Art-Theory: Method and Play

Catalog description

Articulation theory explores how complex concepts are expressed through creative practice. In this class, we will discover how ART encodes ways of interpreting our environment. Throughout the course, students are encouraged to pull from their own art-making practice to create activities—such as call and response exercises, ring shouts, drawing to narrate a concept, etc.—to explore representation, mimesis, formalism, and abstraction in addition to the socio-cultural theory of articulation. Play and experimentation resemble creative research practice. Creative writing, visual and aural practices, as well as acting are integral to the structure of this course. Students will utilize techniques from the development of role-playing and collaborative exercises, improvisational theater, and interactive-dynamic texts to facilitate activities to explore how we frame interpretations of the world and explore complex issues. By actively creating conditions and circumstances in which others collaborate on solving problems or navigating concepts, students will discover the implications of sharing a worldview. Every week, students will “play” in the worlds others have built using these platforms in order to test the extent to which the concepts framed therein can be shared. We will spend time cultivating a method of critique that can be used to explain how and why certain concepts were not communicated in the way intended by our peers. The relationships between the actors in these worlds allow us to model and analyze how concepts like race, class, and gender enter our reality by virtue of this collaborative process.