Schedule

01/17/25 Week 1

Syllabus + Introductions

Anna Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, Feifei Zhou. The Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene.

David Lynch. Mulholland Drive. Winkie's Diner scene.

01/24/25 Week 2: Bottles, Strings, and Portals

Mark Fisher. The Weird and the Eerie.

• "The Weird and the Eerie (Beyond the Unheimlich)
• "The Out of Place and the Out of Time: Lovecraft and the Weird"
• "Curtains and Holes: David Lynch"

Donna Haraway. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

• Introduction
• Playing String Figures with Companion Species
• Tentacular Thinking
• Sowing Worlds

01/31/25 Week 3: Spikes, Sunsets, and Rifts

Brian Holmes. "Driving the Golden Spike."

Alfred North Whitehead. The Concept of Nature.

• Theories of the Bifurcation of Nature

Dakota Gearhart. Life Touching Life ep. 1: "True Love". Animated video podcast.

02/07/25 Week 4: Arrows, Grids, and Skins

Brian Massumi. Parables for the Virtual.

• Introduction
• The Autonomy of Affect
• Chaos in the "Total Field" of Vision

02/14/25 Week 5: Meat, Faces, and Figures

Gilles Deleuze. Logic of Sensation: Francis Bacon.

• Preface
• Body, Meat, and Spirit: Becoming Animal
• Painting and Sensation
• Painting Forces
• Couples and Triptychs
• Note: What is a Triptych?

Field trip to Art Institute of Chicago.

Index of Bacon paintings.

02/21/25 Week 6: Rats, Packs, and Sorcerers

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Selection: “Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal”. 233-252. A Thousand Plateaus.

02/28/25 Week 7 GRAD CRITS

No class.

03/07/25 Week 8: (More) Rats, Noise, and Tentacles

Michel Serres. Parasite.

• Interrupted Meals

Vilem Flusser and Louis Bec. Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (The Vampire Squid from Hell).

• The Vampyroteuthic World
• The Vampyroteuthic Culture

optional:

Anna Watkins-Fisher. The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitic Resistance.

• Introduction
• Chapter One

03/14/25 Week 9: Angles, Events, and Mantises

Guest: Dakota Gearhart

Erin Manning. "Angular Perspective; Or, How Concern Shapes the Field.

03/21/25 Week 10

Final project proposals.

03/28/25 SPRING BREAK

No class.

04/04/25 Week 11: Beats, Bombs, and Bruteness

Guest: Muindi Fanuel Muindi (Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines, Fyrythr Institute for Unsettling Technologies)

Kodwo Eshun. "Virtualizing the Breakbeat." More Brilliant than the Sun. 67-77.

Steve Goodman. Sonic Warfare.

• Introduction (until xvii)
• 1998: A Conceptual Event
• 2001: What is Sonic Warfare?

Muindi Fanuel Muindi. "AI and D"

04/11/25 Week 12

Laboria Cuboniks. The Xenofeminist Manifesto.

Isabelle Stengers. "Reclaiming Animism".

optional:

• Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic. Cute Accelerationism.
• Silvia Federici. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation.

04/18/25 Week 13

1:1 meetings.

04/25/25 Week 14

Final presentations.

05/02/25 Week 15

No Class.

Attend 7pm gallery opening: "Weird Dreams, Weird Analysis" at Co-Prosperity in Bridgeport, Chicago, Illinois.