Readings for each week are determined by the co-instructors and by the visiting speakers. The first set of readings is assigned by the co-instructors and constitute the course’s prevailing questions, key terms, and distinctive examples of interdisciplinary/anti-disciplinary work. The second set of readings is assigned by the visiting speakers and reflect the particular ideas and concerns animating their work in and across fields and disciplines.
September 2: Introduction
September 9: For the first half of class, we’ll spend some time discussing the reading in this “Experience” Packet, a selection of experience-related texts by Emerson, Benjamin, Williams, Agamben, Robinson, Anzaldúa, and hooks. We will work on this packet next week as well.
Presenters on seminar work: AJL & SG
Our guests Jeff Dolven (English) and Florian Fuchs (German) have asked us to read a nice batch of texts, including: Erasmus’ De Ratione Studii (1514), Locke’s “Of Study” (1677), Locke’s “New Method of a Common-Place Book”(1686) alongside excerpts from their own texts Jeff’s Scenes of Instruction (2007) and Florian’s Civic Storytelling (2023). Plus, a bit of bonus material: “Clipping, Copying, and Thinking,” a recording of a conversation between Ann Blair and Kenneth Goldsmith hosted at Cabinet Magazine in 2011.
September 16: “Experience” continued
We won’t have a visitor during the second half of class so instead will begin brainstorming about possible directions for the final collaborative project.
September 23: Please begin reading this “Knowledge” reading packet, which we will discuss in the first half of class and again on September 30.
Presenters on seminar work: CW & MJ
Our guest Elizabeth Margulis (Music) has asked us to read: 1) the intro to her edited volume The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future and 2) another piece she co-authored called “Cross-Cultural Work in Music Cognition“.
September 30: Activity 1: Graphical Notation (What Is a Score?)
Presenters on seminar work: LDVG+IH
Jeff Whetstone has asked us to read Allan Sekula’s “Fish Story”, a short artist’s statement on a movie he made about ships called “The Batture Ritual“ (please watch and read both), and have a look at the “Ship of Fools” painting + detail by Hieronymus Bosch.
October 7: Activity 2: Plaza Soundscape (Attention and Duration)
“Knowledge,” continued
Presenters on seminar work: ME+ME
Elaine Sciolino will speak mainly about her experiences as a reporter and a writer. She has asked us to read a few classic pieces on writing: Tom Wolfe’s intro to The New Journalism, Edmund White’s “Before a Rendezvous with the Muse, First Select the Music” and Anna Quindlen’s “The Eye of the Reporter, the Heart of the Novelist”. She has also offered us a couple NYT articles she co-authored along with interviews she conducted with former French president Jacques Chirac regarding Iran.
October 14: FALL BREAK
October 21: “University” reading packet
Presenters on seminar work: TBD
Our guest Robert Harrison has asked us to read the first four parts of Descartes’ Discourse on Method and an excerpt of his book Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992) about method.
October 28: “University” reading packet, continued
Presenters on seminar work: NI+HF
Our guest Tina Campt has asked us to read Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and the introduction and opening chapter to her book Listening to Images.
November 4: Field trip to the 3D Audio and Applied Acoustics (3D3A) Laboratory to experience the anechoic chamber and three-dimensional sound, as inspiration for our final project.
Presenters on seminar work: LSE+SPT
Our guest Paize Keulemans (East Asian Studies) has asked us to read an excerpt from Alex Galloway’s Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture and his own article “(Early) Modern Forms of Chinese Literary Play”.
November 11: Edgar Garcia, Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography
Presenters on seminar work: SD+EB
Jane Cox has asked us to watch a portion of a video of the opening conversation of a symposium she co-organized with Tavia N’yongo at the Park Avenue Armory called “Sound and Color: The Future of Race and Design“. The video is here. She writes, “I’m in the conversation, along with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Mimi Lien and Mikaal Sulaiman, all artists who I collaborate with regularly. The conversation picks up at 7.45 in the video with Branden’s introduction, and ends at the beginning of the Q&A at about 46 minutes. So that’s about 40 minutes of video to watch or listen to that introduces both ‘what is theater design’ and also some of the things that theater designers think about.”
She also asked us to read the rehearsal script for the first act of the project that she just designed for the Abbey Theater in Ireland, which is a new adaptation of Sophocles Theban Trilogy, by an Irish playwright, Marina Carr. It is called The Boy.
November 18: Please have a look at Montaigne’s “Au Lecteur” (“To the Reader”) and the tables of contents (in English here and French here) of the essays and read Sara E. Johnson, Introduction and Chapters 1 & 2, from Encyclopedie noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Mery’s Intellectual World
Presenters on seminar work: NG+DA
Rhaisa Williams has asked us to read Joshua Chambers-Letson’s “The Body Is Never Given, Nor Do We Actually See It” and her own text “Grief Capital, Grief Activism”
November 25: No class; only Friday-scheduled classes meet today
December 2: FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATION
