UCLA ARTS ANNOUNCES 2016-17 SCHOOL-WIDE STUDIO COURSE SERIES
"Follow the Throughlines" promotes innovation and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Following on the heels of the success of our first school-wide course designed for students from across the school to create, think, and percolate ideas together; we are pleased to announce "Follow the Throughlines," a series of quarterly school-wide, studio-based courses for the 2016-17 academic year:
FALL 2016
AA100: Re-Visualizing Embodiment: Choreopolitics, Design, Access & Space
Guest Instructor: Amanda Cachia, an independent curator from Sydney, Australia who is currently a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory & Criticism at the University of California, San Diego.
Inscribed surface, political object, sign, flesh, boundary, matter, cultural product, artistic work—these are some of the many ways that the disabled body has been theorized and imagined in a wide cross-section of critical scholarship and cultural production. This interdisciplinary course seeks to provide a broad overview of the presence of disability and its various manifestations throughout modern day visual culture, with a special emphasis on how disabled artists have offered a revision to the existing negative constructs typically associated with the disabled form. Together we will develop a new rhetorical framework for the “choreopolitics” of complex embodiment, and we will build a new vocabulary and methodology around disability and access in challenging and stimulating ways. We will engage primarily with work that interrogates the social, political, and philosophical stakes of complex embodiment, drawn from fields that have a history of interrogating embodiment in visual culture, such as within the discourses of dance, choreography, performance, architecture, and more. We will also examine how we might trouble the ostensibly normative narratives in museum and gallery spaces, and consider how access might become a dynamic conceptual and curatorial tool for destabilizing reductive categories. The overarching goal is to engage in dialogue that centers on the creative potential of disabled bodies to generate social transformation within visual culture at large. For additional information, please contact Haley Safonov in the Department of World Arts and Cultures / Dance: hsafonov@arts.ucla.edu.
WINTER 2017
AA 100: Art and the Normal: A Format That Works for Everything
Guest Instructor: Vishal Judgeo received a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship (2015) and exhibited in Made in L.A. (2012) at the Hammer Museum.
In this studio course, we will emphasize discussion around the shifting roles of creative producers and work on projects that mandate individual expression and resistant political engagement in the face of total normalization. We will explore the ways in which the current cultural landscape might offer a porousness that allows for artists to engage with broader publics, working from within the cracks of this new world order. For more information, please contact Vishal Jugdeo in the Department of Art: vjugdeo@gmail.com.
SPRING 2017
AA 100: Find by Image
Guest Instructor: Luke Fischbeck is an artist, composer, and organizer who designs and tests structures for collaboration.
A look at the artistic applications of machine learning (and other forms of artificial intelligence). From archival research and interventions, to generative and participatory artworks, this course aims to unpack advances in technology that are fundamentally shifting how we derive meaning from the world. Course participants would gain basic familiarity with a range of available tools for interpreting and engaging with complexity, with the goal of creating original projects that exploit these techniques—interactive and dynamic media; image, object, and sound recognition; and responsive sensory environments. We'll scale to meet the experience and the ambition of each student: prior experience is welcome but not necessary. For more information, please contact Esther Blair in the Department of Design Media Arts: esther.blair@arts.ucla.edu.