Teaching

»Everything we know, we know through light« – Peter Weibel, 2018

For some people, light is information, for others it is a form of representation of power. Light can be a metaphor for spiritual revelation but also a triumph over darkness. Light is the smallest amount of energy that can be transported and for a large part of humanity, light stands for wisdom and enlightenment - a fascinating and powerful material for artists and designers.

In the project module Enacted photons - exploring light as an artistic medium, we will search for a mysterious, playful, humorous and imaginative approach to the medium of light. The question arises as to what artistic and creative possibilities open up when light - both in the visible and non-visible spectrum - is used experimentally. The aim of the project module is to explore and prototype new forms of interaction with the medium of light. In addition to a basic understanding of the physical phenomenon of light and its physiological effects, we want to explore the character of light and develop interesting connections between light and human experience.

»Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming.« (Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway 2007)

»(…) each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other« (Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation)

Every interface, *jede Schnittstelle*, implies a decision of cutting together/apart aspects of our bodily, technological, and natural realities. As artists and designers we are in the privileged position of being able to imagine and build interfaces between phenomena, energies and matters that haven't been recognized yet. Our art and design projects can ask questions and create narratives that build bridges between things, events and movements of various zones that otherwise would remain disconnected.

In this seminar we will develop a sensitivity to the complex entanglements and complications of what we consider as natural, cultural, material and technological and how these permeate each other. As observers from within, we can experience, imagine, speculate, program and build interfaces that diffract, compute, critique and participate in these networks.

Some research questions that this seminar offers are for example:

• How can we interface with (our) bodies and environments in a way that resists colonial approaches such as extractivism, without falling into an ecological conservatism?
• How can we appropriate technologies to destabilize gridded, cartesian notions of space to provoke open, poetic, indeterminate and careful orientations within and through space?
• How can we resist essentialist assumptions about (our) naturalized bodies and diffract how we relate to the more-than-human world?

Instead of creating distance to the world, how can we re-appropriate media-technologies as explorations of relational belongings, in a manner of decolonial poetic interventions (Glissant)?

Through a series of hands-on workshops, reading + movie sessions, and field/body research trips, we will develop skills and tools to find our own answers to these or other questions. Together, we will build a collaboratve framework of references that allows us to make projects that contribute to the complex networks of our technological and natural reality in meaningful ways.

Certificate of achievement

• Regular attendance and participation
• Participation in workshops, excursions, interim and final presentations
• The work/project must be presented at the end of the lecture period
• The documentation of the projects/works takes place during the lecture-free period until the end of the semester and is expected as either a project in progress documentation or finished work documentation (guidelines for this TBD in the class)

Please send a letter of interesting (max. 250 words), explaining your interest in the course, as well as your level of (theoretical + technological) knowledge and background to: lotta.stoever[at]uni-weimar.de