Dissonance Day Nineteen: Scattered with too many things to share:

Its funny, whenever I go to talk about something in class that I love or have taught a class on ideas pile up and come out in a jumble. Today’s topic “generative art” comes pre-digested after more than a year’s worth of conversations with Bob, a ten-week class, and now research and thoughts leading toward an article on Cage, Reich, and Eno. Too many observations, too many examples, and not enough time to digest them. So – In class today: The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka – playing as the students came into the room, Reich’s “Come out,” Reich’s “Pendulum Music” – performed by one live mic, moiré patterns, Eno’s Trope for iPad, Thicket for iPad, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz for ipad, Conway’s Life, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, and Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. I also made reference to Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” – played in the first few minutes of class earlier in the term. The process of spending 13 minutes listening to “Come out” proved to be the most useful. Students had great comments about this piece in terms of what demands it does or doesn’t place on the listener and how one might listen to the piece. So this was another day where I struggle with either going back to my notes to hit on a few key points or letting the conversation develop any way it goes. I think part of why I keep coming back to this is that generally I don’t have such a large collection of students interested in talking about this stuff. So it’s a good dilemma to have.

I do want to come back to the process/product question as well as the notion of things developing over time. For me, the visibility of the process is such a contemporary, postmodern thing. That doesn’t mean that the process was invisible throughout the history of art, performance, theatre, etc, but that more and more the process has become a large part of the product to the point where they are indistinguishable. It seems to be the same tings as the whole life/art divide. 20^th century art really does work to collapse this – especially in the last 50 years or so.  That was really the point I wanted to make. But I do find it odd that quite often this term I have been frustrated by my need to sort of summarize everything after the fact. These “wrap up” days – while yielding some great conversations – are often not my most favorite classes in the sequence of project, discussion, analysis/history. Hmmm. I wonder if there is another way into this. Something to think about.  

Dissonance Days Sixteen, Seventeen, and Eighteen: Way too many days running together:

Way too many days running together. That’s what a spring break will do. And actually these three class days do blur together as basically transition days from one idea to the next. The projects have been mostly individual efforts (no one has asked to collaborate yet – so I figure I will wait it out until someone asks), so I figured we need to do more group work. We started day sixteen with an exercise cribbed from Brian Dennis’ lovely book called Projects in Sound. Ostensibly a book for elementary and middle school teachers to have their students explore sound. It has some fantastic pieces in it – some quite sophisticated in terms of the generative quality of sound. Perfect for what we were doing at this point in the term. So – after we warmed up I broke the class up into five groups and handed each group a “map” – well really one of those Situationist psychogeographical maps. Their task as a group was to treat this as a piece of music and perform the map in sound. Some wonderful results. Most groups compartmentalized with each person taking a specific sound that when blended together made a whole piece. Some went all at once, some were orchestrated to add or subtract sounds as the piece developed. Really quite lovely actually. We may do a similar exploration of space when we get to the Bauhaus.

 

After the exercise we spent some time discussing the Fluxus pieces. Some great observations on the nature of control and of letting things go to different interpretations. We also went back over some of the terms techniques that have been developing. I posted this list before but here is a more expanded version:

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

Indeterminacy

Open work – interpretation

Life into art/art into life

The next step was to begin to run these ideas through the S,S,&C material and the P2P website stuff. Starting with my favorite Greenberg quote on modernism (“The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”) The interesting ting is that most of the folks we have explored are working in-between disciplines. Adds a nice postmodern twist.  At the end of class I gave them their next assignment – the sound machine project assignment. I figured why not make it fun. The boxes each contained a crumpled up piece of paper with a description of a machine drawn from reading Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus.

Day Seventeen started with the warm up and then a sharing of the projects. Some students did some remarkable work – a few working clearly outside their comfort zone with a “machine.” Some appeared to give the project little effort. I debated whether to start back from spring break with a project or not, but I wanted to recapture the momentum we had going into the break. So, I figured this would be a step back, but one that could move us forward. The word “machine” was an interesting one. Most don’t tend to think of artistic expression this way, but some of the machines were beautiful in their movement and execution. I have videos of them and will post – eventually. Given how messy some of these were there was really no time for discussion after class. I can’t wait to see what happens with the destruction projects.

