HMS-494A Conceptual Art and Writing Practices & Recuperative Strategies

3 Credits

In this conceptual art-and-writing course, students will design, carry out, and document a "cultural expedition" designed to recuperate cultural lineages, dimensions of experience, and kinds of knowledge that are at risk of being lost. We will explore how poetics can expand our notions of sustainability to include cultural recovery and reanimation and we will learn to use specific writing and investigative (action-based) procedures, such as sustained looking practices, not-taking and commonplace books, audio recording and transcription, archive assembly and investigation, and site-specific research and performance. Be ready to step out of the classroom and into a more flexible, open, and versatile way of looking at writing, at the past, and at how we can, out of that past, construct a more diverse and desired world.