Studio Seminar in Art and the Public Sphere (Spring 2024)

4.368 U / 4.369 G

Instructor
Gediminas Urbonas
TA
Vinzenz Aubry
Units
U / G
Lab Fee
Per-term $75 fee after Add Date; SMACT students are exempt
Credit
3-3-6 U/G 3-3-3 G
Schedule
MW 9:30am-12:30pm
Location
E15-207
This course focuses on the production of art in the public sphere as a spatial articulation of a paradoxical reality: what public can we imagine when technologies can access, expand, and augment almost any site remotely? To engage this question, this class will probe edges of unexplored hybridities produced by AR/MR/VR/AI/AL technology. The class will explore how to negotiate site specificity, environmental histories, and public immersion to produce work that critically engages with its milieu in the light of a new climatic regime. 
 
Questions and assignments will focus on researching, proposing and producing projects that unveil ecologies emerging between the physical environment and imaginative ecosystems of the Camargue marshes (France), a haven for wild birds and insects. Artistic proposals will be designed to create new (re)publics, drawing inspiration from biological, cultural, and social ecologies while invoking speculative ecological design, autochthonous knowledges, and local imaginaries. Both individual endeavors and group-work would be encouraged, while the artworks created in the class will be presented in a form of public performance.
 
Participants will probe artistic strategies by mapping the shifting notions of public art. Class discussions and artistic explorations will ask how to radically expand the way we feel and operate in a rapidly changing climate. The class is structured with a help of conceptual lenses through which participants are suggested to develop their artistic projects. As such these conceptual lenses would (A) connect with pressing concerns of public interest – making bridge between community / injustice / climate change, and (B) help to un-earth the underlying (autochthonous) landscape of the site, affected by the Anthropogenic events.
 
Readings and visitors to the class will guide an interrogation of concepts such as anthropocene aesthetics, human and non-human assemblies, new climatic regimes, feminist fabulation, and archipelagic thinking. Readings include those by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Gilbert Simondon, Georges Canguilhem, Brian Holmes, Miwon Kwon, Sven Lütticken, Andrew Pickering, Isabelle Stengers, Eduardo Viveiro de Castro, Oliver Marchart, Elizabeth Povinelli, Daniel Birnbaum, & Sven-Olov Wallenstein, TJ Demos, and others.
 
Visits to the class, examples of practice and field trips include Rus Gant, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Lundahl & Seitl, Tamiko Theil, John Craig Freeman, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sarah Wolozin, Martin Guinard, Daniel Birnbaum, MIT Immersion Lab, Harvard Visualization Lab. 
 
In addition to lectures, class discussion, and individual studio meetings the class will organize several field trips facilitated by guest interlocutors, to catalyze explorations.
 
The class will meet as a group on Mondays 9.30am-12.30 pm for main input: lectures, visits from guest artists and scholars, and discussions of readings, with a Lab work scheduled on Wednesdays, when individual meetings and/or studio visits and desk crits with the instructor (and guest artists) would be organized. Wednesdays time slot would also be reserved for library/archival research and workshopping of students ideas, including production. 
 
Undergraduate and Graduate students are welcome to enrol. 
Info session is slated on Feb.5th at 9.30am.  E15-207 (Wiesner room)
For questions please contact Gediminas Urbonas: urbonas@mit.edu

Additional work required of students taking graduate version.

Prerequisites
UG: 4.301 or 4.302; 4.307; 4.312 or permission of instructor;
G: 4.307; 4.312 or permission of instructor
Emergent (Re)publics

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