Day Eighteen. Back to word games. Pick out a word from the dictionary and give it the most interesting definition you can think of. Some were very playful. No one passed me the dictionary so I didn’t get to play. At this point we had a discussion about the sound machines. I am glad that I programmed these sort of open discussion days in the syllabus. This is where some of the most interesting work happens. I don’t think this kind of approach (project driven) really works without a follow up discussion. What I am always struck by is how interesting the process is on projects that may initially not seem that interesting. This is exactly what I am getting at in terms of postmodernism as opposed to modernism. One is focused on the process and the other the product. At a school that is almost completely product oriented this lead to an interesting discussion. Some great points about not being afraid to fail since the projects don’t have the same kind of expected outcome as more artistically inclined projects. I pontificate way too much – but the point I am, trying to make is that to sustain a career as an artist in any field means constantly exploring, pushing the boundaries, going out of your comfort zone, otherwise you end up repeating the same thing over and over again.

We largely abandoned my notes since I found the conversation that developed far more interesting. I did draw on two ideas though – Barney’s idea of hypertrophy and how this can be applied to art, education, muscle growth, whatever. We also dealt with the notion of problem solving. I really do believe that problem solving a huge part of being an artist in any field. Its making choices to develop a role, setting up a film shot, interpreting a choreographer’s moves, picking which variation on a guitar chord to use, what color, line, shape, texture to employ, etc, etc, etc. I do think that the idea of problem solving is the key to these project driven courses. That is how you gain an understanding of a subject – but doing it – getting your hands dirty, making mistakes, making changes, adapting, being in a dialogue with the work. Well – that – and then reflecting back on what you have done. Next up we get to explore some generative art – yea haw!

Dissonance Day Fifteen: I really have no idea what will happen next:

I get this weird, nagging feeling each day projects are due. I wonder about the outcome. I second-guess the assignment. I think about how the presentation of the projects might go awry. I’m nervous, mainly because once we start in on the projects I really have no idea what will happen next. If I had to predict that we would see the bear again, or that someone would be spit on or sat on, or that someone would cut their hair I would have found it impossible. As the “author,” or perhaps I should say “originator” of the Fluxus inspired pieces for today all of the students were in the same position that I was in. They did not know what would happen next either. If part of understanding how we got to where we are today in terms of aesthetics and the production of artworks is dealing with the notion of “postmodernism,” then I think we got a good look at it today.

Traditionally, or at least in a traditional sense, creating artworks has a certain amount of intention as part of the process. That typically goes hand in hand with controlling the elements involved – whatever they may be. This gives rise to the idea of training or skill or what have you. This gives rise to certain assumptions or “rules” of art. It also gives rise to the notion of “good” art and “bad” art depending on how these rules and the results are interpreted. The ideas developed by the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists works to crack this open – basically the list of techniques I included on day thirteen. After these folks, Cage is a turning point in that his development of indeterminacy helps fuel the succeeding generations. I loved the point that if all you have is a hammer you tend to treat everything like a nail. The techniques developed by these folks doesn't necessarily function like a hammer and therefore the product isn't necessarily a nail.

What I really loved about the Fluxus pieces is that they are suggestions for a direction. That is really about it. They provide a great deal of room for interpretive possibilities. As the students saw today, what someone else was able to make out of their pieces was not necessarily what they had imagined or intended in creating them. Aside from that, the class today was just fun. Noisy, loud, punctuated with laughter and movement – much more interesting than simply listening to me drone on and on about the Fluxus folks. I recall that the last time I did this exercise in class it was a much more somber affair, much less interaction between “performer” and “watcher.” In away the presentations today had the same quality that Bob and I saw with the first Virtual Worlds projects – the sort of barely structured chaos of the avatar presentations. And like those projects, I really didn’t know what to expect next.

Starting with the idea of students as creators, interpreters, and life-long learners we discussed the pieces with these questions:

In composing these pieces what did you aim for?

As the "author" what do you have control over?

Anyone surprised by the interpretation?

Who is the artist here?

What does indeterminacy allow for?

How do you watch the pieces you wrote?

How do you approach interpreting these pieces?

Did the musical, sculptural, and performative ideas have any bearing on interpretation?

Where is meaning located?

But in that moment when the pieces were performed we all watched, we all listened, none of us with any more knowledge of what to expect than another. The comment that “I didn’t realize that they were performing my piece until they read the card at the end” is a great jumping off point for a discussion of the “open work.” So – the plan for the next class is to weave all of these observations from the projects in the first half of the term into a conversation about modernism and postmodernism, open works and process. I am debating the parameters of the Gen Art project only because I really don’t want to back off of where we are at this point, but I do want to focus our attentions a bit more on the analytical aspects of the course. The Gen Art project is really a continuation of the Fluxus pieces in that it is designed to make the “creator” step back from the project and watch what happens. After that we begin to shape the ideas a bit more specifically engaging in a conversation about The Situationists, The Bauhaus, Auto-Destructive art and then post-digital. It is hard to believe that we are only half way through the term. The trick will be trying to sustain this level of energy until May.

