MAS.996.Arts Practicum: An introduction to
contemporary arts practice and theory.
Wednesday 10:00 -> 13:00, E15-054 & Thursday
20:00->22:00, E15-Bartos Auditorium
The MAS Arts Practicum is an introduction to contemporary
arts practice, combining
- readings
in contemporary theory around art, science, and technology
- a
series of incremental assignments leading students through designing and
producing increasingly more sophisticated art works
- a
modest historical survey of 20th century art
The purpose of the course is to introduce Media Lab grad
students to working in the fine arts, allowing them to develop proficiency in
authoring for various media. Twentieth
century experimental practices in film, audio, and sculpture/installation
technique will be investigated as a counterpoint to commercial motion pictures,
music, and product design. Students
will work to master terminology and techniques of film, radio, and sculpture
with a view towards understanding general problems around media technologies
and authorship, old or new. In
particular, we’ll discuss the notion of inventing new media that may produce
the “complex pleasures” associated with literature, film, and music. One can think of the class as “How to Make
(Almost) Anything” in terms of content, narrative, and signification.
The course is divided in two parts per week: A studio class, used for technical training
and critique, and an evening screening session for presentations of historical
and contemporary works in the field, with occasional presentations by invited
lecturers. Both sections will not
always meet each week.
Students will do small weekly experiments in film, audio,
and installation for the first two thirds of the semester. The last third of the semester, however,
students will each author a single work of art appropriate to the media lab --
art that produces or utilizes advanced contemporary technologies. Notions of autonomy and agency, interaction
and network, and cultural context will be explored through readings and
screenings, while students work to produce their final project over a five week
period. Throughout the semester,
student work will be critiqued by the class and the instructor; a constructive
if occasionally brutal process.
Students interested in the class must attend both the
Wednesday and the Thursday meetings in the first week.
Grades will be determined by attendance, evaluations of
projects, and two small papers, with the following percentage weights:
Attendance: 15
Small projects: 40
Large project: 35
Papers: 10
Note: This syllabus
is subject to change during the semester.
Week 1: Intro to the class: What’s necessary to make an art work?
Screen:
Komar & Melamid, “Painting by
Numbers”
Fischli & Wiess, “Der Lauf Der
Dinge”
Tod Haynes, “Karen Carpenter Story”
Eduward Muybridge
Jules-Etienne Marey
Georges Meliers
Frers Lumiere
Assignment:
Create a 15 second video depicting love. This can be filial, spousal, fraternal,
patriotic, but should probably be romantic.
Reading:
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.”
David Ross, “Ross’ 21 Points about Net Art.”
Week 2: Lighting, Writing, Shooting.
We’ll have a local DP (Director of Photography) come in
during the class to show camera, staging, and lighting technique. Introduction to film language.
Crit: luv
Screen (Golden Age):
Dziga
Vertov, “Man with a Movie Camera”
D. W. Griffiths, “Pirates of Pig Alley”
Preston Sturgess, “
Maya Deren, “Meshes of the Afternoon”
Rudolph Mate, “D.O.A.”
Assignment: 15
seconds of argument (intellectual, directed, confrontational…), 30 seconds of
luv.
Reading:
Manny Farber, “Negative Space”
Pauline Kael, “My Life in the Movies”
Erkki Huhtamo, “Encapsulated Bodies in Motion”
Graham Greene, script of “The Third Man”
Week 3: Editing
Crit: Argument, luv
Screen (Narrative Structure):
Stanly Donan, “Two for the Road.”
Chris
Marker, “Sans Soliel”
Mike
Figgis, “Timecode”
Chantal
Ackerman, “Sud”
Peter
Greenaway, “The Falls”
Peter
Greenaway, “Pillow Book”
Ant Farm,
“ternal Frame”
Assignment: Movie of
YOUR choice, limit 5 minutes, due in two weeks. First you’ll draft a treatment, 1 page describing the point of
the film, its organization, strategy of its articulation, logistics of
production. An individual meeting to
discuss the treatment will be scheduled with the instructor for later in the
week. For the following week, you
should have a script or storyboard, and production schedule.
Reading:
Lenny
Lipton, Independent Film
Laura
Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Week 4:
Sculpture (intro)
The class will begin by looking at notions of realism in
three dimensional representations, covering pre-Columbian through
post-Minimalism. Several quick sketches
in clay will lead to a live nude model for the last hour.
Screen (avant guarde)
Stan
Brakhage, “Mothlight”
Andy
Warhol, “Chelsea Girls”
Carolee
Schneeman, “Fireworks”
Dara
Birnbaum, “Kiss the Girls”
Oscar
Fischinger, “Motion Painting #1”
Chris
Marker, “La Jetee”
Reading:
- G.
Cairns-Smith, “The Origin of Life:
Clays”
Week 5:
Sculpture (kinetic)
Students will experiment with mechanical assemblages, simple
machines, and heat and power transfer systems.
