I am teaching two courses in the Critical Studies Department of the California College of the Arts over the 2024 Spring semester.
The “Emergent Becomings” seminar in Graduate Fine Arts addresses the following questions:
What are you? Who constitutes you? How do you define yourself? Are you a human, an individual, a multitude, a post-human, a multiplicity? A cyborg, a fancy animal, a queer creature? This course offers thoughtful questions and methodologies of becoming that can infuse your own art practice. We will closely examine and discuss emergent theoretical and artistic approaches to subjectivity/the self that are expansive and experimental. We will read texts and consider artworks on intersubjectivity, intra-action, desire, new materialism, the irreconcilable, and the synthetic, traversing new imaginings of how we can inhabit the self, the planet, and the world.
Through lectures and discussions, we will attend carefully and caringly to events – from psychoanalyst Pierre-Félix Guattari’s “Chaosmosis,” to the end of the intellectual love affair between Unangax̂ Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck and French theorist Gilles Deleuze, to the ferocity of trans-public intellectual Bayo Akomolafe’s fabulations giving manifold voices to the coronavirus pandemic. Assignments will include experimental writing, presentations, and artworks that center on other ways of being and doing in the only space between the no longer and the not yet: the wildly wondrous, diverse, and multipolar present.
“The Post-Real” undergraduate course addresses the following questions:
Do you know what is real or fake, factual or made up, truth or lies? Do you think we live with a shared reality, that reality is up to each individual, or that reality is an algorithm that has been hacked? Has what is real become wildly confusing as disinformation, alternative facts, or conspiracy theories increase? What does it mean to see deepfakes, chat bots, AI systems, virtual life forms, replicants, and counterfeits swarm across the digital and offline world?
In this course we examine how the technologies we make and use shape the real, who the players of the ‘reality business’ are, and how this matters in the choices we make in daily life. Over the semester, we will create artworks and short essays in response to texts, artistic works, films, animations, and performances by Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, Latinx, Asian and other global theorists and artists. This course provides foundational skills in critical analysis through hands-on assignments that improve how one communicates concepts and ideas.
The “Emergent Becomings” seminar in Graduate Studies addresses the following questions:
What are you? Who constitutes you? How do you define yourself? Are you a human, an individual, a multitude, a post-human, a multiplicity? A cyborg, a fancy animal, a queer creature? This course offers thoughtful questions and methodologies of becoming that can infuse your own art practice. We will closely examine and discuss emergent theoretical and artistic approaches to subjectivity/the self that are expansive and experimental. We will read texts and consider artworks on intersubjectivity, intra-action, desire, new materialism, the irreconcilable, and the synthetic, traversing new imaginings of how we can inhabit the self, the planet, and the world.
Through lectures and discussions, we will attend carefully and caringly to events – from psychoanalyst Pierre-Félix Guattari’s “Chaosmosis,” to the end of the intellectual love affair between Unangax̂ Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck and French theorist Gilles Deleuze, to the ferocity of trans-public intellectual Bayo Akomolafe’s fabulations giving manifold voices to the coronavirus pandemic. Assignments will include experimental writing, presentations, and artworks that center on other ways of being and doing in the only space between the no longer and the not yet: the wildly wondrous, diverse, and multipolar present. History and Theory courses are designed to hone students' critical skills through intensive reading and writing assignments. Recent course topics have included gender, ethics, disease, aesthetics, and discourse on global art movements of the past 50 years.