I'm adjuncting again for the Art and Visual Technology department at George Mason University. Last Spring I taught Writing for Artists; this time around it's a graduate-level research methodologies course. Course description below the fold.
What is research? Conceived in narrow terms, it is secondary rather than primary, derivative and scholarly rather than original and creative, verbal rather than visual in its material outcomes. One of the goals of this course is to stand such conventional wisdom on its head. A more expansive definition of research collapses many of the traditionally held distinctions between scholarship and creativity. At its best, scholarship--like artistic creation--contributes new knowledge, truth, and even beauty (and is in this sense primary); while artistic creation--like scholarship--extends, revises, and reinterprets the cultural record (and is in this sense derivative, in the most positive sense of the word). The legal, cultural, and technological conditions that must prevail for this kind of artistic paradigm to thrive are--not coincidentally--broadly compatible with those that make art history possible: reproduction, preservation, and access—cornerstones of museum and library science—demand institutional structures that strike a balance between open source and closed source; between the rights of creators and the rights of users—themselves potential creators in a dynamic feedback loop. An important theme of the course will be intellectual property law and the ways in which it supports or obstructs these fundamental artistic and curatorial values. Other topics will include metadata, standards, and documentation; the creation of durable electronic art; the artist as preservationist; the use of visual evidence; the role of technology in transforming art history; image search and retrieval systems; and science and art research.
Throughout the semester, class readings and discussion will underscore a paradox of research in the visual arts: much of what we know about images has historically been channeled through words. Whether it is a picture that has descended to us in verse or a catalogue raisonne that describes the objects it inventories or a digital image retrieved through controlled vocabularies, the lesson of art history is that language plays a pivotal role in the transmission of pictorial information.
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Full syllabus available here. There's also a course blog--still an unstrung harp, but that will change soon.
Posted by karik at September 5, 2004 8:51 PM | TrackBackOh boy! You're back.
Background music out of Lessig: Over the Edge Radio did a five program examination of Free Culture, at least the audio version, over half the summer. You can find an archive of it here:
http://matrix.csustan.edu/Negativ/
Maybe useful ambient sound for your seminar.
You _always_ have great suggestions, Marty. BTW, do you know the Spider Robinson short story I link to on the syllabus ("Melancholy Elephants")? If not, read it--it's right up your alley. It's set in a future society with no public domain to speak of. Muscians, in particular, are hamstrung by the fact that most of the finite (very large, but still finite) number of possible melodic permutations are already spoken for. Computers are pressed into service to search for the few remaining non-proprietary configurations. It's a sobering premise, but one that beautifully conveys the dire consequences of a world with no creative commons. [update: I decided to promote this to a full entry]