Final Projects:

The last time I taught this class I neglected to comment on the final projects – which I think is important as a way of reflecting back on the process of this type of class. Whenever I teach project-based work there always comes a point in the term where I begin to doubt the process. Is it going anywhere? Is this class really just about fucking around? Why aren’t more students diving into the projects to create unique and interesting work? I must admit that this term felt a bit more like a struggle than in the past. There are likely a number of factors involved that have very little to do with the class. The class is mainly targeted at second year students. Their entire college experience has been in covid times and ducking in and out of the classroom and onto zoom. This really does not help with the conversation portion of the class. Beyond that there seems to be a reticence to offer opinions – as if there is a hesitation to not be wrong or not offend or upset anyone. There were really only a handful of times where I felt we had a robust discussion about the material – ironically one highlights is when we had a discussion about why it is so hard to have a discussion. Aside from all that – I do think the process works. I am always nervous about projects days – will the projects be interesting, will we have enough to discuss, are the questions posed allowing the students space to explore the material as well as learn from it? As always, there are pieces to get excited about – and yes – by the end of the term many students are presenting just wonderful material. Thoughtful, thought provoking, deep beyond what the surface implies. Even though we ended up presenting final projects on Zoom – all of this was true of both sections. I don’t believe that a class structured this way will get every student to the same level of understanding about the material – but allows them to build on their own skills and understanding and interests. Some will always resist, some merely go through the motions, but then there are students who completely get the possibilities of working this way and how the results can often be surprising and enlightening. I have no idea when or if I will teach this class again. The updates and additions were useful in diversifying the material, but it is probably time to tear the whole thing apart and rebuild from the ground up.

Auto Destruct projects and a series of topics:

As often happens by this point in the term – students that have realized they can use the projects to challenge themselves do so, and students that realize I am not rejecting or dismissing any projects often don’t challenge themselves as much. One question that was posed is what would I accept or not accept as a project. I realized early on teaching this way that in order for students to be free to experiment and to “fail” that I had to remove judgement from the answers to the prompts. The example I often give is when Bob King and I were first teaching Generative Art and a student showed up with what looked like a box of junk. We couldn’t quite figure out how this was an answer to our question, but asking the student to discuss the process revealed a great deal. It was something he wrestled with and tinkered with until it sort of just fell apart. The box of junk was nowhere near as interesting as the story of the process. So, particularly with the destruction project I need students to describe process. Most of the answers were just wonderful – thoughtful, creative, clever. There does seem to be a good strong connection between what students learned from the project and how much they challenged themselves. It was nice to hear one of the students describe this class as the “fuck around and see what happens” class – ‘casue that is basically what it is. I did feel that, unlike the sound machine project, it was the second section that gelled on this one. Which is about as far as I could take them this term. Most of the major pieces are over, save one last project for the final, and we have established most of the main ideas – terms and techniques – for the course. The next few weeks just sort of add to this information. The rhythm shifts at this point to be more about information than projects. My hope is to offer a number of interesting avenues that can be explored in the final projects. Glitch, Afrofuturism, Performance Art, and Glitch Feminism – or how the digital environment can be fucked with. With each of these topics the main question is: how are they using what we have already discussed? And, do they offer anything new to the conversation. The last week of class is given over to spending time on the final projects.

Fluxus follow up and Sound Machine Projects:

Returning from break we spent some time reviewing the Fluxus projects with a focus on modernism and postmodernism. We explored Hassan’s list of terms and ideas associated with each era. In doing so I posed four questions: evaluate usefulness modernist ideas, critique postmodern ideas, critique modernist ideas, and evaluate usefulness of postmodern ideas. My hope with this is to make an end run around the question of why to study all this weird indeterminate stuff in the first place. This discussion gave way to the presentation of the sound machine or generative art project. Students are instructed to build a machine with a certain number of steps and a certain timeframe to create a “sound.” Once set in motion they are not to interfere with their machine, but many struggle with this. Generally about 50% of the machines don’t function as intended do to a variety of variables – but they still produce interesting results. In the first section they were playful and fun and often funny. The second section, although still creating some playful machines, didn’t quite synthesize the way the first section had. But, the work was generally good and interesting to watch. From there we segued into a deeper discussion of the projects and an introduction to generative art through Riley’s In C and Trisha Brown’s solo olos. This class was followed by a discussion of Steve Reich and Brian Eno discussing generative or process driven work. I do have the students listen to Reich’s “Come Out” all nearly 14 minutes of it – in order to hear it shift from one point to another. So, here we cycle back to discuss duration again. We also explored some of Eno’s work along with other artists. It feels like some of this material is starting to cohere for the students. New to the discussion this time is to lean into the modernist/postmodernist ideas a bit more and ask about employing indeterminacy – as Reich does with his tape loops – but then learning from that experience and weaving phasing back into a more traditional compositional approach. I feel this is a better representation of our world in which the two ideas co-exist. Next it’s on to the auto destruct project. Considerably mor complex than what we have seen so far, but based on the skills students have acquired so far in the term.

