Art History and Actuality / Media (B2)

Teacher: Isabel Burr Raty

This course offers a journey into ancient and contemporary art practices that re-appropriate the notion of technology by creating their own technologies or technological approaches. Aiming at proposing less anthropocentric relations and affiliations with matter and the more than human and questioning the binaries object/subject, culture/nature, body/mind. On one hand the course visits examples of ceremonial technologies of indigenous cultures from Latin America and Polynesia, that have been adapted by minority groups that live in a state of resistance against the exploitation of the territories they inhabit. Such as the Rapa Nui community of Easter Island, the Mapuche people of Chile and the Zapatist community in Mexico, whose ritualistic habits become daily art practices that are exluded from the official art production.

On the other hand, we will visit the notion of resistance and de-colonization in the works of eco-feminists, eco-sex feminists, cyber-feminists, xeno-feminists artists that develop new media and post media art works. Works that include organic and inorganic materials and that are situated in the present climatic change, in the capitalocene, as well as the post-Anthropocene and the post natural. Furthermore, we will examine the contents of the course from post-human perspectives to get acquainted with multi-species agencies and aesthetics, matter and materials ontologies. By encountering selected concepts of authors like Karen Barad, Brian Masumi, Rosi Braidotti, amongst others.

Objectives

- Introduction to the history of new and post media art, with a focus on artistic practices that use or recreate technology in order to reclaim it.

- Open the imagination around the creative potentials of technology and expand the notions of artistic materials beyond the paradigms of classical interaction.

- Learn to reflect on the development of their own practices.

Evaluation modes and criteria

- Creative exam or written exam

Teaching method

- Audiovisual sharing of teaching materials

- Class Debate

- Individual research

- Group presentations and group readings dynamics

- Exhibition and performance visits

- Guests