Topics in Contemporary Arts Practice Research

3 units

When a place disappears—a building, a forest, a town, a river—where do its stories go? In this practice-based course, students will use technologies like augmented and virtual reality, ArcGIS mapping, and data analysis to resurrect a historical space and story pertinent to their own research interests. Importantly, technological skills are not required to take this studio course. Students from any discipline are invited to either prototype a final project or write a critically engaged description of such a prototype. Through readings on performance theory and collective memory as well as analysis of recent digital artworks like Mel Chin’s “Unmoored” (which submerged Times Square in life-sized holograms of rising seas), and “Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos,” (which uses geolocated mobile AR to map and visualize the thousands of migrant workers who have died along the US/Mexico border), this class will imagine the possibilities and pitfalls of using new technologies to envision the lost, the stolen, and the erased. No prerequisites are required for this course.