Special Topics

Please note: this page will be updated as information is confirmed. In case of a discrepancy between this page and InsideEC, the information on InsideEC will be deemed correct.

Additional information on these courses is available at https://inside.ecuad.ca
Most credit courses have prerequisites that are clearly outlined on the website.

Spring 2012

MHIS 429 S001 – Topics in Film/Video Theory (3)

Tuesdays, 3:50pm – 6:50pm & Wednesdays, 7pm – 9pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Bernhard Von Dadelsen

Topic: Film, Nation and Ideology

This course discusses the genres of political film and documentary and their function in times of war and times of peace.

We will watch and analyse the classics of political film, starting with the legendary “Casablanca”. We will evaluate a set of post – 9/11 films like Michael Moore’s docs, and the History Channel’s Production “The History of US”. It is interesting to find out how a message, an ideology is created in these films: by their structure, their plot, their characters. Even seemingly old-fashioned theatrical films like “The King’s Speech” or “Slumdog Millionaire” are highly political and respond to national desires.

We will find out why these films are not only political, but, most important: highly entertaining. Analytical tools from the field of drama theory and screenwriting will be taught: most interesting are the classical drama structure and the concept of the “Hero’s Journey”.

AHIS 333 S001 – Interdisciplinary Forums (3)

Tuesdays, 7:00pm – 9:00pm + Thursdays, 3:50pm – 7:40pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Glen Lowry + Harry Killas

Topic: Up on the Wire—down on Madmen: Adventures in new TV

Television underwrites 21^st century culture. Despite high culture pretensions to the contrary, contemporary art, media, and design exist in dialogue with television. TV's power, its ubiquity has made the medium a cornerstone of communications theory, cultural studies, politics, economics and governmental policy. Pundits predict the end of television, bemoaning the proliferation of small screens. Yet, audiences are tuning in and critics have proclaimed a new "Golden Age.” New forms of televisual engagement and expression---new dramatic series like The Wire, Sopranos, Dexter, and Madmen, the advent of reality television, an expanding geography featuring shows form outside the major centres of Los Angeles, New York and Toronto, and new modes or channels of delivery (HBO, ITunes, YouTube, zip.ca)—create unprecedented opportunities for creative and critical exploration.

This course investigates how new television shapes and our interactions with it. Listening to artists, designers, scholars, and others who are engaged with television, we look at how we might respond to and learn from its different perceptions and stories. Looking at the issues that arise from specific shows, we look at how the absolute centrality of television to culture invites us to integrate critical thinking through and with television into creative practice. If you're not watching television, what are you watching?

AHIS 404 S001 - Art Now: Topics in Contemporary Art (3)

Tuesdays, 3:50pm – 6:40pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Jesse Birch

Topic: Sympathetic Magic: The Mimetic Faculty in Contemporary Art and Exhibition Practice

Originating with the ancient Greeks, mimesis is classically defined as the visual or literary representation of nature. However, this class is more concerned with what anthropologist Michael Taussig calls the mimetic faculty: "The nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other." This category of experience has become increasingly important to contemporary artists and curators as both a subject, and a way of understanding negotiations with the mediated world. Through case studies, field trips, readings and discussions, this class will consider the mimetic faculty in relation to recent developments in contemporary art and exhibition making.

AHIS 404 S002 - Art Now: Topics in Contemporary Art (3)

Tuesdays, 3:30pm – 4:30pm + Thursdays, 12:30pm – 3:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Trish Kelly

Topic: Art Space

As a means of evaluating some of the pressing concerns and thematic preoccupations of contemporary art, this course will consider how space, loosely conceived, frames aesthetic production. Whether metaphorically or literally conceived, space– as a three-dimensional area, a blank or empty surface, a virtual realm or a conceptual entity– shapes artistic practice, potentially limiting or extending the communicative possibilities of a work of art. To think this through, we will examine various ‘sites,’ from the studio and gallery, to more abstracted locations of the monitor, archive, screen, map, and street. Using such locales as case studies, we will theorize space as a politically active agent, utilized by current artists in highly innovative and alternative ways.

