COURSE CATALOG
2012
Cycle 2 Courses
ADVANCED MACARONICS: NEOLOGY, SUBJECTIVITY AND THE PROBLEM OF PERSUASION
Big words, complicated words, a little Latin here and there… All of these can be used to advantage in business, public and personal life. This course covers linguistically informed neologism that can be utilized as rhetorical devices for everyday life. Students are expected to research word origins to form a personal patois for use in conversation, critical and creative writing
Digressor: Talan Memmott
CATABOLIC POIESIS
In biology the term catabolic refers to the breaking down of complex substance into simpler ones, with a release of energy. In rhetoric and poetics we can use this term to indicate the breaking down of epic works, long poems, and analects into a simpler, unified form through reductive prosody. In this class we will explore methods for constructing post or anti literary tables rather than texts and terse-verse that may or may not be embodied as a single image (after all, a picture is worth a thousand words)
Digressor: Talan Memmott
COMMUNICATIONS 101: FROM SOOTHSAYING TO TELEPHONY
Building upon the idea of descrying messages, meanings, and patterns, this course will survey the communication landscape, from prophecy, communication with other versions of reality (ex., as surrealism does), to communication mediated by digital telephony.
Digressor: Catherine Daly
CONFISUON: LOST IN LANGUAGE, A TAUTOLOGY
The Letterist (& later Situationist) International made an art of dérive, which might be understood [practiced] as [by] intentionally getting lost in the urban landscape. Today, the Web helps us remain lost at all times: Dérive is ever a click away. But we are always already confused the moment we approach the world (&/or the WWW) with language, which finds traction in its own slippage (cf. Lacan’s notion of point de capiton ). The Web is language-based tautological space [which describes itself], just as a jpeg is made of [unread?] language-in-relation. What happens when we [take/make a] dérive [w/in] language itself, confusing a confusion [of signs]? Is it possible to get lost on a dérive, to drift from the drift? #confisuon confisuon.tumblr.com
Digressor: Jeff T. Johnson
THE CONGRUENCY OF POETICS AND POP CULTURE: DISCOURSE OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE, SOFIA COPPOLA, AND AL PACINO
The idea of congruency, and for that matter, incongruence of all things quotidian, poetic, pop culture, Sofia Coppola, is at a particular schism and asymmetry, and it is a conundrum that must be solved. With the assistance of the following, I hope that we can bring a controlled chaos to said congruency and incongruence, wild scrum. Here are some aids that we will be using: film: Mary Antoinette, Godfather III, The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Somewhere, et al; text: Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Glassner’s The Culure of Fear, Breckenridge’s A Young Girl in Passing, Powell’s Cocktail and Chronic, Creely; music: NWA, The Cockney Rejects, Ramones, Partisans, Public Enemy, et al. In addition to these aid, we will be focusing on much photography: Sherman, Friedlander, Weegee, et al.
Digressor: Ray DeJesús
DISKINETICS: INNER YOGA, MENTAL GYMNASTICS, AND METAPHYSICAL EDUCATION
Fulfill your metaphys-ed requirement and flex your soul by studying mental gymnastics and inner yoga with certified yoga instructor Claire
Donato. Students will watch and respond to workout videos, participate in acrobatic visualization exercises, and look into the brain’s
locomotives. This course emphasizes relaxation and mental energy over muscular strength. The most limber-minded students will win a
Provisional Meta-Fitness Award.
Digressor: Claire Donato
EDIBLE AVATARS, ANOREXIA, AND FALSE ACCUSATION: THE THEORETICAL BASES OF HOLOGRAPHIC FUTURES AND MELANCHOLIA
Edible avatars succumb to anorexia; prims have little or no body of course, although avatars might be accused of just about anything, including. Holographic objects have no weight and that makes them sad; if you’re a tree in a forest you can’t hear an avatar crying in any case.
Digressor: Alan Sondheim
HAPTIC TELEPATHIES AND DIVINATION
In this course we will experiment with ‘traditional’ divination practices as well as turning digital artifacts into analogue hauntologies and Relics, and then back again. “Results” will be tested through telepathic and wired interface on various post-Material levels.
Digressor: Linus Lancaster
THE INVESTIGATION OF WHATEVER
as inception and termination in contrasting interrogation and provocation, the scrutinized topic is described to be in turn contested for its incongruities. the hack studies the limits of propriety, dismantles and reassembles reference, as both charlatan (to the proper) and hacker (to its black box). the hack serves as both sham (in satire) and nemesis (in critique) of the variously absurd and deleterious. this imposter, as sophist and disinformative encyclopedist, skeptically engenders the practicalist terrain of the technoscientist as it most obviously requires distinction of invention from its empirical circumscription.
the course’s object is in demonstrating what a hack you are in reference to presented concepts.
materials: toolkit (includes chemicals, microcontroller, reagents, building materials, organisms, texts)
Digressor: Erik H Rzepka
JUICY TIMELINESS AND SUBLIME ANTI-TECHNICS
To balance the downward drive of “Underwater Procrastination and Advanced Desublimation Techniques,” I will be giving several creative prompts in the direction of “Juicy Timeliness and Beginning Sublime Anti-technics.” As timeliness is also timelessness, beginning is a perpetual state of mind ardently to be desired, and anti-technics is simply a form of technics, we should continue to have a lot of fun and blow each others’ minds with gooey, bouncy and gushy cultural artifacts the likes of which have never been seen before.
Digressor: Maria Damon
NŌ CODE (DEPROGRAMMING 101)
Week 1: View page source. Stare at page source. Line after line. Your eyes, the code. Paper cranes, undulating glass.
Week 2: “A code will be shown without the picture.” Load code, turn off screen. Rediscover uncodifiable mystery of the black box, its illuminations.
Week 3: Travel path of the Nō coder, blind monk of a digital age, deprogrammer of restless interactivity. Record results. Codify. Compile.
Week 4: GOTO Week 1
Digressor: Eric Snodgrass
SPACE, PLACE AND DIGITAL BITS: WHERE THE HELL ARE WE ANYWAY?
Ground control to Major Tom, put your spacesuit on. In Space, Place and Digital Bits we will explore the idea of location in the digital age by becoming modern day urban/suburban/rural archeologists of our digi-embodied sites. This un-course will guide students in exploring the space and place around them with readings, films, web stuff and directive actions that require the un-student to move, listen, revel in their digital and ephemeral bodies. The physical/un-physical embodied self will play an active role in the formation of figuring out where the hell we are. And most importantly of all time- we will make things that are here, there, everywhere, nowhere and just are!
Digressor: Belinda Haikes
UNDERWATER PROCRASTINATION AND ADVANCED DESUBLIMATION TECHNIQUES
A course description will be added when we get around to it.
Digressor: Maria Damon
