2011
• Stephanie Smith, ed., “Fallen Fruit, David Burns, Matias Viegnener and Austin Young.” Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art, 2013
• Stephanie Smith, ed., “Mildred’s Lane”, Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art 2013

Time is a wonderfully elastic construct. Within our technological age, the vagaries of time [instantaneity, space-time, the interval] have become the focus of much philosophizing and analysis. In contemporary art practices, its manipulation and plasticity represent intimate and complex sensibilities toward perception and memory. Temporal strategies aestheticize our physical and cognitive experiences, making it an effective medium for artistic expression. Whether sped up, slowed down or ‘real-time’ duration, time’s modalities reflect our desire for control, understanding and spirituality. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this seminar looked at a variety of material practices (video, installation, painting, sculpture, etc) and considered numerous discourses on time. This examination includeed examples from philosophical texts, film theory and visual culture to better understand how time shapes meaning and consciousness.

SELECTED READINGS

• Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 1969
• Craig Callender and Ralph Edney, Introducing Time, 2001
• Guy-Ernst Debord, Theory of the Dérive, 1956
• Gilles Deleuze, Cinema: The Time-Image, 1989
• Gilles Deleuze “On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy”, Essays critical and clinical, 1997
• Mathhias Gaertner, ‘Thinking Slowness”, Moments in Time, On Narration and Slowness, 1999
• Elizabeth Grosz, “Thinking of the New: Futures Yet Unthought”, Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures, 1999
• Jessica Helfand, “One, Two, Three, Faux: The Myth of Real Time”, Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media and Visual Culture, 2001
• Scott McCloud, “Time Frames”, The New Media Reader, 2003
• Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationaist International in a postmodern age, 1992
• Paul Virilio, Landscape of Events, 2000