Art, Design and the Public Domain

The first meeting of this course will take place on September 1st at 6 PM in room 510. Interested students should plan to attend. This is due to no classes being offered on Labor Day.

With fall semester of 2011 the GDS\’s program in Art Design and the Public Domain is entering its second year of existence, This seminar is intended to serve as an important research, discussion and presentation forum, information resource and a critical laboratory for further development of this new program. The course will focus on informed review and discussion in contemporary transformative, analytical, critical, and interventional art and design practice that engages public spaces and lives of people in the cities.Student interests and instructor suggestions will become a base for assigned readings, research, and presentation projects. Some seminar sessions will include appearances of invited artists, curators, and critics, as well as film screenings, and site visits. In the course of readings, discussions and presentations students will be exposed to issues and notions of Public Domain, Space, Place, Realm, and Sphere, Polis, Parrhesia, Public, Community and Interventionist Art, Spatial Practices, Agonistic Democracy, Memorial, Monument, Public Testimony, Public Speech-Act, Pro-test, Trauma Recovery, Collective Cultural Superego, Site, Audience, and Community Specific Art, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Epic Theater, Derive and Detournemant, Psychogeography, Performative, Interrogative, and Critical Design, the concepts of the Event, the Political, and the Public, Strategy and Tactics, Nomads War Machine, and State Apparatus, Transitional Object, Good Enough Mother, Relational Aesthetics, Art as Responsive and Interactive Environment, Cultural Prosthetics and other.