AHIS 408 S001 - Topics in Modernism (3)

Tuesdays, 12:30pm – 3:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Randy Lee Cutler

Topic: Supersensible Substrate

“The feeling of the sublime is at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain its estimation of reason, and a simultaneous awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgment of the inadequacy of sense of being in accord with ideas of reason...” Immanuel Kant Critique of Judgement, 1790

This course considers the challenging and difficult topic of the sublime, a concept that became important in the eighteenth century in relation to the arts to describe aspects of nature that instill awe and wonder. According to twentieth century French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, the sublime, as a theme in aesthetics, was the founding move of the Modernist period. In this course we will examine the philosophic underpinning of modernism alongside an historical evaluation of the sublime and the fundamental gap or aporia in human reason. What does it mean to express and aestheticized the inassimilable boundaries of human reason and how does this inform the multiplicity and instability of our current postmodern world?

Through active weekly discussions students will develop a conceptual understanding of the sublime as an aesthetic experience through an historical and modernist lens. They will also generate critical research and writing informed by the weekly readings that include Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Okwui Enwezor and Marina Warner among others.

Required Text: The Sublime (Documents of Contemporary Art) by Simon Morley (Editor)

AHIS 410 S001 - Topics in Global Art (3)

Mondays, 4:30pm – 7:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Rob Stone

Topic: Manifold Modernities

In this course we will look at a range of arts practices that have emerged internationally in the period since the 1960s. Focusing principally on fine art, we will also look at cinema, architecture and town planning, music and other forms of art making which migrate across different media as well as the kinds of cultural criticism that have emerged in relation to them.

We will look at a series of technological, economic and political changes during the period as a context to these practices. However, the course won't offer a chronological account of a single character for international art in the period. Rather we will explore a number of relevant thematics. These will explore the shaping of civil rights movements, the structures of different diasporas and migrations, geo-political concepts of globalization and post-colonial theory. We will also consider the role of art in what might be called post-post-colonial thought. Concerning this, we will pay special attention to a notion of 'manifold modernities' (often contradictory and alien to each other) that has been advanced in order to avoid the problems recognized in some earlier strands of post-colonial thinking. The role of curating in both describing and contributing to narratives of cultural change has been significant in this. And, we will look at how curating has helped condition the necessarily new kinds of artistic intellectual activity.

You should expect to gain an introduction to a range of art practices here,and also to watch some very good films and to work out how to talk about them.

AHIS 420 S001 - Topics in Feminism, Gender, and Cultural Studies (3)
Thursdays, 3:50pm – 6:40pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Magnolia Pauker

Topic: Feminisms Today

This course investigates the multiple critical perspectives offered by Feminisms today, while remaining attentive to the substantial backlash against Feminism in culture at large. Course readings will focus on critically contextualizing ideologies of gender, race, sexuality, and class in relation to contemporary culture, art, and academia and the very real impact these discourses have on human beings, animals, and the environment. A consideration of cinematic references will contribute to evaluating how media representations contribute to the construction of normative gender codes pertaining to femininity and masculinity.

The course is run as a discussion group with weekly reading assignments providing the thematic basis for discussion. Close critical readings of these texts by students before each class will generate a deeper engagement in discussions and activities. Students (as interviewers) will conduct an in-class interview with the instructor on the topic of the assigned readings, analyze a film, and produce a thought paper proposal with annotated bibliography, which will inform the term project: a self-directed thought paper. In preparation for the final paper, students will be required to participate in an in-class peer review writing workshop.

ANIM 325 S002 – Special Topics in Animation (3)
Thursdays, 3:50pm – 6:40pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Robert McAfee

Topic: Lighting and Rendering

This course would all about rendering and setting up the final stages of a 3d film. The student could use the instructors pre-existing assets or take existing work and finalize it. Emphasis on the latter. This course would enable the students to produce a finished 3D film in 3rd year.
Topics will include the following:
01 - Introduction and overview
02 - Classic light set ups
03 - Indirect illumination
04 - Render Settings overview
05 - Exterior Environments
06 - Toon Shading and Non-Photo real Rendering
07 - Render layers and passes
08 - Materials
09 - Textures
10 - Volumetric effects
11 - Caustics
12 - Lens and light shaders
13 - Workshop
14 -Wrap up