Dissonance Day Fourteen: I’m starting to wonder if there is a pattern emerging here:

What a great conversation today! I was actually kind of surprised at the number of hands that went up when we started to talk about indeterminacy and Cage’s notion of non-intention (as it is framed by the Zen notion that there is not good or bad no ugly or beautiful but just is).  La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #9 (the infamous line across the page) generated some wonderful points about expectation and interpretation as well as the role of the artist. My hope is that we will be able to sustain this as we discuss the Fluxus pieces on Tuesday. So, following a day when I felt like I lectured far too much we have a day where I really don’t have to say much at all (but because I can’t seem to shut up about this stuff I do anyway). Interesting – I wonder if a pattern is emerging here. One of the issues I still need to deal with is staying on the path that was decided for the course and following a different path that emerges from the student projects and in-class conversation.

In a number of ways I feel like the Fluxus pieces are the last big push toward establishing the foundational elements of the course. Generating a handful of additional techniques that we can then bring into the remaining projects. Indeterminacy is certainly one of the main ideas, but also the notion of concept art. As we begin to discuss intention and interpretation. What our expectations are in what an artist “does” and how “art” is “produced.” The In Bflat website is a good example of this: http://inbflat.net/.  I am interested to see what will happen when we shuffle the Fluxus cards and students have to create an interpretation on the spot. This tends to reveal a wide range of interpretative possibilities. This is also why the cards should not be labeled “music,” “sculpture,” and “performance.” This is the last step before spring break. After that we immediately go into the generative art section where the students are forced to step away from the sound machine they have created and just watch and listen alongside of everyone else

Much like the Gen Art class this one feels like slowly chipping away at the resistance to be expressive in a specific moment. More students contribute to the conversation – although not all students – but this may be an unachievable goal. I went back and forth on the exercise to start the class with today, but in the end I was quite pleased with the results. I realized that I need to get them to start collaborating more and in smaller groups. So groups of three had 10 minutes to produce a “collage” (which could be defined as any mixture of sound, text, images, movement, etc) built out of what they group had on them or what they could find in the space. What I loved about this project is that I didn’t have to spend 10 minutes explaining it – the ground rules were set and then they went at it. This never would have happened 3 weeks ago. Also – the noise level and level of working exceeded the first half an hour of the DADADAY! stuff. So – it seems clear that something is changing in the class.

I did mention to the students that they should be noticing that the type of exercises and projects are changing and how this relates to the pervious work they have produced. So – unlike the sections when they were simply tossed into the projects today was about introducing Fluxus ideas and questions in the hope that they are more mindful in executing the Fluxus day assignment. The point is to begin to examine these ideas in a deeper and more thoughtful analytical way. As always, I am both nervous and expectant to see what they come up with.

Dissonance Day Thirteen: Hi, I’m a teacher, welcome to my lecture:

Ughh. I hate when I do that. Lecture. When I feel the need to explicate, to defend, to make certain that the message received is the one I am sending out. It’s a tedious way to investigate this material. Especially after starting each section with a project or in –class exercises. To resort to just telling the students things directly seems like a copout. But, rationally – isn’t that the job of a teacher, to explain things? Perhaps. But there is more to it than that. Getting a student to understand something on their own terms rather than mine is a much better solution. But then one must be willing to give up controlling that understanding. Rhizomatic education happens in multiple ways. I suspect when I go back over this blog I will see that each transition day – when we are ending one section and moving on to another – ends up feeling a bit like today. I know we had days like this with the Gen Art class and the Virtual Worlds class, so maybe that is just part of the dynamic of how this works. Or – maybe I just can’t help but to want to explain stuff.

I knew I wanted to discuss why the Surrealists developed the techniques that they did. I think it is important that we dissect these movements and ideas this way. Get to the philosophical ideas behind the surface chaos. To make the point that even though some of this work may seem purposeless, it is all done with purpose. My fear is if the students do not see this behind the chance and juxtapositions and such then it just seems like some pointless exercises. Even with the explication it may still seem that way.  My goal with days like this is to help them look beneath the surface of the techniques. To ask “for what purpose.”

