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.