CCID 200 S001 – Community Projects (3)

CCID 300 S001 – Community Projects (3)

Tuesdays, 8:30am – 11:20am, Spring 2012

Instructor: Cindy Mochizuki & Lois Klassen

Topic: Archive City

This studio course offers students the opportunity to encounter and collaborate in creative projects that are situated within the city’s known and unknown collections. Where are the places that contain the city’s stories and histories? Whose voices are spoken there, and whose are silenced through those collections and archives? How do artists and designers approach and intervene in those places and with those voices? Through site visits, interviews, projects, and presentations, students will have an opportunity to propose creative projects that collaborate with official and unofficial archives and collectors. Local collections including the Vancouver Police Museum, Japanese Canadian National Museum, Crista Dahl Media Library and Archives, Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre are some of the sites of memory that will be encountered in this course. The approach that will be taken in this community projects course will situate the projects alongside the work of other artists who have intervened in public collections like Esther Chalev-Gerz (Echoes of Memory), Peter Morin (Peter Morin’s Museum), Katherine Shozawa (New Denver Memory Project), Walid Ra’ad (Atlas Group), Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, and Mark Dion. Grounded in a thorough understanding of memory and post memory, participatory art practices, and collaborative design strategies, Archive City instructors will support students as they explore the values, ethics and aesthetics of creative work that draws on public and private stories and collections. This course could result in a curated web project that will house a digital archive of students’ projects.

Archive City is an artist team that exists to collect and re-materialize memory and post-memory within specific communities and places. In 2008, Cindy Mochizuki, Lois Klassen and Jaimie Robson produced Archive City: Portraits of Lulu Island (Richmond Art Gallery), which existed as fieldwork and a memory collection lab involving local residents of Richmond, BC. In 2009, Archive City re-materialized memories surrounding the location of the Richmond Olympic Oval in Frozen Fictions (Roberts Street Social Centre, Halifax, NS).

Lois Klassen is a Vancouver-based artist who’s collaborative and participatory works have been produced for galleries, museums and schools in Canada and abroad. In 2010 she worked with Mary Oliver to produce an installation, performance, and community dialogue about urban development in Northern England. In 2009 her work, Garden Gnomad used open source technologies to record and circulate conversations with community gardeners in Vancouver. Her text about the participatory art and theatre from the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games is forthcoming.

Cindy Mochizuki is an interdisciplinary artist working in a range of in drawing, video/animation, performance, web works and installation. Her works explore the intersections of public and private memory and history. They are process-based and often integrate interviews and the archival. Her body of work has explored digital archives responding to objects of memory from the past including the kanashibari, shadow archive (2007), March to December (2009) and new formations of archiving the present and the living in such projects as Archive City: Portraits of Lulu Island (2009) and a forthcoming Mörkö, a collaborative sound and live animation performance with Pessi Parvianinen co-presented by Vancouver New Music around the collection of interviews around ‘monsters’ collected across two port cities (Helsinki, Finland and Vancouver, Canada).

http://www.jcnm.ca//marchtodecember/

http://cindymochizuki.com/kanashibari/default.html

CCID 200 S090 – Community Projects (3)

CCID 300 S090 – Community Projects (3)

Online course, Spring 2012

Instructor: Natalie Doonan

Topic: Community Projects: Yes In My Backyard

Community Projects: Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) is a 3-credit elective course open to students in any ECU program. In this course, students will collaborate with Pivot Legal Society in their YIMBY Campaign, which aims to gain public support for programs that make housing accessible to everyone.

Students will learn how to apply their unique skills as practicing artists, in working with issues of housing and homelessness. Students will be guided through a collaborative process, in which they will develop work in response to the specific needs of a partner organization, with the goal of addressing fears and prejudices about the people who live in supportive housing. Students enrolled in this course are strongly encouraged to register also in CCID: The Ethics of Representation, which will inform project work by providing an ethical framework and appropriate methodologies for community practice. These two courses are complementary in addressing collaborative process and the dynamics of working within interdisciplinary team oriented projects.