Natural elements, humans, animals, and artificial power sources will be
used.
Screen:
Jean
Tinguely
Alan Rath
Rebecca
Horn
Rube
Goldberg
Jean
Tinguely
Nam June
Paik
Joseph
Cornell
Crit: Longer film
Activity: Kinetics
(oxy acetylene & mechanisms)
Assignment: Create a
clay or porcelain figurative bust of a friend or acquaintance.
Reading:
Guy Brett,
“Forcefields: An Essay on the Kinetic”
Week 6:
Installation/Public Art
We’ll take the Oxy and Rebar outside and practice simple
mechanical principals of suspension, triangulation, and framing. We’ll look at public contexts for both the
production and display of art, as well as community and activist strategies.
Crit: Portrait
Screen:
Christo
CAVS
greybeard allstars
San
Sebastian Beach Collective
Barbara Krueger
La
Fiembrera
Institute
for Applied Autonomy
Alan Kaprow
Iara Lee,
Synthetic Pleasures
Rafael
Lozano-Hemmer
Assignment: Cornell
Box (allowing some contemporary technologies)
Rythem
Week 7:
Sound (Language, speaking, events, narrative)
This week we listen to the spoken word, traditions of oral
narrative, and modernist experiments in “cut ups” or non-linear oral
techniques. We’ll cover fundamentals of
recording, digital editing, and concepts of sampling and filtering.
Crit: Cornell Box
Audition:
Wyndham
Lewis
Filipo
Thomasso Marinetti
William S. Burrows
Vladimir Usachevsky
Christian Marclay
Alvin Ayler
Negativeland
Ira Glass
Orson Wells, “War of the Worlds”
Roosevelt, “Fireside Chats”
Reading:
Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, “Le Futurisme”
William S.
Burrows, “On Cut-Ups”
Ira Glass,
Radio
Douglas
Kahn, Wireless Imagination
Assignment: NPR Story: Interview,
write.
Week 8:
Sound (Art in sound technology)
Basics of sound synthesis, introduction to advanced music
systems such as MSP, reactor, beatbox.
Crit: NPR Story,
interviews and writing. (students also
make a pitch)
Audition:
Luigi
Russolo
Igor
Stravinski
Bing
Crosby
Pierre Schaeffer
Assignment: NPR
Story edit
Reading:
Luigi
Russolo, “l'Arte
dei Rumori”
(week 8 reading, con’t)
David Morton, Off the
Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America
Don
Delillo, “White Noise”
Douglas Kahn,
Noise, Water, Meat
Week 9:
Intro to Art and Technology
This class begins a four week survey of art and technology,
starting with Greek sculpture and architecture and ending with contemporary net
art. While the screening section will
continue to feature art work, the class periods will increasingly be spent
discussing readings, which shift from articles to entire monographs. The class period will take on more the
quality of a seminar, used to provide conceptual and theoretical foundations
for the final project.
Crit: NPR Story
Reading:
Samuel
Butler, Erewhon
Lev Manovich, Language of New Media
Assignment: Outline a project working towards the “complicated pleasures”
that Tony Dunne ascribes to literature, cinema, and theater, but using advanced
technologies close to your research.
Week 10:
Renaissance and Enlightenment Art and Technology
Natural magic, wunderkammers and natural history, display
and experimental practice, and the split of natural magic and natural science.
Screenings:
Diego
Velazquez de Silva
Leonardo da
Vinci
Rene
Descartes
Jacques de
Vaucanson
Crit: Final project
proposals
Reading:
Stephen
Toulmin, Cosmopolis
Week 11:
20th Century Art and Technology
Painting and photography in the nineteenth century, absurdism
and technology, the American technological sublime, machine art, cubism,
futurism, constructivism, and the Bauhaus.
Guest Speaker: Erkki
Huhtamo
Screening:
Alfred
Jarry
Karel Capek
Francis
Picabia
Ferdinand
Legers
Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy
El Lizzitsky
Reading:
Lewis
Mumsford, Technics and Civilization
Lev Manovich, Language of New Media
Week 12: 20th Century Art and Technology
(II)
World Wars and technology, America in the 1950’s and the
culture of product, the bomb, television, and the work of art at the end of the
industrial age/beginning of the information age.
Guest Speaker:
Graham Harwood
Screening:
Marcel
Duchamp
Jean
Tinguely
Survival
Research Labs
Andy Warhol
John
Whitney
Canadian
Film Board and the computer
Reading:
Tony Dunne,
Hertzian Dreams
N.
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post Human
Week 13: Current directions in Art and Technology
Guest speaker: Perry
Hoberman.
Reading:
N.
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post Human (con’t)
Collins and
Pinch, The Golem: What You Should
Know About Science
Week 14:
Current directions in Art and Technology (II)
Guest speaker:
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
Reading:
Bruno
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
Week 15:
Current directions in Art and Technology (III)
Crits and public display of work.