Dissonance Day Twenty-three – Auto-Destruction Projects:

This was the project I was looking forward to all term – mainly because I know it was a complicated one, but also built on the other projects. Bob and I gave the Gen Art class a similar project in that the students had to create a system of motion that could sustain itself for at least an hour – that was the assignment that infamously used the “bags of meat.”  The Dissonance project had a minimum of a half an hour with no maximum. What I like about this assignment is that it is designed to work in opposition to traditional aesthetic training. At this point I can only speak for my own background, but my training as a performer and designer rested on building toward a specific goal. While there may be some simplification or stripping away in the process, the end result is something that has been “created” rather than pulled apart. I do think the rhetoric of “creation” and “destruction” is often far too exclusionary. One does not necessarily exclude the other. An act of destruction can be an act of creation and vise versa. Of course what I love about this kind of thinking is that it allows me to discuss deconstruction.

I have been thinking about where to pull this in for a while. We need to loop back to the Situationists – who also moved between creation and destruction – to deal more specifically with the fall out from May of 1968. Having happened largely in the universities of France it had a huge impact on the thinking of the next generation – which included Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard. An embracing of both/and as opposed to either/or is certainly the legacy that these students have grown up with. The fact that so many of them have explored juxtapositions suggests that it is ingrained in their thinking. I may need to devise a deconstructivist exercise for us to do in the first ten minutes of class.

So – the projects. I must admit that some just knocked me out. Very clever solutions to the problem. The most successful were the ones that included the thought process – the writing about why the piece ended up the way it did. In the next incarnation of the class I need to make this more a part of the assignments. My hope was that by leaving it flexible that students would express these ideas in the blogs – that has not happened with most of the class. Since some had lost of cleanup to do we didn’t really get too far into the discussion. I am interested in how they approached it, what questions arose, what ideas did they discard, were any risks taken, what did they think of the other solutions? I really do feel like I am done at this point – not the class or the students – but my contribution. We basically have three days left – one on the auto-destruction projects, one on Metzger, and one on post-punk and glitch – which is really more of a listening party. The final week is turned over to the students to see what they can come up with on their own.