(please note, this text was modified and mangled from www.sandystone.com, old acltab sites and unkown sources that showed up late one night.)
ACTLab Courses-Postmodern Gothic
Summary:
Theory, technology, and art collide in this course's final presentations, held on or after the last day of class. We'll think of this as a more or less public event titled The Promises of Monsters. In order to do it, we'll need a working knowledge of monsters -- the place of the monstrous in history, how defining "monster" works to stabilize the definition of "human", how defining sexuality, gender, and ethnicity works in similar fashion; how monsters and machines are gendered; how the idea of the monstrous relates to rationality and delirium; how these themes are inflected to stabilize "normal" and "abnormal"; and in general the complex ways in which That Which is Different comes to be That Which is Evil (and sometimes Powerful, and sometimes Savior, and sometimes...?). Using film, video,sound, and other media, we will compare modern representations of the monstrous with a few of the postmodern, to gain an appreciation of how the idea of the monster has changed in that transition, and what the changes imply for our own ideas of bodies, subjectivity, and desire.
Class is in studio and discussion format. This means that your active participation is a requirement of the course. During the semester we expect you to contribute your own ideas and arguments to the discussions, and to be willing to take the responsibilities and risks such contributions imply.
There are no written exams. Instead you will use the theories and tools you acquire during the semester to make stuff about some aspect of postmodern gothic. What you make can be in any form: sound, installation, video, computer animation, collage, sculpture, assemblage, performance -- you name it. You will do this in stages, starting with simple projects and moving to more complex ones, using humor, irony, uncommon approaches, and bizarre techniques.
Here is a sample syllabus: Click Here
Here are some resource we use for the course:
PoMo
Postmodern images and a basic quote or two
Theses on the Situationists and their time
Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Chip Morningstar's "How to Deconstruct Almost Everything"
Goth
Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"
Poe's complete works
Note: Clicking on a title on the Poe main page doesn't open it
in your browser -- it downloads a text file to your hard drive.
Monsters in Literature and Film
PoMoGoth
onna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto"
Donna Haraway's "Promises of Monsters"
T.A.Z.
Read the online chapters until you've had enough.
Be sure to also read "Communications of the Association for Ontological Anarchy",
Communique #1, Part II: "Some Poetic-Terrorist Ideas Still Sadly Languishing
in the Realm of "Conceptual Art", on the main page (scroll down).