How do ants or bees organize on a mass scale when their individual brains are incapable of understanding the bigger systems they’re creating together? How did a Twitch hive-mind of 1.2 million people beat Pokémon one collective move at a time? How do we make art that makes us and our audience feel more connected, more alive, more powerful? This hands-on project studio course is about making art where participants are the medium, and the masterpiece created exists inside and between them. Let’s explore community and its connection to transformational, radical joy — not complacent happiness, but a joy that is the feeling of power, agency, and capacity growing within us and within the people around us as we cooperate to overcome shared challenges. Which systems and forms of art, play, and expression foster that kind of joy? This course is heavy on imagination, vulnerability, reading, discussion, experimentation, playtesting, and interactive group activities. Each week explores the relationship of the individual to the group under various lenses and spheres of life (i.e. politics, religion, activism, evolutionary biology, sociology, pleasure, the universe, sports, games, childhood, etc.). Then together, we break down the relationships, dynamics, and effects those systems have, and create multi-media prototypes and performance experiments inspired by these themes and ideas. The early assignments are solo, and then almost all assignments are in groups. The core process of the class uses iterative game design as a structure for ideating, creating, playtesting, and refining, though students are welcome to work in any medium they choose, so long as the goal is to explore themes of collective joy.
Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Sections (Spring 2024)
OART-UT 18-000 (7263)01/22/2024 – 05/06/2024 Thu1:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Luhrs, August