“We learn a place and how to visualize spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination.
Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.”
Gary Snyder (“Blue Mountains Constantly Walking”)
Tactical media is situational, ephemeral and self-terminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular social-political context in order to create intervention. This class will explore the history and production of interventionist performance projects that address critical social, political or personal issues or situations in diverse sites. Through the lecture the students will focus on strategies for working collaboratively to investigate creative forms of critical thought and presentation. Disciplines of performance, dance, movement, new media, research, and creative response will be examined in various forms and combinations. We will look at different examples of multidisciplinary projects that include elements of surprise, improvisation and audience participation, like Sasha Waltz’s “Korper” , Goat Island’s “When will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy” and Critical Art Ensemble’s “Diseases of consciousness” . Reading and viewings survey discourse of the body through different tactical media theories and performative practices: feminism (subRosa), postcolonial theory (Coco Fusco), a history of the sense (Bertolt Brecht) and of the moving body (Eadweard Muybridge and “Walikng as knowing as making” project). This class will combine theory and practice, investigating forms of thought and presentation, styles of collaboration, historical and philosophical perspectives and methods of individual and collective expression and creativity by using the means of tactical media.