John Cage, La Monte Young, and Fluxus:

One of the things I have been struggling with teaching this course is engaging the students. Their work on the projects is wonderful, but once we turn our attention to discussion things seem to fall flat. So, in anticipation of the Fluxus project I opted to shift things a bit by going back to the physical warm-up that was developed for this class ages ago. I’ll admit I feel a little silly doing it, but I do think it helps transition us from where we are coming from to where we are headed. I’ve also tried to structure more performative exercises at the top of the class. I really do love the John Cage inspired indeterminate sound piece in which students are given a chart with blocks of time to fill with sound. It always produces some lively and creative results. Given the horrible HVAC sound that dominates the gym space we have taken to retreating to the stage area for discussion in a more conventional seminar set up. Not my favorite choice, but it does seem to generate better interaction. We discussed the Cage material complete with some examples of his work. I’m trying to get students to see the idea of indeterminacy not as a simple approach, but one that can be developed in a number of different ways. It does seem to be a hallmark of postmodernism. The next class was an introduction to La Monte Young’s work and Fluxus. Some of Young’s simple compositional devices (like a line on a piece of paper) do seem baffling, but allows for a conversation about what we expect from a composer or author. Here indeterminacy can be seen as a direction, but not necessarily as a final goal. All of this leads toward the Fluxus project and the best way I have found of approaching this is to share examples of this type of work before the assignment. The student generated Fluxus pieces were quite nice, but largely remained on the level of small, quiet, Zen-like work. Which is fine. I have seen this approach before – specifically in the postmodernism class. Its interesting to me that this project can generate smaller more intimate gestures, but also huge, sprawling, loud work too. It all really depends on the make-up of students in the class. This time around I do not have any Drama students enrolled – so I wonder if that has some impact. At the half-way point of the term we established a good list of terms and ideas, but. Do feel like I have been leading them toward these rather than them discovering them. I do need to explore patience more fulling in allowing students to figure this out on their own. This was made clear by the student responses to what is going well and what could be improved in the course. More open ended question, more patience, don’t lead or fish for ideas, allow them to develop organically. It has been some time since I taught one of these project-based courses and I need to remind myself that it takes a good 6-7-8 weeks for these ideas to begin to gel. The plan now is to review the material from the first half with a specific focus on the shift from modernism to postmodernism and connections to Self, Society, and Cosmos ideas. I’m toying with the idea of attacking Hassan’s modern/postmodern list and exploring the ideas from multiple sides – where is the value in these ideas? Where is there no value? And then it’s on to the generative art machine projects.

Surrealism, Artaud, and Baraka:

