Curricula
(by scrapworm with guest lecture series including student presentations and visiting faculty)
Graduate school was largely a transformative expansion point for the development of my teaching motivations. The opportunity to enroll in the Mount Royal School of Art provided me a dynamic non-linear learning environment, the potential to study with accomplished intellectual professionals and fine artists, and the chance to find like-minded indivuals within the community of artists: learning and teaching. The experience has revealed an active model of evolution in the arts toward involved creation of culture via self-examining constructivist settings.
resume
Concurrent to my graduate work at MICA in Baltimore, I continued ongoing collaborative projects out of Brooklyn, NY, and realized that my work is but the energy of the context in which it is inspired. The syllabi below reflect this educational process as it has contributed my alt-art and artist-teacher studio/post-studio practice.
Courses are available for post-graduate exploration and independent study by arrangement with accrediting local New York City institutions.
Fall 2008
Arts as Non-Linear Ideas
Prof. Wrenn
URGENCY: Creative Artists' Responsibility for Possible Futures
Course Description: This course is a laboratory to ask oneself to pour all energies into creative inquiry. We will study historical and recent artists, teachers, and creative thinkers as examples that will challenge you to a questioning process. Our dialogues will guide group and individual experimentation with ideas.
- You will transform materials into associative forms to discuss implications of representations.
- We will consider the mirror of relationship on several levels to examine ways of engaging culture to look at itself (and tragic ironies in self-perpetuating constructions/absolutisms).
- There will be a 10-week group project based on the 10 themes of Unit 1. Each group will publicly present progress weekly.
- Individuals will keep personal investigative journals in both book/paper and blog/hyperlinked website forms.
- We will have weekly themes including morning screenings, mid-day group critiques of progress referring to assigned readings, and and afternoon wrap-up discussion.
- Most work will be done outside of class as integrated into a way of looking at daily life.
In the final third of the course (Unit 2), we will enter a deeper level of questioning with a shift in content to philosophy and the development of individual final projects with private consultations and in-class material and social experiments.
Goals:
- To challenge ourselves in discussions to break through to unexplainable creative leaps via active participation in group dialogue.
- Over the weeks of the course you will questioningly examine open inter-relationship associative patterns in your own way.
- You will work to bring others to such a questioning point for themselves by making trans-disciplinary fine art work.
- The group will be examining the motion of thought and the creative process via thought and the creative process (responding to content material).
- You will strive to make art that is activated by the viewer and introduces less-destructive, sustainable cultural possibilities.
- Think nonlinearly and discover how to consider the interest of the self and the group mind's enrichment at once (living system paradigm).
- Cause a multi-dimensional questioning of what one is really looking at by calling attention to various flaws in conditioned, constructed, acculturated assumptions.
Contemporary Themes of Truth and Tragedy Primary Text Books:
- Miller, Henry. The Air Conditioned Nightmare. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1945.
- Griffin, Susan. A Chorus of Stones. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.
- Rimbaud, Arthur. A Season in Hell and the Drunken Boat. New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1945.
- Bohm, David. On Creativity and Thought as a System. London: Routledge, 2005 & 1992.
- Trotsky, Leon. Art and revolution : writings on literature, politics, and culture. Edited by Paul N. Siegel, 2nd ed., 4th printing. New York : Pathfinder, 1992
"If you say it is not a matter of correctness, you are creating a problem for those who want to understand."
-Questioner to J. Krishnamurti
Course Syllabus:
Unit 1
Group Project
Each group will work with one or several interrelating Contemporary Themes of Truth and Tragedy. Each week's discussion will focus on one theme. Progression in time of theme discussion and projects will consider the parts in relation to the whole. Readings by each author are to be completed every two weeks. Full participation in process is considered: group dynamic, weekly presentations of investigations, individualized physical idea journals and online hyperlink associative records.
