This advanced class invites students in all disciplines to develop semester-long projects that explore slow aesthetics, slow politics, and slow knowledge. Here, the word “slow” points in several directions: towards more open ways of responding to constant states of urgency and crisis, towards traditional and new forms of knowledge and of political resistance, and towards a renewed relationship to our own lived experience in time. Possibilities for projects are wide-ranging, including social practice and socially engaged work, elongated and durational time-based art forms (performance, film, and music), exploration of slow, analog, and hand-crafted processes in making, detailed scientific observation, archival work, deep-dive scholarship, and long-form experimental writing. Project concepts might incorporate: attentional freedom, awareness, care, decolonialism, degrowth, duration, experience, healing, justice, listening, pleasure, presence, resistance, recuperation, reflection, regeneration, sanctuary, sustainability, and uncapitalism. We will meet weekly to support one another in developing projects, to share and discuss work-in-progress, and to deepen our critical engagement with underlying ideas through related readings. We will also explore ways of making our work public and seeing it through the expansive lens of public action.
Learning Outcomes:
Participants will gain experience in developing and completing long-term projects.
Participants will learn how to support each other’s work through caring engagement.
Participants will deepen their experiential and critical understanding of slow politics, slow knowledge, and slow aesthetics through the lens of public action.
Delivery Method: Fully in-person
Prerequisites:
Interested students should contact the instructor (salrandolph@bennington.edu) with a letter of interest and descriptions of previous work related to what you might want to pursue. Students of any year are welcomed but preference will be given to those who are ready for advanced self-directed work in their areas of interest.
Course Level: 4000-level
Credits: 4
W 2:10PM - 5:50PM (Full-term)
Maximum Enrollment: 12
Course Frequency: One time only
Categories: Advancement of Public Action , All courses , Fully In-Person
Tags: art , CAPA , Experimentation , film and video , interdisciplinary , music , projects , public action , slow , Social Practice , Time , Writing