Study Guide

Objective

The students will be able to
• get acquainted with topical phenomena and genres in art and other social activity
• express opinions
• develop their critical thinking
• understand the practices of contemporary art and identify those practices, discourses and elements in contemporary art that are relevant to their own work.

Content

Artistic work, the field of contemporary art and the related discourse.

Teaching methods

The course consists of lectures, reading and writing assignments, visits to exhibitions, and short artistic productions both individually and in groups.

International connections

Thoughts of incompleteness, exposure, unpredictability, surprise, and even vulnerability.

Trying things out, constant modification of one’s own thinking encourages open-mindedness.

Willingness to question notions that are already thought to be known.

Recognize the crucial role of the other-than-human ‘other’ in creative dialogues.

Giving up the pursuit of the right answer

Interference in the production of normality (queer reading or gaze), different interpretations, looking past the most obvious level.

Concentrating on process rather than outcomes.

Slow close-up reading and looking

Try out new things and take risks.

Content scheduling

The speculative worlds of art
Strange spaces, times, creatures and materials


How can we define the present? Does it always take place in relation to the past and the future? Does the present (NOW) even exist? What possibilities do we have to speculatively imagine what is to come?
The course will explore how creative world-making practices such as visual art and speculative literature, new technologies, feminist theory, etc., as perspectives and tools, can create or anticipate strange new forms of existence and temporalities, challenging our understanding of the past and opening up unexpected and potentially more promising futures.
The course aims to emphasize the need to structure experiences as fiction in order to understand them. By creating speculative systems or worlds through artistic work, our relationship with materials, objects, words and living and non-living beings will be explored.

The course will cover topics such as:

- The means of (speculative) fiction in art and art text
- Worlds within worlds
- New temporalities (times and spaces)
- New technologies, Artificial Intelligence, AR, VR, etc.
- Trying to pay attention to the overlooked, including non-human beings and matter
- The interconnection between the digital world and natural systems
- The invisible made visible or sensed

Evaluation scale

H-5

Objective

The students will be able to
• get acquainted with topical phenomena and genres in art and other social activity
• express opinions
• develop their critical thinking
• understand the practices of contemporary art and identify those practices, discourses and elements in contemporary art that are relevant to their own work.

Content

Artistic work, the field of contemporary art and the related discourse.

Evaluation scale

H-5

Objective

The students will be able to
• get acquainted with topical phenomena and genres in art and other social activity
• express opinions
• develop their critical thinking
• understand the practices of contemporary art and identify those practices, discourses and elements in contemporary art that are relevant to their own work.

Content

Artistic work, the field of contemporary art and the related discourse.

Evaluation scale

H-5