This course will provide students with methodological frameworks for socially engaged work. Content will focus on artists who have addressed similar concerns in community projects, such as Rick Lowe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Suzanne Lacy, Danielle Abrams, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Superflex, Jenny Holzer, Lucy Orta and Group Material. Students will be required to participate online (through our Moodle course website), and will have regular meetings with representatives from Pivot Legal Society, who will help to guide projects.

CCID 201 S001 – Social Practice + Community Engagement (3)

CCID 301 S001 – Social Practice + Community Engagement (3)

Mondays, 1:00pm – 3:50pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Holly Schmidt

Topic: Communities of Practice: Art + Pedagogy

In the Communities of Practice: Art + Pedagogy course, students will gain a theoretical understanding of the critical role art plays in the social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development of children and youth. Students will be introduced to pedagogy and methods that inform the design, delivery, and evaluation of community-based arts programming.

The course is offered in two distinct parts. The first part will provide 6 classes on-campus at Emily Carr Granville Island campus on Mondays 1:00-3:50pm. In the second half, students will be supported to design their own 7-week art program, which they will deliver to a small group of children in their middle-development years (ages 6-12) at a local elementary school. The work at an elementary school will take place on either a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday afternoon (3:00pm-5:00pm), depending on the students’ schedule. Youth leaders from a local secondary school will assist students in the delivery of their program.

The Communities of Practice: Art + Pedagogy course will provide Emily Carr University students with a unique opportunity to explore how values, ethics, and assumptions shape us as artists, learners, teachers and, ultimately, as “global citizens”. The goal of this Community Service Learning course is to deepen students' civic responsibility through the provision of rich experiential learning opportunities that are intrinsically tied to academic content.

This course is facilitated by Holly Schmidt (ECUAD faculty) and Marisol Petersen (Community Schools Coordinator, VSB)

CRAM 200 S001 & INDD 230 S001 – Ceramics: Introductory (6)

CRAM 310 S002 & INDD 330 S002 – Ceramics: Advanced (6)

Tuesdays, 12:30pm – 6:40pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Justin Novak

Topic: Factory

This class introduces a pedagogical model called “Factory” that posits students and faculty as a collective force employing processes of mass-production in the service of cultural inquiry and social agency. Each project will identify a specific context that offers opportunities for both utilitarian design and poetic investigation, allowing participants to explore the dynamics of food service, commerce and commodity culturethrough the production and use of ceramic objects. Though students will also produce individually authored work, this curriculum hinges on collaborative projects that engage and/or serve the larger community.

CRAM 204 S001 – Ceramics: Special Topics (3)

CRAM 304 S001 – Ceramics: Special Topics (3)

Wednesdays, 4:30pm – 7:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Evelyn Grant

Topic: Ceramic Design Project: From Concept to Market

This course familiarizes the student with the various stages of a successful ceramic design process. Utilizing discussion, slide presentation, peer review, demonstration and hands on experience, students will explore each stage through to production of a simple ceramic product. Approaches to bringing a product to market will be presented, with a jury review of final product for possible exhibition in the marketplace.

This is a studio course in which hands on experience with the ceramic design process, technical (model and simple mould making, slip casting, glazing and glaze decoration) processes, and approaches to taking the work to market will be presented Resources and contacts for further exploration will be provided and discussed.

CRAM 204 S002 – Ceramics: Special Topics (3)

CRAM 304 S002 – Ceramics: Special Topics (3)

Thursdays, 4:30pm – 7:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Jason Walker

Topic: Ceramic Handbuilding Techniques

This course will present and focus on handbuilding techniques and aspects of using the ceramic process as a medium for individual communication. The assignments are structured to extend capacity for practical application of ceramic practices, with an emphasis also on critical and creative thinking to broaden understanding of clay as a medium for artistic expression.

DHIS 400 S001 – Design Futures (3)

Wednesdays, 8:30am – 11:20am, Spring 2012

Instructor: Rory Wallace

Topic: Future Shock

“The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.” (Valery)

In an uncertain future marked by unprecedented change, design practice will have to re-invent itself. This change cannot afford to be a slow evolution; business will not be as usual. Much past design has contributed to our present predicament, so what must new practice look like?

