TUMBLR

A SCRAPBOOK OF STUFF I'M READING / LISTENING TO / LOOKING AT.

Oct 31, 2011

Course: Art/English/Theatre & Drama 469 Interdisciplinary Studies in the Arts
Topic Title: “What It Is: Manually Shifting the Image”
Instructors: Lynda Barry

Course description:

There is something common to everything we call the arts. What is it?
It’s not aesthetics. I’ve seen a squatting guy at a Minnesota ‘Renaissance Faire’ perform Romeo and Juliet using just a cigarette butt and a bottle cap for the actors, and I’ve seen Romeo and Juliet performed by Shakespearean actors in full period costume, and both times this ‘it’ I’m talking about was there.
This ancient ‘it’ has been around at least as long as we have had hands. It’s something I call ‘an image’ and this class is about using our hands — the original digital devices —- to understand the location, function, creation and use of images.
…
When we are kids we might call this interaction with an image ‘playing’ and when we are adults we might call it ‘creative concentration’ but it seems that there are similarities in the state of mind that comes about during the creation of and interaction with an image.

This state of mind is not plain old thinking. Its existence is tied to manipulating something in the external world, usually with our bodies, our hands or voices – a piece of cloth, a series of musical notes, a drawing, a written piece of dialog- The route to creating images seems to be more physical than thinkable. A reliable way to understand and experience images is to make things in series, which is what we’ll be doing in all of our writing and picture making sessions.

If you missed the NYTimes writeup of Lynda’s workshop, go read it.