School for Designing a Society

Composition Courses

Fundamentals

Course proposal by Herbert Brün, in response to the question "What do you consider fundamental to designing a society?" The fundamentals course offers deliberately stipulated premises in nine areas, including: freedom - the number of alternatives for choice; criteria; the establishment of connections; temporary truth; ethics. The fundamentals were formulated to enable people to speak language, rather than be spoken by language, when working together to design a society.

Design Groups

1. Make a list of statements about which you would say that they are currently false and you wish they would be true. Take care that the statements are, to the best of your knowledge, false. (Avoid beginning a statement with such phrases as "I wish that...", which would be taken as a true statement.) At this stage in the assignment, the falseness of the statements is to be emphasized.

2. Order the statements in such a way that statements earlier in the list, if they were to become true, might imply that statements later in the list would, as a consequence, also have become true.

3. Form groups: "design groups". The design groups are to:

Read members' statements: examine the formulation of the statements;

Compile a single list of false statements that all members of your group would like to become true;

Speculate on actions, practices, strategies, structures that might create a context in which the false statements would become true;

Assign each other reading, writing, drawing, composition, and research that might follow up on the speculations;

Host a long term project that could be a container for the traces of your group's designs (and the work of other groups), for example:

a book
an installation
a video
a circus
a teach-in

Seminar in Experimental Composition

The emphasis will be on your articulation and creation of projects of contemporary relevance, in particular, seeding reference, and other projects as might protect your creativity against commercial enterprise (how to be successful without succeeding in being silly). The seminar involves listening to music as a group, composition projects, performers' workshops, and conversation. Materials are to be drawn from art, science, the society we live in, and the society we wish to live in. When composing a piece of music, a formulation of thought, or a living arrangement, the composer chooses among alternatives, and generates new alternatives, such that witnesses can observe the consequences of the composer's choosing. Thus, composition may be an input to any discipline concerned with problem solving.

Health Care Delivery Systems Design: "Inside My Heart But Outside the Box: Thinking, to Change the Health Care Box"

This class is an advanced design group, focusing on analyzing the current system of health care delivery, on designing systemic alternatives to it, and on formulating implementation ideas for our designs. Readings and research play a large role, enabling us to examine the history of language and desires in the area of health care delivery. Participants will read texts by Eric Cassell, Arthur Kleinman, William Osler, Nel Noddings, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, Martin Buber, and Francis Peabody.

A Composer's History of the World

Taking Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States as point of departure, in this class each person chose a past event (be it a social action or an artistic trace) and focused on how it "retarded decay" (a composer's focus). Questions we asked ourselves: Did the people who made the event, bring about something which without them and that event, would not have happened? Did the event, and the "composers" of it, contribute to the existent store of meaning? Did society's response -- its language -- attempt to pre-empt the intentions and thought of the event -- to co-opt it? How can we 'be-friend' this past event, considering it a living partner to our present-day attempts to make art/events of contemporary significance?

Portable and Site Specific

Taking inspiration from the sociological, philosophical, political visual art of Hans Haacke, Krzystoph Wodicko, and others, this course offers the seemingly contradictory socio-compositional challenge to students to create a piece that could function as site-specific commentary on the location of its installation, and yet be functional in a desired way when set up in other locations.

No-Risk Art Lube

As a warm-up to designing, take 20 minutes to give a composition assignment that can be explained, responded to, and presented within the 20 minutes. "Go to someplace in the room and touch an object; write a commemorative plaque for that object." "Compose a dance for one hand in versions: a 5-second version and a 2-second version." "On a piece of paper, write instructions for a silly walk and a serious walk. Swap papers and practice the two walks." The quirkiness and brevity of the assignments plus the low expectations implicit in the quick turnaround -- AND the reliably surprising depth, humor, and variety of the results -- make a useful exercise for overcoming blocks, stage fright, and low self-confidence in creative action.

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