Schedule:
- Week 1: eye of the soul: technology and human ambition Film clips from "Until the End of the World," Wim Wenders, 1992; discussion of Henry Miller
- Week 2: faith, suffering, us/them, victimization, sympathetic horror, & standard concepts of god Film clips from "Cube Zero," Ernie Barbarash, 2004; discussion of Henry Miller
- Week 3: generational echoes: cyclical history & cultural memory Film Clips by Gerald Scarfe, "The Wall," Pink Floyd, 1982; Discussion of Susan Griffin
- Week 4: paradigm shift, sudden cataclysmic perspective change, survival instinct, & dangers of crisis isolationism Film clips from "28 Days Later," Danny Boyle, 2002; Discussion of Susan Griffin
- Week 5: hypocrisy and classism in dehumanizing war strategy Clips from "Inside Shock & Awe," National Geographic, Bijal Trivedi, 2005; Discussion of Rimbaud
- Week 6: I'm right, I'm right!, defining against the other, [art] dissolving inner/outer, engrained absolutisms & ideas on [evil] Clips from "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero," Frontline, PBS, Helen Whitney, 2002; Discussion of Rimbaud
- Week 7: radical freedom, action and the human witness, moving beyond despair, & militant/violent superstructures Film clips from "Waking Life," Richard Linklater, 2002; Discussion of Bohm
- Week 8: radical worldviews, neurochemistry, quantum mechanics & participatory (consciousness/ thought contributing) reality B side Interviews from "What the [bleep] do we (k)now!?," William Arntz and Betsy Chasse, 2004; Discussion of Bohm
- Week 9: art purpose, catastrophic aesthetics, & the fragility of record Film clips from "Decasia," Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison, 2002; Discussion of Trotsky
- Week 10: civilization and epic time, technology and acceleration Film clips from "Naquoyqatsi," Godfrey Reggio, 2002; Discussion of Trotsky
Unit 2:
What event, what law do they obey, these mutations that suddenly decide that things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way, and that there is no longer wealth, living beings, and discourse that are presented to knowledge in the interstices of words through their transparency, but beings radically different from them? For an archaeology of knowledge, this profound breach in the expanse of continuities, though it must be analysed, and minutely so, cannot be 'explained' or even summed up n a single word. It is a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of knowledge, and whose signs shocks and effects it is possible to follow step by step. Only thought re-apprehending itself at the root of its own history could provide a foundation, entirely free of doubt, for what the solitary truth of this event was in itself.
-Michel Foucault, "The Limits of Representation," The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
Final Individual Project:
Philosophic Inquiries on the 'Self' and Reality as Continuum of Conditioned and "Enframed" Constructs.
Secondary Text Books:
read and refer interchangeably throughout 5-week unit (weeks 11-15)
- Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. Translated and with an introduction by William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
- Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech. Translated by Joseph Pearson, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
- J. Krishnamurti.The Urgency of Change. New York: Harper and Row, 1970, and the Awakening of Intelligence, Brockwood Park, UK: Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, 1973.
- Talbot, Michael. Mysticism and the New Physics. Arkana: Penguin, 1993
Weekly clip screenings to prompt discussions:
- Clips from PBS Film on Magnetic Field Reversal
- Clips from Joseph Campbell: Sukhavati
- Clips from Prior to the I am- Chapter 7 "Truthiness"
- Clips from Nova: The Elegant Universe
WEEK 15
Final Critique of Projects and Self-Evaluative Discussion
Grading
Final grades are determined by (a) the student's demonstrated ambition to self-challenge and commitment to projects and the classroom community, and (b) creative quality of the work produced (i.e. effectiveness of solutions, visual impact on viewer, challenge to problematic/closed 'art' and cultural paradigms). Don't be late or skip class.
* the wiki opinion on noumenal as a word- The noumenon (plural: noumena) classically refers to an object of human inquiry, understanding or cognition. The term is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to, "phenomenon" (plural: phenomena), which refers to appearances, or objects of the senses. The philosopher Immanuel Kant used the term noumenon more-or-less synonymously with the phrase thing in itself (German: Ding an sich).[1]