Dissonance Day Twelve: In which I am fascinated by the conversation generated by the students but feel compelled to drag it back toward my agenda and am thrilled at the ideas that the students develop:

Wow – what a great class! The conversation was fascinating. In looking over my notes I was concerned that we wouldn’t have nearly enough to fill the class period. Turns out we only covered about 1/3^rd of what I expected to cover. The dynamic of this class is very different then when I have taught it before. A good deal of that can be attributed to the make up of students in the class – what their interest level is, their willingness to participate in the conversation, personal interests and interactions. Honestly – in a class of 28 students typically only about 6 or so are openly engaged in the conversation. With this class it is routinely more like 15-16 students. I have no idea if the projects or the way the class is set up encourages this or not.

But I do wonder about the projects. On the one hand they exist as something external to comment on and respond to. Unlike a reading assignment, which may or may not be completed by the student, a student that brings a project to class has participated in the discussion. While it happens on a number of different levels, they have at least given thought to a particular subject – so far “time” and “juxtaposition.” Add to this the exercises at the beginning of class each day and they have participated in a collective experience. – which isn’t always the case when a student simply slumps into a seat and remains disengaged. The other element of the projects is that they become a pretext for the conversation. Since every student has contributed a project and explored everyone else’s project they are in a position to have an opinion and to make connections to other ideas.

In asking the students to discuss what techniques we have seen so far we generated this list – which has been augmented with additional ideas:

Suspend intellect (embrace nonsense and the "primitive")

Exploitation of form

Parasitic of history (Duchamp's urinal needs art and the museum)

Antagonistic

Iconoclastic

Collage (of images, text, ideas)

Chance (poem, image, sound)

Juxtaposition (the antithesis of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk)

Spontaneity

Automatic writing (reaching out toward unconscious)

Noise (embraced as aesthetic element, not interruption)

Negation of high art VS low art

Devaluation of skill, training, talent

Simultaneity (multiple meanings simultaneously)

Dynamism (goes with juxtaposition as combination of elements)

Philosophical or aesthetic concerns over commerce

Process over product

I then read Manovich’s idea from The Language of New Media about how all of these techniques have been embedded into the structure of contemporary computer software. So – while many of these ideas still remain challenging for traditional artistic disciplines, the students have largely grown up in an environment in which thinks like “cut and paste” and the juxtaposition of nonlinear online windows has been commonplace. This certainly raises the question that the Futurists raise in that if our world is fundamentally different through technology how do we reflect that in our art?

Unlike the day after the time projects that kind of felt like a gathering day this one seemed to push the conversation forward. I don’t recall getting this deep into questions of intent, process, product, and concept this early in the term. It is nice, but it also raises the question of whether we will exhaust these questions in the next few weeks. I don’t think so, but you never know. I think I will ask the students a few key questions just before spring break. A kind of midterm evaluation to see what is working for them and what could be tweaked to raise the level of interaction.