Spring Session: February 6 — April 27, 2012
UC Independent Media Center, Urbana, IL
Seminar
This is a seminar for refreshed language, active thought, and generative discussion. Concepts, formulations, notions, ideas from the history and prehistory of the project will be subjected to the criterion of contemporary relevance: What is needed now? If composition is taken to mean that you are a composer when you bring about that which without you would not happen, how can we formulate projects and create a seminar that would not happen without us? The offer of the seminar is that we share, examine and generate: distinctions, statements, questions, assignments, desired consequences, responses, collaborations, creations, performances. We’ll try things out.
Topics might well include choice, freedom; need, necessity; listening, love, care; alternatives to current economic, gender, justice, housing, health-care, media, and artistic systems; power—dismantle, smash, share, give or dilute? metaphor, reframing, recoding, description; job, work, employment, task, contribution; community, society, dynamics, conversation … The SDAS seminar is offered by the whole SDAS team of organizers and is sustained by all participants.
Design Groups
Every participant in SDAS is invited to write a page of statements under the title “Right or Wrong: My Desires.”
State anything about which you wish to say: “While it is not the case, I desire it to be the case,” statements that are currently false that you wish could become true. List the statements in such an order that the fulfillment of desires earlier in the list may imply the fulfillment of desires later in the list, but not vice versa. You may or may not deal with the reasonability, desirability, or possibility of any fulfillment. Imagine that these statements could be part of your answer to the question, “What would I consider a desirable society?”
The second part is to form groups called “design groups” to read each other’s statements, consider their formulation, try to combine the individual lists into a group list of desires that all the members of the group wish to become true statements. Begin to speculate on actions, practices, structures, policies, strategies that might create a context in which these desires might become true statements. Assign each other reading and research in support of these speculations, and create a group composition—performance, booklet, map, film, teach-in—to present your groups work to other groups.
Political Economy
Michael Brün
How to comprehend current events and current talk about economic issues.
Why the ‘political’ in political economy is relevant.
The Gaze
Meadow Jones
How have ‘otherization’ frameworks based on power been constructed through performance and “the gaze” in the United States? This course considers racialized, gendered, and sexualized performances in such historical and contemporary sites that contribute to the objectification and commodification of people and culture. We will pay particular attention to how subjects deconstruct dominant ideologies of racial, cultural, gender, and sexual difference
and engage in forms of social and political mobilization.
Key questions include:
• How are vision and visual representation implicated in the
objectification of some human beings and the empowerment of others?
• How are deviant identities controlled through visibility and invisibility?
• How do images mediate our ability to relate to the suffering of others?
• How do technologies affect who can speak with authority about the state and condition of the body?
Collaborative Thinking and Improvisation
Christopher Reyman & Sandra Hendrix-Lopez
What is creativity? How can we create cooperatively during spontaneous composition? How do we examine our relationships and interactions as performers? We will explore these questions through exercises, discussions and journals, allowing students to reevaluate their concepts of performance, improvisation and composition “on stage” and in every day life.
Designing Disagreements
Cristina Fenotti (Milano) & Ya’aqov Ziso (Urbana)
A series of visits into observing and trying out dynamics of differences of opinions, conflicts, and contradictions as we piece together our daily life encounters and conversations inspiring us to stick together.