Advanced Workshop in Artistic Practice and Transdisciplinary Research: Interspecies Ecologies (Fall 2019)

Instructor

Gediminas Urbonas

TA

Luiza Bastos Lagos

Lab Fee

$ 75

Credit

3-3-6 ug, 3-3-3/3-3-6 g

Schedule

TR 2pm-5pm

Location

e15-001

This course discusses artistic practice based research geared towards a development of transdisciplinary and multi-valent projects that connect creative drives with political realities and social conditions of so called environmental turn. Interspecies Ecologies take its inspiration from the Zooetics, a 5 year-long research project focusing on sympoiesis, as well as from the Swamp School. 

The course explores intersections of the human and nonhuman knowledge spheres through a series of collaborations, bringing in artistic experimental practices into scientific knowledge fields and vice versa. To advance research, pedagogy and presentation of future interspecies ecologies the course addresses cohabitation of human and other forms of life as an urgent issue that unfolds through a variety of discourses: indigenous and vernacular knowledge, biosemiotics, posthumanism, and human-animal studies, among others. The course proposes re-imagining the role of ecosystemic thinking and artistic imagination in this context. Readings related to this subject include those by Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Isabelle Stengers, Elizabeth Povinelli, Andrew Pickering and others. Visitors to the class include Sohin Hwang, Silvia Bottinelli, Joe Davis, Miriam Simun. Field trips to the New England Aquarium, Museum of Natural History, and the FUTURITY ISLAND serve as relational models and discursive events that include presentations from Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Christine Shaw, Nicole L’Huillier, Indre Umbrasaite, Tobias Putrih, Glorianna Davenport, Caroline A. Jones, Erin Genia, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Eben Kirksey, Brent D. Ryan, and Lorena Bello Gomez.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version. Limited to 20.

Students taking a production-based ACT class will be charged a $75 lab fee after the add date on a semester basis. The fee covers the cost of student production materials used as part of the class. SMACT graduate students are exempt from the lab fee.  

This is a variable unit class.