In this course we will look at how design has functioned through some catastrophically bad and some reassuringly good examples. What are some of the forces that have driven it and what can we expect in any transformation in the futures (plural, because there are multiple potential futures). What will shape it and us?

Design has become overburdened with language that doesn’t mean what it seems to (e.g. what design isn’t “human-centered”?). We will define “design” very inclusively as we will look inside and outside the field/discipline for effective language, guiding principles, current practices, and useful methodologies.

HUMN 305 S002 – Studies in the Humanities (3)

Tuesdays, 12:30pm – 3:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Rita Wong

Topic: Documenting and Storytelling: Lands, Waters, Home

This course explores how people imagine and share the concept of home in relationship to the lands and watersheds where they live or travel on. How does storytelling help to create stronger, more resilient and knowledgeable communities?

We will read books by two biologists--Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber and Being Caribou by Karsten Heuer--and discuss how these texts have been translated into documentary films. As a survivor of cancer who researches the connections between cancer and the environment, Steingraber offers a rethinking of home that is both ecologically and industrially literate, attentive to the complex flows of materials in our daily lives. Heuer, as he journeys through the Arctic on his honeymoon, challenges the limits of what we might call home as he and his wife follow a caribou migration for five months. His story also raises the question of what relationships are possible between human and non-human neighbours on this planet we call home.

Considering the role of cultural perspectives in fostering respectful co-existence among diverse forms of life who share an earthly home, we will also read two anthologies that gather a range of Indigenous stories together from the Pacific Rim and across Canada: First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim and Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past. In making space to listen to different communities that share common waters and common lands, the course encourages students to reflect on and voice their own senses of home in creative and critical forms.

HUMN 306 S001 – Studies in Humanities: Design (3)

Tuesdays, 12:30pm – 3:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Rory Wallace

Topic: “Design like you Give a Damn”

Design is the interface between people and the world around them. A designed object may be made of plastic, metal, cement, pixels or paper; always it is made of ideas, attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs. To understand design we need to understand its context.

Camouflage can be a popular clothing motif on Vancouver streets, but it is the difference between life and death in Afghanistan. Context and meaning depend on how something is perceived and in this course we will trace some of the most prevalent ways we "read" culture. If we can't control how our design is received we can't control what we make.

Does the world need square eggs? Why do cars look only very slightly different each year? Do we really need obsolescence? Is the solar-powered car an answer to our concerns? Cultural narratives, the stories we tell ourselves, shape design practice so we will focus our study on the relation of the individual human to society. We are as much products of design as producers of it. Because this is a humanities course we will focus on what it feels like to live in a world that has such designs upon us all.

HUMN 311 S001 – Visual Art Seminar (3)

Mondays, 1:00pm – 3:50pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Kyla Mallett

Topic: The Expanded Archive

This special topics course is a 6-credit hybrid academic/studio course (HUMN 311 + VAST 310), which focuses on current discourses on and around ideas of the archive and contemporary art.

Over the last two decades, ideas of collecting, accumulating and archiving materials have made their way into established art practices, from exhibitions like Deep Storage (PS1, 1989) and Accumulated Materials (Vancouver Art Gallery 2005), to texts like Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995), Hal Foster’s An Archival Impulse (2004) and anthologies such as The Archive (Whitechapel Press, 2006).

We will examine the relationship between ‘the archive’ and current art practices, and the emergence of archive-based practices, from straightforward photographic portfolios and artist’s books (Larry Clark, Steven Shore) to library-based artworks (Martha Rosler, The Reanimation Library) to constructed, fictional archives (Walid Raad, Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov), to classification-resistant, unruly archives, and so on. We will look at a variety of ways in which artists engage with the idea of the archive from mining the personal to constructing the elaborate.

In this course, students will engage in readings and research, assignments and field trips, and the completion of a term project in which they consider traditional, creative and experimental approaches to engaging with ‘the archive’ with regards to their own art practice. This course is open to students from any area in 3^rd year or above.

