Courses

A-F

A Composer’s History of the World

Taking Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States as point of departure, in this class each person chose a past event (be it a social action or an artistic trace) and focused on how it “retarded decay” (a composer’s focus). Questions we asked ourselves: Did the people who made the event, bring about something which without them and that event, would not have happened? Did the event, and the “composers” of it, contribute to the existent store of meaning? Did society’s response — its language — attempt to pre-empt the intentions and thought of the event — to co-opt it? How can we ‘be-friend’ this past event, considering it a living partner to our present-day attempts to make art/events of contemporary significance?

Architecture of Participation

This course is an exploration into the social effects of spatial designs. Particularly the question of what kinds of designs might increase people’s participation in the decisions that affect them, in their social environment, in their lives–this is the focus for speculation, investigation and experimentation. This could include room arrangements, playgrounds, housing, pubic squares, community gardens, transportation, and imaginary hybrids of these.

Designing Disagreements

Cristina Fenotti (Milano) & Ya’aqov Ziso (Urbana)
A series of visits into observing and trying out dynamics of differences of opinions, conflicts, and contradictions as we piece together our daily life encounters and conversations inspiring us to stick together.

Design Groups

  1. Make a list of statements about which you would say that they are currently false and you wish they would be true. Take care that the statements are, to the best of your knowledge, false. (Avoid beginning a statement with such phrases as “I wish that…”, which would be taken as a true statement.) At this stage in the assignment, the falseness of the statements is to be emphasized.
  2. Order the statements in such a way that statements earlier in the list, if they were to become true, might imply that statements later in the list would, as a consequence, also have become true.
  3. Form groups: “design groups”. The design groups are to:
  • Read members’ statements: examine the formulation of the statements;
  • Compile a single list of false statements that all members of your group would like to become true;
  • Speculate on actions, practices, strategies, structures that might create a context in which the false statements would become true;
  • Assign each other reading, writing, drawing, composition, and research that might follow up on the speculations;
  • Host a long term project that could be a container for the traces of your group’s designs (and the work of other groups), for example:
    • a book
    • an installation
    • a video
    • a circus
    • a teach-in

Ecological Design: Permaculture

Permaculture is the design and maintenance of resource-producing ecosystems that have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. Permaculture is an integration of landscape and people that produces food, energy, shelter, and other material necessities. Permaculture design criteria are applicable worldwide. This course will introduce the fundamentals of Permaculture design, and stimulate projects to be initiated within the timeframe of the course. Presentations will focus on Permaculture sites, plants and other living resources, water catchment design, fermentation and human nutrition, functional integration of animals, soil management, and green architecture.

Fundamentals

Course proposal by Herbert Brün, in response to the question “What do you consider fundamental to designing a society?” The fundamentals course offers deliberately stipulated premises in nine areas, including: freedom – the number of alternatives for choice; criteria; the establishment of connections; temporary truth; ethics. The fundamentals were formulated to enable people to speak language, rather than be spoken by language, when working together to design a society.

H-N

Health Care Delivery Systems Design: “Inside My Heart But Outside the Box: Thinking, to Change the Health Care Box”

This class is an advanced design group, focusing on analyzing the current system of health care delivery, on designing systemic alternatives to it, and on formulating implementation ideas for our designs. Readings and research play a large role, enabling us to examine the history of language and desires in the area of health care delivery. Participants will read texts by Eric Cassell, Arthur Kleinman, William Osler, Nel Noddings, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, Martin Buber, and Francis Peabody.

House Theaters

Together with citizens of the hosting town, the touring group prepares a weekend of House Theater: performances designed to take place in–and use the idiosyncrasies of–a house turned into a cabaret. You are invited. You walk up the stairs of an unfamiliar home. A child with a top hat greets you: “Welcome to House Theater!” You see amidst the knicks and knacks of the home, a small stage. Some 40 chairs are arranged around small tables lit with candles. You take a set. You face neighbors and colleagues. From the staircase, someone seems to be arguing with someone upstairs. At first confused, you realize the performance has begun. . . In house theaters, the audience is treated to an intentional mixture of new music, political theater, and the paraphernalia of a household environment, before being asked to make connections between the pieces in a discussion with the performers.

Introduction to Cybernetics

Cybernetics has been called “the art and science of organization”, and “the science of control and communication in people and machines”, and “the study of observed systems and observing systems”. Cybernetics offers a toolbox for talking about systems and change. This introductory course will focus on some basic vocabulary for talking about systems: structure, organization, regulation, feedback, inputs/output, recursion, equilibrium, disorder, decay, emergent property, communication, observer, language. Cybernetic theory is language in action: here, if nowhere else, the language is at the service of desirability. Projects in recent years have included: the treatment of legitimate questions, conversation theory, and acting so that there be a system.

