Winding down rather than ramping up

In putting this class together I made the conscious choice to structure it a bit differently than previous project courses. The typical gesture with these is to sort of drift away fro the material until the students are left as owners and authority. So – the Gen Art, Virtual Worlds, Aesthetics of Dissonance, and Postmodern courses all concluded with turning over space, time, and material to the students. Some pick up the challenge, other’s don’t. May main point with this is not to appear indifferent, or shirking some sort of pedagogical responsibility, but to allow the students to own the material in a why that can’t happen if I am “in charge” right up to the final day.

So, the last section of this course was devoted to applying what was learned form the readings and projects to a few works – namely Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and David Lynch’s Industrial Symphony No. 1. After about 13 weeks of this stuff my hope was that students would be bursting with things to say about Stoppard’s script. Some were but, alas, not all. It was obvious, however, that the vocabulary and ideas that had been acquired aided in the conversation. So, rather than have to explain the mathematical or chaos elements that show up in the play both narraitvely and structurally.  We were able to hit on most of the material that we covered this term.

The last piece was to discuss Lynch’s odd performance video. The disclaimer I had for the students is that this was the first piece I began to use chaos theory to analysis, mainly because of its chaotic, non-linear feel (the results have been posted here). As the conclusions to the term the discussion was interesting. Good comments and details from the students as to specific elements and ideas that emerged form the viewing. It allowed us to discuss works that don’t fit a more traditional critical framework. While we didn’t hit on as many ideas as we did with the Stoppard, the conversation still offered a good overview of the term and how chaos can be applied to both art viewing and art making.

Between these two classes we explored the notion of order out of chaos. My typical gesture is to simply leave a box of materials and instructions in the room for the students to discover and explore. The paper was due that day and so I met with the students for a bit and then slid a gift wrapped package with “instructions” – mainly a list of questions generated by the readings – as well as paper, tape, crayons, post-it notes and a short length of rope. Odds and ends mainly, with no predetermined use. I have dons this exercise about 5 or 6 times and what strikes me about it is that basically the same thing happens every time. Students do open the box – which means someone has to decide to open it. The tear up the “instructions” and then they proceed to use whatever is in the box (in the past it has included things like paper clips and string) to fill the space. In exploding out into the space it doesn’t seem to matter if it is a traditional classroom or a seminar room or an open space like the gym two other things happen. They stack chairs in the middle of the room and hang stuff from the ceiling. Having seen this enough I really consider these two actions to be the strange attractor of the exercise.

I’ll need to decompress form the term and revisit this material after grade are posted, but immediate reflections suggest that this course was not as successful as other project courses. I suspect it may have something to do with the material. The chaos stuff all cycles around a few very basic ideas (things like iteration, butterfly effect, bifurcation) and when you get that it is really a matter of simply refining the ideas rather than moving on to others. The Dissonance and Postmodern class were both built on a wider range of material. Perhaps in the future I can augment the chaos material with things drawn from complexity. I suspect it will be some time until I teach it again. It will also be more than a year before I attempt another project-based course. The main goal with these courses is liberation – encouraging the students to develop their own ideas out of the course material. Since I feel that is expected of “artists” then why not start the process while a “student artist.” So, while I love teaching these class since I find them liberating and fun, ultimately they take way more energy than amore traditional course.

I fully expected to return to this blog to find is overgrown and decayed:

It has been ages since I have ad the time to jot down my thoughts about the class. It looks like I am trying to account for about seven classes with this one post. The bad thing about this is that much of the detail has faded. The good thing is that I have a different perspective on what has transpired.  Some of the “text” days were given over to exploring and explaining fractals and strange attractors. This is the first time they have been so deep into the class – which worked well since they are perhaps the most complex ideas we address. They provide a way of looking at structure that side-steps the question of linearity. The structures emerge from non-linear and non-deterministic process but nevertheless create a recognizable structure. This was all meant as a lead in to the narrative structures project – which was re-titled “strange attractors indeed.”

The assignment dealt with taking one of five American folk tales and reconfiguring it based on one or more of the chaos ideas. I suggested that students might want to isolate elements of the story such as theme and character, location and events to see what materials they had to work with. The results were amazing. In fact, I think this was the peak of the class with the larges number of interesting and engaging projects. I do find that having repeated this course structure a number of times now that there is always one project where things come together. When I taught the Dissonance class it was the Fluxus pieces – which fell far too soon in the term for the peak. I didn’t feel we could recapture the energy after that project and after spring break. With the Postmodern class I deliberately put this type of material after the  break but the class peaked one project before this with the Ironic Museum piece.