HUMN 311 S002 – Visual Art Seminar (3)

Mondays, 1:00pm – 3:50pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Paul Mathieu

Topic: Issues in Contemporary Ceramics,The Art of the Future

This course will look at recent development in contemporary ceramics as it relates to contemporary culture and current art practices. Fired clay as a material is very resistant to time and objects made with this material today will be around for a very long time. The ceramic objects we make today will thus become “The Art of the Future”. Why make ceramics now? What is its relevancy? How is ceramics related to other art forms? We will look at contemporary examples from all over the world and attempt to answer these important questions.

Each week, there will be a visual presentation by myself or by students (following pertinent research), as well as discussions around readings. Each week each student is to bring a Xerox or printed copy of a relevant article on the subject from the current art press. Visits to museums, exhibitions, studios as well as critiques of actual works will complete the content.

HUMN 311 S003 – Visual Art Seminar (3)

Tuesdays, 8:30am – 11:20am, Spring 2012

Instructor: Elizabeth MacKenzie

Topic: Drawing Faces

This seminar provides an opportunity to investigate contemporary ideas of portraiture within drawing. Rather than pursuing the idea of a portrait as a fixed, singular image we will consider representations of the face as an ambiguous, shifting field of interaction and interpretation.

Faces represent an individual’s unique characteristics as well as the features shared by all faces. While the act of drawing a face represents the desire to know and understand someone else it also reminds us that our understanding of another person is always partial, incomplete and provisional. Within this process we represent both engagement with and alienation from the other; portraits represent ambivalent, intersubjective experience. Portraits also encourage us to understand ourselves as we contemplate the image of someone else; creating images of faces provides an opportunity to explore the relationship between the self and other, as well as the selves within the self. Diverse formal and theoretical frameworks for representing faces will be investigated through readings, presentations and assignments.

HUMN 311 S004 – Visual Art Seminar (3)

Thursdays, 12:30pm – 3:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: David Khang

Topic: Bio Art: Biology in Art, Art through Biology

How is contemporary art practice affected by biology? How do we understand anthropomorphized animation characters in The Jungle Book or Finding Nemo? Can designers make the environment better for non-human species too? As contemporary artists savvy in diverse media and technologies, how do we understand Eduardo Kac’s GFP Bunny, Orlan’s body manipulations, or Critical Art Ensemble’s reverse-engineering of Monsanto products? This course will introduce and critically examine an array of art practices that negotiate terrains that were once considered off limits to artists: that of scientific techniques, technologies, and (bio) materials. These practices are inclusive of, but not limited to: genetic interventions, tissue culturing, inter-species engagement between humans and other species, animals, plants, fungi, and the ever-present ethical debates that are necessarily contentious. The examination of the materials covered will further our understanding of the continuum that exists between art, science, and technology. While a background in Sciences is not a prerequisite, awareness of basic knowledge and understanding will facilitate engagement with the course material.

HUMN 311 S005 – Visual Art Seminar (3)

Wednesdays, 4:30pm – 7:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Landon Mackenzie

Topic: Post-Post-Modern

Inside the Academy and Outside in the World; Strategies for Creative Survival

This artist-led seminar for advanced visual art students is aimed at those who are curious about emerging conditions of production and distribution in the new globalized Art World. Can art claim to be a site of resistance or just a way to help collectors double their money? There are now over 200 Biennales and dozens of Art Fairs all over the globe. Do these events with their special curators, combined with key art magazines and specialized Internet sites dictate more than ever what is circulating and valued? Berlin, London, New York and Beijing are clearly centres, so where does that put Vancouver, Warsaw, or Sao Paolo? Which 20th century theorists can help us better understand where we are? What will this global/digital era be called if we out of “Post-Modernism” or even “Contemporary Art”? In whose interest would that be so? In this seminar there will be lectures, student presentations, readings, research, individual reports, weekly discussion and peer-to-peer dialogue.