Living Labs

A Living Lab at the School for Designing a Society is time of several days duration late in the session when the students are invited to design an intensive series of activities. The idea is to spend a set duration of time in each others’ presence, to experiment with modes of interaction, presentation, and creation, to model ideas that design groups have formulated as components of a desired society.

Movement Theatre with an Utopian Twist

In this series of workshops participants study the structure of live observable human behavior (movement, gesture, speech, interaction of all sorts) in an experimental studio setting, in order to invent techniques for performance of behavior organized in new ways, new form. The purpose is to serve the author-composer of theatre in turning the daily life material of human action into behavior not observable in daily life, yet possible to perform. Patterns of such invented behavior can be used in compositions, motivated and informed by the ethics of the author-composer.

The work will be of several types. First, basic skills for movement and acting will be learned through physical and conceptual exercises. Second, an interconnected set of concepts and techniques that already have a history of use in theatre pieces will be explained, discussed, demonstrated and tried. People will work in groups of 3 or 4, taking time to develop responses to specific experimental set-ups and perform for the others in the class. Third, groups will extend known techniques, invent new techniques, make notations and scores for experimental works, and make and perform original compositions.

Some names of concepts used in the workshops are: contradiction in gesture, paradox in behavior, manifesting absence, the movement repertory of reverse action, two-second plays, movement as time-objects, off-stage space on stage, anomalies of simultaneous actions and sequential actions, composed coincidence, pivoting between frames of time and place, putting the frame into the picture, the framing of gestures – the gesture of framing, the gesture of the frame, composition through theatre-montage, composed non-sequitur, pivot-patterns using the technique of pivoting, solo and ensemble pivot patterns, simultaneous non-intersecting events, counter-intuitive behavior, speech and gesture disengaged and realigned, counter-intuitive distribution of speech and gesture, orchestration of behavior, 3-D time and 1-D space, inventing notations, making scores for otherwise impossible events. A large space, mobile flats, books, articles and discussion are all part of the work.

No-Risk Art Lube

As a warm-up to designing, take 20 minutes to give a composition assignment that can be explained, responded to, and presented within the 20 minutes. “Go to someplace in the room and touch an object; write a commemorative plaque for that object.” “Compose a dance for one hand in versions: a 5-second version and a 2-second version.” “On a piece of paper, write instructions for a silly walk and a serious walk. Swap papers and practice the two walks.” The quirkiness and brevity of the assignments plus the low expectations implicit in the quick turnaround — AND the reliably surprising depth, humor, and variety of the results — make a useful exercise for overcoming blocks, stage fright, and low self-confidence in creative action.

P-Z

Performance as Social Design: Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

A performance lab, where the “theater exercises” rehearsed are our actions in everyday life. An extension of Performers’ Workshops. This lab starts with the premise that our actions in everyday life can be viewed as performances, and are thus changeable, in that, as with theater/music performances, our behaviors exhibit intention, choice, and have consequences. A survey of the components of presentation of self are examined: dress; gesture; words; inflection patterns; emphasis; movements; intensity; sequence; timing. We’ll read excerpts from the works of Erving Goffman and Eugenio Barba. Participants will be asked to bring “material” to class: behaviors/habits they wish to change, amplify, or have alternatives to. No “stage” performance or theater experience required.

Performers’ Workshops

Students (musicians, actors, poets, speakers) are invited to prepare a performance on which they would like comments. An audience is invited to witness and make comments on these performances. Performers are asked to orient the audience by stating the experiment of their performance. The audience is asked to address their comments to the performance they witnessed—not to their thoughts on performance in general, not to the handed-down homilies telling how such music, that author, or this piece ought to be interpreted. Rather, the audience is invited to address their comments to the performance they witnessed, by making an instruction which can be tried out by the performers there and then. The patience and committed enthusiasm with which the performers try out suggestions (made by “mere” listeners), and the skill with which audiences make them, grow with the realization that a seemingly irrelevant instruction can, against all expectations, generate the desired performance.

Playing Attention to Language: Introductory Course

Language has a reputation in our society of “mere-ness”, of being a mere “carrier” of thought and meaning. In the architectonic hierarchy of importances, thought and meaning are high up as the significant parts of a message, with language underneath, a relatively insignificant, mechanistic, pierceable surface. This class focuses on another reputation: that language is a major dynamic in social affairs, not only carrying thoughts, but shaping them. Students analyze texts in that light, examining use of adjectives, but/and, the figment “It is” as sentence subject, report/argument, dependent and independent clauses. Exercises, games, and discussions molded by outlandish constraints, are to be played.