What made this chaos project so interesting was the range of answers. So many different ways to mangle, alter, re-shape, and change the stories while still holding onto the basic story or characters. What I found most surprising about the projects were how many students actually created an algorithm or small machine to run the story through and then watched to or listened to the results. Really interesting stuff – and just as much about the process as the product. In the discussion of these pieces we looked at where the similarities were and how unique some of the solutions were.

From there we looked at Borges “Garden of Forking Paths” and an essay on non-linearity. Part of what I was getting at with this stuff is how many different ways there are of approaching structure and how often we fall back on the same linear models. So – we explored 77 Million Paintings and a few key examples of hypertext as well as experimental fiction. Reaching back to discuss Barthes’ “The End and Introduction” provided an opportunity to discuss how chaos theory ideas might play out in specific stories.

The next bit was the final project which was focused on creating a machine to make a mark. Part of the intent with this assignment was to get students out of themselves to create something that cold run without their control. It was intended to build off of the machine-like solutions for the narrative project as well as be a lead in to the discussion of generative and non-deterministic art. When I say that the class peaked with the fourth project it is largely because I felt that as a whole the class developed some interesting ideas. The fifth project certainly had highlights with a handful of students doing some remarkable work, but not all were firing on all cylinders.

When the machines were clever and engaging you could feel the reaction from the group. Others had ore straight forward solutions – which adequately addressed the prompt, but didn’t necessarily go that extra step. Part of the intent with this section is to begin to show applications of these chaos ideas. To open students up to the possibility that there are other ways of exploring structure and control. This gave way to a discussion of Eno’s work and the idea of generative art – which always includes a playing of the four disk Zaiereeka. The conversation was more successful than some pervious because I tried to ground it in questions about what the students are learning and what is expected of them as artists. The main question was why would an artist – like Eno, or Reich, or Terry Riley – want to set a piece of music in motion when they had no idea what would happen. Hopefully this all primes the pump to talk about Cunningham and Cage.

As a side note about the rhythm of the class. Although I have taught a number of courses this way – all built on the same basic frame – they all seem to work totally differently. Some of this is due to the material and some due to the students. Like any class I probably need to teach it this way a number of times before I truly understand how it works. I do find teaching these courses exhausting – constantly trying to come up with projects or exercises that will illuminate one idea or another. I feel while it is a less interesting way of teaching – sometimes just talking is much easier.

Post iteration project – pre structure project:

Part of my intent in setting this class up is to do three things – 1) provide a general overview to chaos theory. 2) Explore how the ideas can be used to discuss specific works of art. 3) Explore how these ideas can be used to generate art. The projects that we have done up to this point – unbalancing a system, weaving together five different elements into a whole, and iteration – have all been designed to provide a general introduction to the ideas. The balance piece works against the Newtonian sense of order by adding something to a system that sets it off on another pattern. As was pointed out – even projects that have a destructive quality still produced a new kind of order. The project of weaving pieces together was about the interdependence of all elements and how the whole is always more than the sum of its parts – a crucial idea when dealing with dynamical systems. The iteration project was – well about iteration.

It also laid the groundwork to begin discussing how this idea is played out in different mediums. Heinlein’s “all you zombies” uses the idea as a structuring device that allows the author to tell a non-linear story in a linear way. Iteration was, of course, also part of our butterfly effect conversation connected to Run Lola Run. It shows up wonderfully in Steve Reich’s “Come Out.” Listening to the sound created as the two tape loops separate is fantastic. You can hear the results as sounds just piles up on itself.  

This was the way in to the next conversation – so we started by discussing what students could hear in the recording. It struck me that with Reich’s piece he developed an iterative process that was additive – in the sense that the sound got more complex as the piece went along. We talked a bit about Reich’s essay on music as a gradual process – in which you can hear the structure – and then listened to – looked at Reich’s Pendulum Piece. As the mic swings across the amp you can hear it slow down. Great example of a fixed point attractor – which lead to the conversation at the next class.

We then moved on to a few examples of iteration that stripped away rather than added on. Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” is such a great use of this idea – recording and re-recording reflected sound until nothing is left but pulses of sound. William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops is also a great example of this. Haunting and beautiful – Basinski’s brilliance – like Reich’s – was to trust the process and let it go and simply listen to the results. The hope is that these examples would begin to establish a direction for what to do with these ideas. 

Somewhere before and after fall break: I just didn’t see it due to the structure

Heinlein’s All You Zombies offers a good example of iteration as it is drawn out in a narrative. If you follow the logic of the story it actually suggests that there is no beginning and no end – more of a rhizomatic type structure. The logic of the time frames as well as duplications of character don’t allow for a linear process. Like the film Primer it is built on loops within loops within loops. Having the students bring in images to represent this structure gave us a good way into the story. The loops were prevalent in many of the images, but there were a handful that found a different way to represent the structure of the story. My hope is when we get to fractals and phase space that these images come in handy.