So – from Surrealism to Cage to prepare for the Fluxus stuff for next class. I knew I wanted to get Breton’s points about the dullness of mind exposed to only rational things, to dream logic, to the notion of the marvelous built on new and surprising combinations. But the real subject of all of this emerged with Miles’ comment about how he has been exposed to this his whole life. People that grew up with the internet grew up excepting collage, expecting juxtapositions, expecting surrealist combinations as part of the normal world. That is what the technology was designed to do. There are connections here to Dada as well as things like youtubepoop that we need to explore in greater depth. In retrospect perhaps we should have followed this thought. But I also know that we have about half of the term left and if we follow this thought now I am not sure where it goes and how we develop from there. Odd that that would be the thinking in a class that deals with liberation, questioning rules and openness to the unknown. I never said there wouldn’t be any contradictions. But I do see the irony of this gesture. Play like I say to play not like I play. Again – welcome to my lecture.

Part of me wonders where this path would lead at this time in the term. But part of me also knows that we will have a much better vocabulary for that conversation when we reach the post stuff. It does dawn on me that while some of the students would be ready for this conversation at the point in the term – not all are yet. Chaos and order, chaos and order. I want to get out of the binary and then I fall right back into it. I suppose if I just lectured then I wouldn’t be concerned about such things, that I wouldn’t ask such questions. Perhaps I should dispense with notes, dispense with an agenda and just see what happens. Hmmmm.

So Cage is the connective tissue between the historical avant-garde and the more recent stuff. Why did I not have a section on him in the syllabus? I suppose I felt that we could use him to connect one piece with the next. My hope is the blathering I did at least established the ideas of chance as a discipline, indeterminacy, and pollyatentiveness. My hope is that we can go more into this with the Fluxus stuff. A change in rhythm with this section – readings first and then project. So we will see what comes of that. My goal at this point is to use that last class before spring break to ask all of the P2P questions about modernism and postmodernism before we head into the Situationists. I do need to work in more smaller group exercises at the beginning of the class. To try and find the balance where all groups gel instead of just some of them. This may not be possible, but it is worth a try.  

I left the class thinking about this:

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.

Dissonance Day Eleven: Surrealistic Museum Project:

I have been looking forward to this project since it was assigned last Thursday. But I woke up this morning with a bit of worry. What if the projects are not interesting? What if no one spends any time looking at them? What if the assignment is just a bust and we have nothing to talk about? In the past when I have given this assignment it has been at the end of a section on Surrealism, this time it is at the beginning. Will the students have any idea what I mean by juxtaposition or clash of elements? Will they all just look up Surreal images online and copy what is there? Many question and concerns. However, as has always happened in the past, I was delighted by the outcome. Given the chance to be creative or do unusual assignments the students here tend to rise to the occasion. So that it wasn’t just an exercise in wandering around I gave the students a few things to consider up front and about a half an hour to explore everyone else’s projects.

Do you have any questions for anyone?

What do you see in projects executed by others?

Any intended meanings?

Any unintended meanings?

Any of the projects funny?

Any of them disturbing?

All of the pieces reflected the nature of the question posed. It was interesting to see what the students noticed in the discussion. Some of the same themes came up again and again – a number of stuffed animals and references to genitalia – either explicit or implicit. It was interesting that given the same assignment some of the pieces were moving, some frightening, some just laugh out loud funny. The intent of the conversation was to begin to explore this type of activity as a technique – one that either is useful or not useful in a kind of “tool box” of artistic techniques. In the discussion we further explored the following questions:

How did executing this project compare to the time project?

Is it simple to put random things together?

What of the see what happens idea?

Is this a technique you work with all the time?

Does this technique have a use value?

Did you discover anything you were surprised by?

What I like about this project is that is it asking the students to do something that they are not necessarily asked to do in arts classes (Julian’s classes aside). The general intent of projects in arts classes is refinement. Zeroing in on meaning or intention and shaping the work to fit a certain goal or parameter. It was interesting to hear that some of the students struggled with this project in wanting to refine the work. Others had the opposite reaction, that this project was easier than the time project since it required them not to think about meaning or refinement.

This course is not designed as an art class, but hopes to use these projects as a way of exploring certain techniques and the philosophical ideas behind them. Techniques that rely on chance combinations can ultimately take us places that planning and logic cannot. I need to weave all of this together and draw back on the Dadaists and Futurists in the next class but also tie it to Surrealism. So we will be moving backwards into Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto from 1924. The goal is to create connections between the projects and Breton’s writing. This is where I felt some of the projects were quite strong – the ones that included the paragraph about the process. Why the object ended up looking the way it did is just as interesting as the object itself. I need to push more on this both connected to the projects and to the blogs.

We do have some more surrealistic thinking to do in the next class. In all likelihood I will start them with some automatic writing.