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

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

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

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

Kodwo Eshun. More Brilliant than the Sun.

Steve Goodman. Sonic Warfare.

Muindi Fanuel Muindi. "The War on Terra". The War on Terra and the New Underground Railroad.

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.