Art, Design and the Public Domain Pre-Final Project Workshop

The seminar will serve as a space for artistic and design experimentation, and discussion intended to foreground students’ emergent interests, concepts, and methodologies toward their analytical, interventional, and transformative practice.

In this course the students will be developing and sharing their independent artistic work while exploring and discussing potential subjects for the final projects in the Art, Design and the Public Domain concentration.

Through presentations, readings, precedent studies and critique sessions—all student-led—the course will build towards a shared set of questions about the changing meaning of public realms—physical and/or virtual.

In the first half of the seminar, students will select and present relevant examples of theory and practice as a means of framing their own intellectual and artistic interests.

In the second half, students will focus primarily on the development of artistic and design experiments, with opportunities to test these projects with outside critics, practitioners and publics.

The structure of the seminar will be creatively interrupted by invited talks and workshops from internationally accomplished artists and designers whose work critically contributes to the discursive life and well-being of the public domain.

In order to encourage the broader GSD community to engage with the critical themes and questions of Art, Design and the Public Domain, some of the sessions with invited guests will be open to the entire school.

The seminar will also be occasionally diverted by field trips to the relevant public sites and events, meet important artist and designers, visit public art organizations and agencies as well as prominent working studios.

Evaluation will be based on seminar participation and presentations as well as the quality and ambition of art and design work.

This course is limited to and required for students in Art, Design and the Public Domain MDesS track.