Playing Attention to Language: II

As a prelude to composing texts, conceptual topics are addressed: “I” in the third person, metaphor, framing, linguistic take-overs, the power of the respondent, dismissals, the construction of emphasis, etc. Distinctions between scientific language, academic language, and creative language are examined. Passive voice, too. We read texts by Thomas Kuhn, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Herbert Brün, Gertrude Stein. Participants are asked to compose texts that belong to a society they prefer and imagine, and whose language shapes that which they desire and long for. In anticipation of writing current events, students are asked to describe a discouraging ‘fact’ in an encouraging way.

Portable and Site Specific

Taking inspiration from the sociological, philosophical, political visual art of Hans Haacke, Krzystoph Wodicko, and others, this course offers the seemingly contradictory socio-compositional challenge to students to create a piece that could function as site-specific commentary on the location of its installation, and yet be functional in a desired way when set up in other locations.

(S)elf-Defense for Women, Men, and Trees: How to Read, Write, Speak, Learn English in a Time of Disinformation, Misinformation, Slander, Spin, Propaganda

(Pre-requisite: Playing Attention to Language I and II) Less a class, more an activist strategy/awareness-raising, this project is a collaboration of people working together to influence the learning of English in current times. We will create a hand-book that could be used in any high school or college English class, from composition to ESL, and would offer a “self-defense” against the accelerated propaganda mechanisms that purposely debase language and thought. Part of the collaboration would be to form relationships with English and ESL teachers in the area, eliciting their ideas and suggestions as to the content, format, and function of this booklet. The challenge for us as writers would be to write in a way that is non-bi-partisan, informative without being academic, acute without seeming on-the-edge-of-conspiracy-theory, and fun to read; the challenge for us as activists would be to follow-up the writing with ideas and methods for disseminating the booklet into friendly hands.

Seminar in Experimental Composition

The emphasis will be on your articulation and creation of projects of contemporary relevance, in particular, seeding reference, and other projects as might protect your creativity against commercial enterprise (how to be successful without succeeding in being silly). The seminar involves listening to music as a group, composition projects, performers’ workshops, and conversation. Materials are to be drawn from art, science, the society we live in, and the society we wish to live in. When composing a piece of music, a formulation of thought, or a living arrangement, the composer chooses among alternatives, and generates new alternatives, such that witnesses can observe the consequences of the composer’s choosing. Thus, composition may be an input to any discipline concerned with problem solving.

Teaching Teaching

To teach teachers teaching. Pre-requisite: participants want to, and intend to, teach. Students (teachers) are asked to make position statements regarding: teaching vs. learning; authority vs. authoritarian; instruction vs. orientation; what to avoid; how to educate wanting as well as knowing; retardation of decay, and how that influences learning; communication and “anticommunication”, and how that influences teaching. Students (teachers) are asked, “If you don’t agree that teaching is when someone does what you want, then, when is teaching?” As a response to that question, teachers (students) each give a presentation, something they “teach”. The student is then responded to by the class of teachers.

The City You Live In

The city you live in invites participants to reflect on various physical, social, organizational and even whimsical features that make the difference between a desirable and a miserable city. Research into encouraging city-scale experiments that have been enacted elsewhere, as well as ideas that have been or could be tried in our own neighborhood are compiled into a booklet and shared with policy makers at various levels.

The Gaze

How have ‘otherization’ frameworks based on power been constructed through performance and “the gaze” in the United States? This course considers racialized, gendered, and sexualized performances in such historical and contemporary sites that contribute to the objectification and commodification of people and culture. We will pay particular attention to how subjects deconstruct dominant ideologies of racial, cultural, gender, and sexual difference
and engage in forms of social and political mobilization.
Key questions include:
• How are vision and visual representation implicated in the
objectification of some human beings and the empowerment of others?
• How are deviant identities controlled through visibility and invisibility?
• How do images mediate our ability to relate to the suffering of others?
• How do technologies affect who can speak with authority about the state and condition of the body?

Tree of Knowledge

Over 10 weeks, we will read the 10 chapters of Tree of Knowledge by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, one chapter per week. The subject of the book is the biology of cognition. Discussions will focus on understanding the chapters, and understanding understanding. Maturana is not concerned with “things” and “facts” of an independent reality, but rather how the structure of the human organism validates “things” and “facts” in such a way that it becomes possible to make descriptions of “things” and “facts”. Maturana’s sentences are formulated to do what they say. In our conversation we will be interested in what we say, and what our sayings do.