Interdisciplinary Future-Tense Liquidation I: Collaboration, Speculation, and Archaeologies of…

Catalog description

This course will be about extraterrestrial ambivalence, the tragedy of the cyber commons, haunted houses and dead malls, pissing in the data stream, putting sugar in the gas tank, and creepy crawling toward ambiguous utopias. Through shared readings, discussions, guest interventions, and lectures, students and residents of the Wartburg Senior Living Facility will collaboratively create a text for performance, treating the ensemble, the classroom, and the commune as imperfect, messy sites for speculating about the future. We will traverse the slow-motion disasters of capital and collapse, its false horizons and concealed architectures, anarchist thought, and ontological slippage. Taking an intergenerational and cross-disciplinary approach, we will assemble a fractured, provisional text. The resulting work will consider an imagined future imbued with the inherent instability of cooperation, language, and shared authorship. Students will engage in writing exercises in small groups and in collaboration with Wartburg residents to craft characters, fictional oral histories, and speculative futures that will serve as the foundation for a collectively written performance text. Our work will expand into a companion course in the spring, where students will collaboratively bring the written text to life through devised performance, puppets, objects, costumes, music, and sets, culminating in a public performance developed in ongoing dialogue with Wartburg residents. Senior Studio