Students must take the following two courses for a total of eight units.
Urban Arts Workshop Paris
IOART-UT 1925 (Undergraduate)
4 units
Urban Arts Workshop–Paris is composed of lectures, presentations, screenings, readings, field trips, field assignments, walks, written reactions, discussions and blogs, as well as visits from guest speakers and artists designed to expose students to the key concepts and fundamental theories of urban studies, public art and the urban-inspired works of many great artists and writers based in Paris. Each class another “form” of urban art will be investigated, including discussions about and encounters with street photography, graffiti, sculpture, installation art, dance, performance art, parkour (freestyle street gymnastics), gorilla theater, art vandalism and underground art, urban sound projects, large-scale projections, poetry, essays and short stories with an aim to understand how such art forms came into being and how they express a distinctly urban message to the inhabitants and visitors of Paris. The instructor seeks to combine the critical and theoretical with the experiential and personal in order to lead students to a deeper and more fruitful relationship with Paris, the arts and themselves.
Course Objectives:
At the completion of this course, the student will be able to:
1) Discern and clarify what is distinctly, “urban,” by applying the fundamental concepts of urban studies to everyday life in Paris.
2) Explain what qualities make Paris a remarkable urban destination. And, to look at how these qualities appeal to the artist as imaginative capital.
3) Identify specific art forms as uniquely, “Urban Art,” through a deep investigation of the reciprocating ways artists affect their cities and cities affect their artists.
4) Differentiate between the multiple urban art forms presented in the class and to perceive to whom and about what these art forms speak, through a careful study of the artists’ intentions, aesthetics, tactics, techniques and impacts.
5) To engage urban art and Paris at a profoundly human level through a close analysis of the urban art-inspired themes of class, race, gender, place and identity in order to appreciate the complex and often contradictory nature of everyday urban life.
6) To focus in depth on one specific urban art form in order to expose a particularly exceptional and compelling facet to peers.
Documenting Culture
IFMTV-UT 1048 (Undergraduate)
4 units
Culture
is palpable – every day we eat it, we speak it, we write it, we perform it, we share it, we defend it, we produce it and we consume it. Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, for it expresses not only who we are, but also who we are not. Tenuously bound up in material creations, practices, and exchanges, culture is, in fact, a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and is easily lost because it truly only exists in our minds. Our written languages, governments, monuments, celebrations and other man-made works are merely the products of culture; they are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists cannot dig up culture directly in their excavations. So how might we begin to not only engage a culture, but to also preserve the most living and essential parts of it? By what means may we navigate a culture, uncovering the richness of meaning embedded within its body of traditions? Throughout history, the most compelling points of entry into a culture have been, without a doubt, the arts and the rituals of daily life. And today, the single greatest witness to this precious parade of human works and wonders has come to be the motion picture camera, an apparatus that is at once capable of documenting a culture as well as mediating it so that both participants and observers may relate to it.
In Documenting Culture: Paris – A Media Arts
Workshop, we will, with cameras rolling, penetrate Paris, la capitale de culture, from the many
captivating points of entry the city offers, including: art, architecture, music, fashion, philosophy, technology, gastronomy and such practices of everyday life as laboring, strolling, conversing, loving, protesting, resting and leisuring. Students will be trained on the essentials of high definition video production and editing in order to create not only thoughtful works, but also the highest quality films, which will be screened in class and posted to the class blog. Assignments include a series of group exercises designed to focus students on the core craft principles of documentary filmmaking and electronic field production as well as individual projects that encourage each student to explore the fingerprint of his or her own creative curiosity.
