Art, Conflict and Technology

Catalog description

This course considers the period of violence in Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1998 known as The Troubles, and recent issues pertaining to sovereignty and borders caused by Brexit, Britain's proposed exit from the European Union, as a point of comparison between societies rife with strife, division and predilections to violence. We investigate the ways in which visual art to literature to theatrical performance explores and interrogates societal conflict and emergence from conflict, and how evolving technological systems influence political power dynamics and modes of artistic practice. We will use the legacy of societal conflict in Ireland and Northern Ireland to compare concepts and physical manifestations of borders, barriers and bridges in the region and in global contexts. We will examine fluctuating development of democratic processes in Ireland and Northern Ireland, individual and group public performance, and the influence of technologically crude and highly sophisticated tools on communities emerging from strife. We will use our analytical lens to focus on figurative and literal borders, barriers and bridges to explore work produced in Belfast, Derry and Dublin, alongside circumstances and artistic practice in present-day Pittsburgh, Cuidad Juarez, Jerusalem and Soweto. On a visit to Ireland and Northern Ireland over spring break, students will meet with artists, writers, legislators, community organizers, academics and ex-combatants, to learn about their past experience and current motivations. Students will analyze artistic practice, peacekeeping initiatives and performance of identity in relation to the historical framework from which it emerges in Ireland and Northern Ireland. We will use this foundation as a point of comparison to practices throughout the world. Students will process their experience and developing analytical skills by documenting their…