The juxtaposition or surrealistic object project is one of my favorites. A fairly simple process – combine things that don’t go together – but yields quite a bit to discuss. I think this project works best when it is the first one, but the way this course is set up it comes in second. Some really wonderful work – a lot of food related projects – which adds that interesting dimension of decay. Perhaps we will revisit this with the auto-destruct projects. Rather than send students around for Surrealistic museum I opted to move from project to project with the “what do you see” questions. This, of course, means we don’t get all the way through the projects in one day – but it’s worth spending the time on this early in the term. As always, we often see things in the projects that were either not intended or not on the radar of the maker. Particularly with juxtaposed pieces we could spin out endlessly. We paired the discussion with Breton’s Surrealistic Manifesto. We discussed how in creating short circuits to the brain we still struggle with “meaning.” That’s the fun part. But even with this discussion I feel like I am trying to pull observations out of them. Even simple questions like “what do you see in front of you” somehow baffle or cause students to lock up. On impulse I asked my first section – what do I need to change to lead a more vibrant discussion? Is it the questions, location, material – what? Ironically – we had a great discussion about discussion. Same in my second section. So, I’ll work on changing the dynamic. The follow up to this discussion was about Artaud and Baraka’s work. I returned to the roots of the class and started with a physical warm up. We then did an exercise with an audience inside and activity. I had indented to break them up into groups to do this, but felt we might not get too far into the process. So – we discussed what was on their minds, what is most pressing. No suppose that it is the workload of the school and the never ending treadmill – very similar reactions in both sections. So we created apiece with half the class on the outside and half inside a circle – with movement around the outside. Both section responded to movement that got faster and harder to execute until collapsing. We assessed the first round, made some adjustments, and then swapped inside for outside. Once we discussed this I felt it was a good example of some of Artaud’s ideas about the spectator in the center of the action. We discussed Artaud’s No More Masterpieces essay, his First manifesto, Baraka’s Revolutionary Theatre essay and Slave Ship play. The pieces fit nicely together. Part of what I want them to see is how connected these ideas are to what we have been discussing and also how they have been evolving. Went into the quieter and more intimate kitchen for the conversation – which felt a bit better – but I have yet to have a class where I feel like all cylinders are firing. On to Cage and Fluxus next.

Bakunin and Danto and Dada – oh my!:

So to prep the students for chatting about authority and power I changed the class dynamic by making them sit in assigned seats on a traditional classroom arrangement. Sometimes this backfires and there is a great sense of relief that they can just be told what to do. And, it does make me feel uncomfortable, which I guess is part of the point. Actually a bit more lively a conversation than we have previously had – may be due to the deafening heating/AC system being dampened by our distance – or a sense of familiarity at being in a “real” classroom.” In either case, I felt that we covered the material quite well and got to the major points of all the reading. I do like to raise questions about agency and how they can tell if someone is telling them something useful. The question of why they would trust me, or any of their instructors, always rankles a bit – as it should. The Bakunin and Danto conversation leads into discussing dada – through some of Ball and Tzara’s writings and Duchamp. We started creating simultaneous poems – three groups creating a minute of sound - which was fun and works as a good example of the dada stuff we will discuss. But, after the fun its back to struggling to get any response from the students about any of the questions. So, part of what I’m wondering about is not just engagement, but ideology. Are they disengaged because they don’t like the material , didn’t read it, don’t want to discuss it? I’m just finding it difficult to turn the corner on this class and have what I would consider a good conversation. Perhaps that will happen with the surrealist projects – or not.

Project 1 to Futurism to Dadaday:

So, having lost a day to the snow and ice we compressed the discussion of the projects into the material on Bergson and then into the Futurists. I don’t think we went as deeply into the projects as we have in past classes, but there were some good observations and connections. Some of this is about pulling ideas and techniques out of the projects – which we did, but I feel like I was perhaps offering the bulk of these ideas. This lead us into discussion Bergson’s notions of duration and simultaneity. I’ve also added palimpsest and defamiliarization as terms. This all led to discussing cause and effect and the relationship of the part to the whole. Not sure I have gotten to those things at this point in the term, but they are proving useful. The addition this time was Lorde’s essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” – which worked quite well. While I recognize that Lorde is discussing race and gender, I see her essay as universal (not to take away from its power) and the same observations can be applied to religion, law, education, aesthetics – any system of value. This offered a great way in to the Futurists. I do think that was the clearest I have ever discussed them. Finding new ways to articulate familiar things can open up a lot. This carried over into the next class when we discussed Russolo and sound. The main point here is that as a painter Russolo’s pallet was wide open – why then would it be closed to certain sounds in music? Not a huge revelation, but an opening up of the idea of what can and can’t be used artistically. We may or may not see this pushed on in the surrealistic projects. This gave way to a truncated Dadaday – with three activities – dada poem, exquisite corpse text, exquisite corpse image. Three groups rotating between the stations. Some fun appeared to be had and we posted results to discuss. This is where things are not quite gelling. I’m really struggling to get students engaged in the discussion part. Not sure why. It does feel like we have a long way to go to establish a working dynamic for this class. My hope is that as we move to the next project students will become more engaged and more vocal. Well – chatting about authority and Danto and dada tomorrow – so we shall see.