Project 1: The Everyday [conceived by Sarah Kanouse]

In 1952, French Sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe published this map reflecting the movements of a Parisian student over the course of one year. The triangular shape, representing the bulk of her travel, shows her movements between home, university, and piano lessons. Situationist Guy Debord commented that the map should provoke “outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited,” and it influenced him in devising the dérive as an antidote to routinized ways of occupying urban space.

Despite Debord’s intervention, the majority of our lives are still spent in relatively circumscribed pursuits framed by a few key spaces. For those of us involved in the study of art at the university, our movements may be defined largely by the triangle formed between home, downtown/campus, and the Studio Arts building. Rather than rejecting these limitations, what creative potential might they contain? 

For “The Everyday,” you will create a project inspired by your movements between home, main campus/downtown, and Studio Arts. The medium is completely open, but you must base your work in one of the strategies discussed in the initial slide presentation: Ordinary Materials, Daily Routines, Invisible Acts, Re-Presenting the Everyday, or Designs for Everyday Life. How might the readings prompt you to think differently about your daily routine? How can you find delight, beauty, or insight in it? What is the best way to present this to an audience?

The medium is completely open, but you must bring your work to a professional level of finish and install it in the critique space or classroom before your critique day. 


Project 2: Mediated Reality [created by Mark NeuCollins]

"A basic tenet of postmodernism is that our understanding of the world is based first and foremost on mediated images." - Eleanor Heartney in Postmodernism

For this project, create an artwork that exposes either a particular or a general class of media manipulation in our culture. Your artwork should somehow demonstrate the fallacy of an idea that is being fed to us. Your definition of media and media manipulation can be broadly defined. The manipulation may be subtle, and in fact exposing subtle yet insidious manipulations are probably the strongest subject for this project. Bring to light something that we take for granted, something that has become second nature to us. These can be cultural norms, conventions of our time, generational differences, etc.

Ideas that come to mind are: notions of family, becoming an adult, material wealth, etc.

For this project, try to stay away from the obvious areas of advertising and political spin – the intrinsic reality-bending of these two areas has already been worked over pretty well, hence it is extremely easy to fall into tired and cliched treatments. However, I am not going so far as to say that these areas are off-limits, just be careful to take a unique approach. As an alternative, you may want to search for some not-so-obvious manipulation to bring to light. You may find it more personally relevant to look at areas where you have been the target of some sort of manipulation. Particularly pay attention to implied cultural assumptions.

In your exposure of the manipulation, a deeper and longer lasting meaning for the viewer is usually created if you allow the viewer to come up with the "proper" interpretation rather than to hit them over the head with a message.Your artwork .

As usual, the project may be executed in any medium and may be object-oriented or otherwise, but you must bring your work to a professional level of finish and install it in the gallery space during the allotted time. 

Project 3: The Archive
(while research in Archival materials will be required, this project is extremely open-ended)

     Archive, from the Greek, etymologically refers to “a public building,” “a place where records are kept.” From arkhe, it also means a beginning, the first place, the government. By shifting the dictionary entries into a syntactical arrangement, we might conclude that the archival, from the beginning, sustains power. Archival memory works across distance, over time and space; investigators can go back to reexamine an ancient manuscript, letter finds their addresses through time and place, and computer discs at times cough up lost files with the right software….What changes over time is the value, relevance, or meaning of the archive, how the items it contains get interpreted, even embodied.”

--Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire

For “The Archive,” you will create a project based on research at Special Collections. There are at least three possible approaches: working with a special archival collection; working with the architectural environment of the archive; or working with systems of cataloging and preservation. Regardless of the way you approach the project, you should plan to spend time in Special Collections doing research: looking at archival materials, observing the space and working environment, or talking to staff about how they do their job. Since this is the final project of the semester, you will have only one chance to get it right.