Over the course of the semester, our class will build a collaboratively accessible map of various concepts gleaned from the readings from the semester in a shared "vault" inside the software called Obsidian. Your work will help to both prime the discussion for the day and to record the insights of our discussion.
Although the entire class will participate in this activity for the entire semester, you will select one week's readings to prepare in Obsidian with extensive notes. Each student will select a week of readings to focus on. We will make these selections the second week of class, so it will behoove you to look ahead at the readings before that session.
Your work for this assignment will be due in two parts.
Your work here will help to prepare the class for discussion. Think of this like a potluck dinner. Our authors furnish the ingredients, each of us will cook a dish to share. Your job is to set the table and anticipate a menu.
Select five (or more) key concepts within the readings for your week. You are anticipating what people will want to talk about.
Make obsidian pages for these topics. This is our menu.
Be considerate in your title. Even at the moment of naming a file, you ought to consider how this page might be most useful. For instance, to create two seperate pages for "deterministic systems" and "non-deterministic systems" would result in either informational redundancy between the two pages. Instead, perhaps "determinate and non-determinate systems" provides a better frame.
Alternatively: Integrate the concepts you choose into a previously created page. As the semester progresses, you will encounter writings that deal with concepts that other authors have already dealt with. For instance, Heinz von Foerster speaks of "trivial and non-trivial machines". These concepts resonantes strongly with "deterministic and non-deterministic systems" although they are distinct. You could elect to include the Von Foerster concepts to that aforementioned page.
In each concept page, include two or more quotations from the text (along with the page numbers) that will help us to unlock that concept. If you copy and paste from a PDF, please format the quotations so they are clear and readable.
During class, you should plan to takes notes of the discussion. Classmates may also take notes inside the concept pages you created. After class, you should summarize these notes into a brief introductory summary of the concept which expresses how it functions in the authors' text and philosophy. In other words, you are answering the question: why did this concept need to be created?
In cases where you are adding to a previously existing page, you will simply add your introductory text to the relevant section of the page.
Around midterm, you will do a fifteen minute presentation about your practice. You sohuld spend 75% articulating the main questions and motivations of your artistic practice. The final 25%, you are asked to comment on 1-3 readings from the course (which we have already read or will read) which you feel resonate strongly with your work and may inform, recontextualize, or renarrativize your practice.
You don't need to have everything worked out at the theory/practice nexus. This is an opportunity to share your work with the class and to express interest in certain strains of thought endemic to the course which you may wish to work with in the final.
You are asked to create a work which draws on your practice that responds directly or indirectly to the concerns of one or more of course's three areas (cybernetics, chaos theory, and process philosophy). Since there is no studio time offered in the course, you may use work you are creating for another class (if the instructor finds that agreeable). In the final session, you will share documentation of the work and discuss it in terms of text's concepts.