H79.2746 Lecture 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Zurkow
This class uses animals, humans, and other creatures as a way to think about character representation. Claude Levi-Strauss’ observation that “Animals are Good to Think” is the starting point from which we make, discuss, and examine the ways in which art works imagine the interrelationships between the human, the animal, and our environment. If we can only perceive these things through mediation (media representations), then how we represent them is the fundamental question, reflecting our ideologies, prejudices, hopes, and fears. Do we speak for animals, and if so what are we saying for them? Are they friends, pets, environmental equals or beasts? How are hybrid monsters (chimera) created and what do they mean? How do we understand our places as subjects in a landscape or a datascape? How can anthropomorphic cuteness be subversive? This class focuses on questions of intention, relation, and subjectivity, through critical engagement with representations of people, animals, monsters, and mutants, in their respective environments. The class is further focused on the use of character in context, via toy design, robotics, animation, video, image generation or data visualization. There are introductory texts on character development, and generally an emphasis on literary, philosophical and natural history texts, including Jorge Luis Borges, John Berger, Giorgio Agamben, Donna Haraway, Rebecca Solnit, Steve Baker, Deleuze & Guattari. Assignments include studio work and readings. There is more emphasis on the development and analysis of ideas, and less emphasis on particular media or forms. Students make several short projects, backed up by readings and research into precedent art works. There is a final project. Class is a combination of studio critique, responses to art works, reading and discussion.