HUMN 311 S006 – Visual Art Seminar (3)

Mondays, 1:00pm – 3:50pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Bettina Matzkuhn

Topic: Pattern: Textile and Beyond

This course will address pattern in a broad sense, with particular attention paid to aspects of the many traditions of surface textile design. The evolution of textiles includes social contexts and economic trends; we will discuss how patterns –both in textile and other media– reflect the worldview of their makers. In addition to historical examples we will encounter many contemporary artists who incorporate ideas around pattern into their practices. Readings for discussion may include topics such as patterns in psychology/behaviour, fractals, natural or human-made structures, and ocean currents. Resources, readings and research covered in this part of the course will be applied to the design and hands-on printing of student textile designs in GEVA 310 Special Topic: Directed Studies: “Textile Printing & Surface Design”---to be taken in tandem with this course.

HUMN 311 S007 – Visual Art Seminar (3)

Mondays, 8:30am – 11:20am, Spring 2012

Instructor: Elizabeth MacKenzie

Topic: Drawing Faces

HUMN 311 S008 – Visual Art Seminar (3)

Fridays, 8:30am – 11:20am, Spring 2012

Instructor: Keith Langergraber

Topic: Where The Rapids Are: Exploring the North in Contemporary Art

This course will explore the impact of globalization on contemporary culture and identity in northern communities throughout the world by studying new art forms that have developed since the 1990’s. Students will examine how northern issues have become the focus for a number for contemporary artists, such as Kevin Schmidt, Brian Jungen, Stan Douglas, Roni Horn, Olafur Eliasson, Claus Beck-Nielsen, Orit Raff and others whose works explore issues and concerns surrounding the North. Students will also study northern indigenous artists including Annie Pootoogook who challenges traditional ideas of Inuit art with her drawings of contemporary Inuit life replete with snowmobiles, television sets and sunglasses. The content of this course will also include Inuit film makers such as Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner), who explore questions of identity and the environment in their work. Through these studies in northern art, students will consider challenges relevant to the north in regards to environmental issues, including global warming, resource extraction and sovereignty in the north. The course will make use of slide presentations, video screenings, lectures, and discussions. Students will have opportunities to access research materials related to artists concerned with northern issues which they may use towards the completion of their own studio work, written work, and presentations. Students will also produce a studio work broadly relating to the topic. Students should be able to demonstrate an understanding of the issues and questions introduced through research, discussion and by way of other hybrid forms of learning/dissemination.

HUMN 311 S090 – Visual Art Seminar (3)

Online course, Spring 2012

Instructor: Henry Tsang

Topic: Spatial Practices

This course will explore how space is constructed, beginning with Jurgen Habermas’ proposal of the historic emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in central Europe. Through the writings of David Harvey, Nancy Fraser, Saskia Sassen, Rosalyn Deutsche, Brian Holme, Chantal Mouffe and others, students will be introduced to various theoretical approaches to urban, global, economic, social, community and virtual space. We will research how artists and cultural activists have engaged with the world, from the gallery to the worlds outside, through the internet and within media. We will discuss our role as individuals, citizens, artists, designers and media practitioners in relation to the social production of space and the ideals that democracy represents.

ILUS 306 S001 – Illustration Practices: Topic (3)

Mondays, 1:00pm – 7:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Justin Novak

Topic: Pop Surrealism

Pop Surrealism is a cultural territory that is closely related to other underground art subcultures such as New Contemporary and Lowbrow. The movement is known largely as an underground painting movement, but it also increasingly encompasses digital and sculptural practices, Though Pop Surrealism is centered on gallery-oriented practice, it shares more stylistic and thematic commonalities with illustration than it does with painting as practiced within Contemporary Art, and a great number of leading figures in the movement work regularly within the applied arts. Students will take on the challenge of exploring, within the University framework, a territory that has developed well outside of academic discourse, and in many ways represents a rejection of critical analysis. In order to do this, students will engage in a methodology that alternates between an indulgence in impulsive expression and a consideration of the imagery’s implications in social context. The goal will be to bridge gap between the raw, intuitive spontaneity of this genre and the university’s dedication to cultural inquiry.

PNTG 314 S001 – The Vicinity of Painting (6)

Mondays, 1:00pm – 7:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Yunhee Min

Topic: Special Site Project: Union Gospel Mission, Vancouver, 2011

This course is designed as a studio course with an actual site project to be completed by the end of the course. The students will work as a group of teams to research including site visits, to carry out a studio production (planning/working out the design/material, etc) and to execute the final works on site. The goal is for the students to gain a working knowledge and experience as well as to understand the community and the various contexts involved in a site project.

