Critical History: Curating Images, Objects, Media

This class will take place in the Science Center room 469.Critical History is an experimental seminar dedicated to bridging the worlds of media and things, archival research and hands-on making, knowledge production and installation design, theory and practice. Its aim is to explore curation as a form of critical scholarly practice and the relationship between knowledge and the object world.The seminar\’s work will be built around the development and construction of four experimental installation modules that will be integrated into a larger exhibition entitled Making a World. The show will comprise a diversity of tangible things, natural and artificial, drawn from among the nearly fifty distinct methodical collections at Harvard and set out to exemplify the basic principles of the modern Western categorization of tangible things. Objects will be selected to demonstrate standard distinctions such as those between things in nature and the human made; animate and inanimate things within nature; artworks and other artifacts; specimens and things valued for their unique qualities.Faculty: Peter Galison, Jeffrey Schnapplimited to 12 studentsAlso offered as History of Science 290.