The same is true for the iteration projects. Part of what I like about this course structure is that it gets me outside of my own examples. I have specific iterative examples I use – and have used – again and again. So – we listened to Steve Reich’s Come Out today – which I think is a fantastic example of iteration that develops in time – so the postmodern idea of sameness with difference. Listening to this piece is – to me – the same as Ed Lorenz computer model of the weather – the two paths begin to diverge and something else is created. We saw that today with the robot bug drawing in that it traced a similar pattern, but still somewhat different.

So – as always – I am impressed by the variety that students bring in as answers to the prompts. We need to explore what type of systems we saw, what the variables were, and how these elements affected the projects. We do see a number of projects that involve volunteers – perhaps more so this time than with the other two projects. So clearly social systems were at work as well as sound and movement and digital applications. We will certainly revisit these in the next class and then build on the ideas with the Reich essay. Since we listened to Come Out today we can listen to Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room next time – an iterative example that strips away rather than builds up. We can then revisit the projects with these ideas in mind.

What I find odd about the structure of the class as it has developed is the deferral quality – as if we are always getting to the point, but never quite there. Each project is a good example of where we are headed – I just have to wonder if we will ever get there. In mentioning this to Bob his point was to document this process a bit more. It is not something I have seen with the project classes yet – they always felt like they had a clear direction and a clear building up of ideas. Strangely this one has a more chaotic structure – which was totally unintentional on my part. But I suspect it was always lurking there when I taught the class in the past – I just didn’t see it due to the structure.

Days n days n days: All Project-Based Courses are not the same

The last few class periods sort of blur into each other due to the material – Lorenz on the Butterfly Effect, Bradbury’s Sound of Thunder, The film Run Lola Run, and then a discussion of the film. I realize as I think about the connections between these elements that my thinking about the rhythm of the class is directly connected to the course material. I know that sounds like a fairly benign comment, but it does help me examine why this class seems to be working differently than other project based classes. I have used this structure about five times now and I have just assumed that the type of driving toward an understanding by moving from one element to the next was part of how these courses worked – and it was for those subjects. The chaos class seems to be working differently.

Some of this comes out of the fact that even when I taught this material as more of a seminar course that it felt like similar ideas simply presented in a different way. So each of the organizing topics – things like sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the butterfly effect, iteration, feedback, fractals, strange attractors, non-linearity, indeterminacy – all seem like different words for the same thing. So rather than move from topic to topic acquiring a greater breadth of knowledge on a subject this course seems to work to gain a deeper understanding of these ideas. What I mean by that is the difference between a horizontal and vertical structure – one moves forward in time whereas the other freezes time and moves deeper into the subject. Rather than a well made play, this course seems to be working more like a slowly developing picture. This was not planned, but rather discovered as the class developed.

What this means is that projects and readings and conversations we have had prior to this point may not reach maturity until we add more material. We have been cycling back to discuss both projects more than in previous project courses. It is interesting since chaos theory suggests this kind of non-liner structure that the course would develop this way.

The point with the past few class meetings has been to start applying these ideas to stories, to film, to structure. So we bounced Lorenz off of Bradbury and basic chaos ideas off of Run Lola Run. The point is to see these elements in these stories with the eventual leap to structure stories this way ourselves. I find that due to this structure that the course is more about narrative than I had intended. For that reason I feel like I need to make a change for the next in-class projects in which text and language are not part of them. But, there are a million different ways to tell a story – so – who knows.

Day Eight: Internal and external logic

I love the days after projects. Having that big open space that can be filled by anything. I know that it may sound odd, but until the projects are presented I generally have no idea what we will focus on for those open days. This allows me to shape the conversation around what emerged from the projects. Its not as if I have no idea why I asked the project question, but increasingly I am interested I where the questions will take us. Since for this class the subject is chaos theory I am content to sort of wander around in projects based on “systems,” “balance,” “space,” and a list of randomly generated items. So – I ask the questions for a reason, but leave them open enough so that my reason need not be the student’s reason for completing them. As I told the students today – how they answer each of the project prompts determines how the next set of questions will be framed.

I was struck by the fact that the first projects gave us a chance to talk about natural laws or rules – things like gravity and friction. The second projects were presented as interesting little logic problems. Weaving together the five disparate items the students had to wrestle with – at some point – how they all fit together. That each answer presented a dynamical system more driven by the whole rather than the individual parts was quite amazing. Each of the projects tried to forge a connection between all the items. In some cases this was an image, in others an action.

Since this emerged from the projects it was an opportunity to discuss the notion of internal and external logic (or structure). What I mean by that is there are certain structures visible on the outside of a system. The well-made play format, for example. The arc of exposition to climax to dénouement is graphable independent of the details of the individual story. Pieces that work this way have an external logic or an external structure that are independent of the pieces that comprise the whole. There was really only one of the projects that I felt had this kind of structure.