Students who have taken a PNTG 314 are also encouraged to sign up.

SOCS 300 S002 – Studies in the Social Sciences (3)

Mondays, 1:00pm – 3:50pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Susanne Becker-Von Dadelsen

Topic: Representing Realism: New Developments in TV-Documentaries

Since the international success of “Living History” and “Reality TV”, new forms and formats of the documentary genre have evolved for television. These productions attract large audiences by their “event” appearance and their playful, or else shameless transgressions of responsibility and ethos of the classic documentary film. They also radically change modes of representation and notions of what is “real”. This has to do with their self-conscious choice of content and narrative strategies, but also with the chances of digital production. Digital technology, some think, hightens the possibilities of “realism”. Others emphasize, that it provokes a new relationship between viewer and image that also challenges what we perceive as “reality”. In this course, we will watch international documentaries illustrating recent developments of the genre and read theoretical texts on the impact of these changes.

SOCS 300 S003 – Studies in the Social Sciences (3)

Mondays, 5:30pm – 8:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: M Simon Levin

Topic: Network/Connect/Collaborate: The New Art of Association

Teleconferencing with SOCS 300 S040

Are we Facebook friends or Twitter followers? Do you subscribe to iTunes U or Open U? The Tea Party or Green? Where do you get your news Al Jazeera or Fox? Is it Creative Commons or locked down? Do you depend on Wall Street or Eurozone? Landed Immigrant or mobile citizen? One passport, or two? Are you LinkedIn, hooked up, or embedded? The question of association or affiliation has re-emerged as a defining element of the 21st century culture. Following 9/11 and the disintegration of the so-called global economy, this 18th century pre-occupation has returned and is influencing contemporary art. Building on sociologist Bruno Latour’s notion of Actor Network Theory (ANT), this course looks at the question of association. In other words, it offers different ways of approaching the often invisible connections between actors—people and objects—that come together in contemporary art practice.

Challenging artificial distinctions between form and content, this hybrid course is built around on a model of blended-learning. Using a networked media platform to build realtime dialogue through different Emily Carr communities, online and face-to-face, this course will connect students on Granville Island and Vancouver Island around a cluster of shared interests or concerns. Driven by an ongoing collaboration between media artist M. Simon Levin and academic Glen Lowry (marayaprojects.com), this innovative SPACE course seeks to give students the opportunity to address thematic concerns around networking, collaboration, association and assembly by investigating the potential for new forms of exchange and collaboration that reach beyond the scope of the traditional classroom. This course seeks to think and talk through the positive and negative implications of making creative work in an increasingly networked world.

SOCS 300 S040 – Studies in the Social Sciences (3)

Mondays, 5:30pm – 8:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Glen Lowry

Topic: Network/Connect/Collaborate: The New Art of Association

Teleconferencing with SOCS 300 S003

VAST 310 S001 – Visual Art: Special Topics (3)

Mondays, 4:30pm – 7:20pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Kyla Mallett

Topic: The Expanded Archive

This special topics course is a 6-credit hybrid academic/studio course (HUMN 311 + VAST 310), which focuses on current discourses on and around ideas of the archive and contemporary art.

VAST 313 S001 – Visual Art Projects (6)

Mondays, 8:30am – 3:50pm, Spring 2012

Instructor: Keith Doyle

Topic: Sculpture as Utility: Shop, Social, Trade

In this course students will come up with novel solutions that either support or subvert the traditions of a conventional art and design marketplace. Narrative-driven approaches will act as a framework for exploration. We will learn how well planned projects, objects and structures aid in the creative process and enhances productivity.

The functional forms we make will operate between sculpture and utility. Class projects, structures, objects, service & media will be developed with the intent to share or barter as part of a larger beneficial social economy.

We will explore themes that can generate value applied to a marketable commodity in the social economy as well as the conventional marketplace. Students will work towards the production of functional form; applications will include flat-pack, foundry and digital output.

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Special Topics

Special Topics

Spring 2012

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