AHIS 333 F001: Interdisciplinary Forums

Topic: Audience + Affect

“Art makes us perform.”

In his book, Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World, artist and educator, Pablo Helguera, argued that we all invent, interpret, and perform a variety of roles in our everyday lives as they intersect with art and creative practice. Whether in classrooms, studios, galleries, cinemas, online or on the street, we can see that artists cultivate audiences through their affective actions, gestures, and works, and create opportunities for complex and dynamic inquiry. Is it politics, society, or science that allows us to draw emotional resonance from a composition of simple lines and colours? How might an artist strategize to create works that knowingly resonate for a viewer, and to what end? What are the implications of mobile and ubiquitous technology as we attempt to develop new art audiences? Exploring the intersections, collisions, and feedback loops of audience and affect provide us with opportunity to understand how art can do what it does, and what it might do next. With an eye on the development of critical dialogue and a highly usable praxis toolkit, this course will introduce and unfold the concerns and constructions of affect and audience in contemporary practices, offering an exciting public lecture series that looks at the various ways in which audience and affect inform our practices and our daily lives.