The rest were driven by an internal structure – one that was hard to see from the outside. What I mean by this is that each of the items was bound together by a logic specific to that student. They each had reactions to or ideas about all of the five pieces. In discussing the process some talked about what choices they made or how they conceived of the images as a whole. So – to them – the work had a kind of coherence a kind of logic. But it is a logic that we can only really see by exploring the interrelation of the parts adding up to the whole. With the external structure the parts add up to a whole, but a whole that is predetermined before the interaction of the parts. Internal logic works exactly the opposite.

So, in order to bring this idea to the surface for our conversation about the second projects I had the students do an exercise based on rules. Using the card game Mao (Eleusis) I had them develop one rule that was not too simple or too complex to direct an action. The rest of the class watched the group execute the action according to the rule and then figure out what the rule is. Like Mao it is built on inductive reasoning. Since we don’t know the rule at the outset we can only figure out what it is as the parts interact according to the rule. By watching the activity eventually, in most cases, we could figure out the rule. We then made the leap to the internal logic of the second projects.

I have mentioned that I am still trying to find a rhythm with this class and I think I finally figured out why. Although this course has the same framework as the other courses, the subject matter suggested a different pattern. For this class we seem to be moving from the abstract toward the specific, whereas in the other courses it was the other way around. Although we really haven’t gotten too deeply into the course material yet I feel that the students already have a good idea about a lot of the terms we will come to simply by executing the first tow abstract projects.

Day Seven: Somewhat ironically I find that I am in the same position as the students

I honestly don’t think I have found a rhythm with this class yet. I realize that some of the construction of course is designed to prevent a too regular rhythm from establishing – but I still feel like I am struggling to figure this particular class out. In the past when I taught Chaos it was fairly straight forward in that it was a one to one understanding – we read articles and talked about the ideas. Here with the projects taking the lead it is looking for chaotic ideas that have been established by the projects that are then woven back into the readings. I did feel that the first project offered quite a bit to discuss – but I only really saw this as we got deeper into the readings. My hope is that the same thing happens with the second projects.

In a way the structure of this piece reminds me of a project that we did in the Symbolist/Absurd class where we generated a list of “truths” and then had to fashion a culture out of them. It produced some interesting projects, but I wondered if there was a better way to frame the question. I am wrestling with that a bit on the second chaos projects. We generated a list of five terms or ideas to be used in creating a project that exists in “space.”  I resisted the urge to contain the project more specifically since in looking for a rhythm for the class I didn’t want to push it too far in one direction or another. I found the results to be along the same lines as the Symbol/Absurd project in that I wonder if there was a better way to frame the question.

Somewhat ironically I find that I am in the same position as the students were in answering this prompt – I have a bunch of disparate pieces I need to weave together into a whole. The part/whole dynamic has become much more of an issue that it was in other chaos classes. We saw it in the first project and certainly saw it again in the second project. It really was quite amazing how much variety there was in these presentations, and yet how bounded they were by the five items. One of the questions I want to explore is the similarities and differences in the approaches. To me, this is the key to these projects – 25 or so different combinations.

Two things that caught me off guard in the presentations were 1) how many of the solutions were performance based. I wonder if this was due to the list – had “tomato sauce” not come up would the solutions have taken a different approach. 2) the internal logic of the pieces. This is another question we need to return to and develop more fully. We will see this idea again and again in that chaotic systems often appear to have no logic from the outside, but underneath there is an internal logic driving the system. So – we will pick up on this next class and discuss how this logic was created. We may need to focus the warm up exercise on this idea.

I found it interesting that of all of the project very few had an external logic – what I mean by that is a logic we could predict or see in advance. The idea of knowing where something is headed or a predictable outcome. The one piece that was built this way had the quality of an acting exercise in which all of the pieces are synthesized into a logical whole. This may be another issue to address – logical wholes and seemingly illogical wholes. Reflecting on these projects I am finding that there are any number of ideas we can develop that will fit nicely into the chaos discussion. I need to remember that we are really just in the first part of the class and that unlike other project courses that a built to reach this kind of chaotic presentation by mid term or the end of the term this is where we are starting. Perhaps the trajectory should be from chaos to order rather than my more typical implosion metaphor where I tear the class apart three quarters of the way through. Hmmm. I never really saw that as the structure – but that seems to be what is emerging.

One of the things that I forget with these project driven courses is how much of the direction of the course relies on the work of the students. Even with two sections of the same class in the same term the outcomes could be widely different. The material covered is the same, but the pieces that are offered to discuss that material vary. I am interested to see where this class will take us. The end result doesn’t seem to be producing work, but analysis – using these pieces as a way of tearing apart other works and discussing structure that appears random or chaotic.