Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Instructor
Thu 5-8 p.m. in the ACTLab, CMB 4.110

Summary:
This is a course on naming - navigating the spaces between signifier and signified, object and subject, actor and actant, and about how we negotiate the process of attributing fixed identities to unstable concepts.

We'll do this by making - going hands-on with digital technology, audio, video, performance, graphic and plastic arts. We'll explore the enigma of predication, the mystery of how identity and difference arise. Hopefully we'll do this without resorting to the act of predication.

We're looking for M.A. or Ph.D. students who want to:
Develop extreme technical, conceptual, and theoretical abilities
Experiment with digital equipment, film, sound, light, video, performance, vr, all of the above
Discover new ways to combine technology, art, and theory
Work beyond conventional limits

Develop your skills using ACTLab principles of intensive discussion, conceptual freeplay, and intellectual daring. Working in the ACTLab's technology-rich environment, you will master cutting edge hardware and software with an eye toward new ways of representing your work. We encourage unconventional approaches, flexibility, and multidisciplinarity - not only for their intrinsic worth, but because multiple knowledge sets are what you need to thrive in an era of exponential change.

Discussion:
The vexing dialogues between signifier and signified are often mediated by human sociality, but humans are ornery critters and frequently break the frame of representation merely because they can. Street argot breaks away from conventionality only to be reappropriated by commerce and steered back to the mainstream. Friends invent private languages. Older cultures use proper names in a flexible way to signify life stages, and names change as individuals grow. In "Western" cultures names are more likely to be fixed, persistent identifiers whose purpose is as much about surveillance and control as about description.

In the act of languaging, the subject-object link creates tensions between logic and dream, order and chaos, linearity and simultaneity. Think of it as a wrestling match between Socrates (exemplar of logic) and Coyote (playful, dangerous trickster).

Texts we will use include excerpts from Foucault, Ronell, Barthes, Lacan, Adorno, Althusser, Baudrillard, Benjamin, and Derrida. Films, videos and soundscapes will be added over the semester. Things we will make include, well, anything we can imagine.