Artistic Agency
University of San Jorge
Facing the Dreamer, I Tremble and Grasp at the Edges of Myself for a Taste of This Life: The Portrait Portfolio of J. D.Challenger - A Performance Piece
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robert Tracy, Louis Kavouras
J. D. Challenger was born in Oklahoma and essentially "raised" by his step-grandfather, "a full-blood Choctaw, who first introduced the young J. D. to the culture and spirit of the Native American people." This Performance Piece---featuring PowerPoint Narration/Original Modern Dance Choreography/Original Jazz Music---will assess J. D. Challenger as 'the dreamer' facing his growing number of Native American friends and the urgency welling deep within the artist of 'sketching' their stories, their histories, their vision but not the white man's range of view! From his studio in Taos, New Mexico, J. D.began to paint the landscape of Northern New Mexico for his clients, but privately, J. D. painted his Native American friends and they shared their stories. J. D.'s style began to emerge within acrylics/oil on canvas/watercolor processes as his inner visions became more and more clear following his witnessing a Ghost Dance. This performance piece assesses J. D.'s initial reluctance to show his 'private' portraits to the general public for fear of "offending the very people he so admired." Denise encouraged J. D. to show his portraits to his Native American friends for their opinions. "A Kiowa holy man told him: "There need to be messengers; your path is to tell the stories of the native people to those who do not know what has happened in the past or what is still happening today. You make them see who we are, that we are real living human beings and that we are still here."
Adapting to Scale: Transforming Large Lecture Classes in Art and Design Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jacqueline Turner, Jamie Hilder
Large lecture classes come in for necessary criticism, particularly in art and design contexts where small studio classes are highly valued. As faculty delivering curriculum to the entire first year student body, we present our story of collaboratively creating a large lecture class that feels more like a small one. Our methods have been multiple and responsive, but include a concerted effort to build in vulnerability and kindness, to focus on conversational style, and to approach a conventional art historical timeline in a self-reflexive way — all through a linked curriculum model that takes into account the labour conditions of a small university. Our large lecture model becomes a space to incite curiosity for new Ways of Seeing, Learning, and Knowing as well as a site for transformative justice. We co-author group agreements with students to create reciprocity and highlight instructor vulnerability by revealing the impossibility of intellectual scope, and issuing invitations to learn alongside, not from instructors. We talk about how we create an anti-imperial critique through contemporary art examples, cultural studies analyses, and diverse literary texts that challenge Eurocentric structures, but also explain our decision to adhere to a conventional timeline out of a commitment to distributive justice. Our approach undoes the expert model, focuses on conversation and collaboration, uses writing as a process-based, iterative, experiment-driven activity to develop critical literacy and prepare students for their lived realities, and to undo the vocationalization of art school education.
Sensory Walks for Climate Perception: The Role of Sound in Climate Change Narratives and Speculation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eleni-Ira Panourgia, Guillaume Dupetit
Walking as method allows for multi-sensory engagements with urban landscapes that can generate perceptual and embodied understandings of environmental issues. This paper explores the role of sound during sensory walks that focus on the perception of climate change. The research presented in this paper is part of a larger project that examines the notion of sonic fictions as a sensory dimension to explore, imagine, and eventually reinvent our environment through sound. Drawing from a workshop featuring a walk about coolness and heat perception on the Descartes campus of Gustave Eiffel University in France, emphasis is placed on the soundscape of the areas visited and its speculative potential. Participants observed the urban area through listening, focusing on the sounds of the environment and their sources in relation to other factors such as the built environment, flora, fauna and light. The soundscape was recorded to capture the overall sound environment and individual sound elements in a layered and immersive manner. The recordings were further edited and diffused to the participants after the walk to establish a dialogue between perception and speculations. Approaching climate perception through listening revealed connections of temperature with human and non-human sound sources, cultural associations with sounds and their sources, as well as sound qualities including loudness, density and frequency variation. These insights are then employed to develop sonic fictions to explore fictional and sonic discourse between climate change prediction models and subjective individual and collective perceptions.
