From the Deluge to the Meltdown: Life Processes and Feedback Loops

online course

I want to start this class from the idea of “entrapglement” –a portmanteau that I coined to address the mixture of entrapment and entanglement that we face when trying to engage with the worlds around us.

How do we look at life other than our own? And, once we are looking, from where do we look at it?

Recently, we are jubilant about all life-y things and processes. Matter moves, it breathes, it wriggles! It is alive! But if we end up dealing with such processes merely as metaphors and allegories for our own world and our own life, we end up once again confusing the forest for the trees.

Perhaps it will be helpful to take look at living processes and sub-routines using the lens of chemo-ethnography, where ethnographers move beyond enthusiasm “about the liveliness of ‘matter itself,’” and instead attend to “the complexities, frictions intractabilities, and conundrums of ‘matter in relation’” so that we can critically considers the slippages that occur when we focus solely on the molecular register and clamber toward new techniques for making knowledge that risk reinforcing age-old socio-material fault lines.

Through the seminar, we will parse out the relationships we have to life and matter from the narrative standpoint of water -as the main substrate of life, but also as the plot device that heralds extinctions. We will look at the temporality of life that is incompatible with life, and will try to make sense of what kind of cultural production can fully address the multiplicity of worlds that we move through and that we are part of.

Course leader

Julieta Aranda is co-director of e-flux and a frequent instructor for the master seminar “Art & Science” at the Art Institute in Basel, Switzerland.

Target group

This course is designed for BA and MA students, artists, architects and researchers of visual arts, humanities and social sciences, art history and curatorial studies, architecture and design, and anyone with a keen interest in the subject area.

Course aim

Through the seminar, we will parse out the relationships we have to life and matter from the narrative standpoint of water -as the main substrate of life, but also as the plot device that heralds extinctions. We will look at the temporality of life that is incompatible with life, and will try to make sense of what kind of cultural production can fully address the multiplicity of worlds that we move through and that we are part of.

Credits info

2 EC
At the conclusion of each course, registered participants will be issued a certificate stating their equivalency of The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) credits from Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina, Kosovo and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon, France.

An equivalency certificate is issued to registered participants who have demonstrated competencies to learning outcomes and associated workload certified with the equivalent ECTS credits of the curricula of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon, France. Employers, colleges and other postsecondary schools can choose to accept the equivalency certificate as a substitute of ECTS credits.

Fee info

EUR 300: The total fee is 300€. The participation fee is due in full after you have successfully enrolled in the course via written confirmation from SSAS. The fee covers tuition, proceedings and certificates. This fee does not cover the cost of individually necessary materials, personal equipment, further excursions, accommodation or travel expenses. Final acceptance to the course will be confirmed only after we have confirmation of your payment in full. Bank transfer fees are to be covered by the registered participant.
EUR 30: Students who wish to obtain an ECTS certificate must pay an additional supplement to the registration fee, calculated as 10% of the annual fee, corresponding to the administrative treatment of the ECTS certificate established by the Ensba-Lyon. Only participants registered in a higher education institution, and who explicitly request it at the time of registration, will be able to validate ECTS credits in accordance with European regulations.

Scholarships

Scholarships are available for participants from Kosovo. A limited number of scholarships are available for international participants.