Small Lights at the End of the World

Catalog description

In this course students will develop foundational skills of lighting design for live performance. In small teams, students will work both as lead artist for their own time based, live, human centered event, and as lighting designers for fellow classmates and collaborative projects. Small Lights at the End of the World will center on hands-on exercises, including programming of the ETC EOS family of lighting consoles in Collaborative Art's Studio G performance studio, presentation of visual research, electrical safety and basic wiring, best practices for technical documentation, safe hanging of lighting fixtures, and the visual standards of "professional" lighting design. We will also build DIY lighting objects that can be adapted to any scale of production opportunity, yet stored under the bed of your studio apartment. Because lighting is a rapidly evolving, ever changing field, students will develop the research skills to self-teach new techniques on a project by project basis. Collaborating in light requires comfort with conceptual abstraction. Short writing assignments and classroom discussions will help us form our own language for light as a m dium of perception. We will engage the ethical quandaries of working in hierarchical collaboration, and carbon intensive artistic practices in the age of human driven ecological collapse. Working together, we will push at the boundaries of form and perception, questioning deeply held assumptions, and moving toward radical integrations of light and performance.