Now over 10 years old, “Social Practice” is a term broadly applied to a variety of art-making strategies that implicates other people and/or social systems in their making. The genre has diversified from representing social forms (dinner parties, conversations) into stand-alone museums, real estate cooperatives, and schools: projects that intervene into real-world systems on their own terms.

This class will engage the power of systems thinking in making artworks that interrupt and/or reimagine the systems that comprise our contemporary experience from personal to global scales. We will look at personal systems and social systems, game design and the writings of Donella Meadows, as well as technological, economic, and civic systems. Through lectures, reading assignments, discussions, project frameworks, and critiques, students will work to define their own interests in and forms of systems interventions.

Students will work collaboratively and independently on projects that critically engage contemporary and relevant topics and contexts, local or global, online or offline.