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Acquire insight and knowledge about changes and transformations within one of the sub themes (see below). This course offers two sub themes, looking at changes and transformations within media, art, and performance. It investigates these developments and their emergence within their specific historical and discursive formations.
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Media: This course focuses on the dynamics of media changes by looking to earlier precedents. It considers nodal points in the development of media and intertwines three levels of analysis: 1. historically specific case studies of the emergence of particular media (e.g. photography, telegraphy, film) - with an eye on points of resonance with the present; 2. more general organizing concepts apparent over the long haul of media deployment (e.g. reproduction, extension, storage, participation, personalization); 3. debates over agency and implication particularly as they relate to a situated notion of historical inscription, aka, doing history at a moment of profound media change.
Art & Performance: This course tracks the emergence of a radical transdisciplinarity in the arts and performance that manifests itself in a blurring of boundaries between the arts and performance, and between the arts, performance and other practices like, for example, activism, design, politics, health care, education and science. In this course we explore examples of such emerging practices and meet with people involved in them.
These transdisciplinary developments urge a reconsideration of the concepts used to engage with them. This course approaches these transformations through a closer look at concepts and the relationship between concepts and objects. We will explore how concepts are explored within artistic practices, how they can become (as Bal puts it) a “third partner” between transdisciplinary practices and critical theorists, and also how a closer look at concepts, what they do and what we do with them, may help us to further understand an define our own role as critical theorists.
Career orientation:
Students will develop research skills appropriate for current developments in media, art and performance, and in historical and comparative research relevant for reflection on the dynamics of historical change and transformation within these fields.
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