What Art Has to Say: Creative Responses to Societal Challenges

Course goals

After completion of this course, students have learned to:

• identify, describe, and explain arts-led thinking in contemporary artistic and creative practices;
• identify, describe, and explain the situatedness of contemporary artistic and creative practices;
• identify, describe, and compare the medium specificity of artistic and creative objects and practices in their reflection on contemporary culture and society;
• use the method of medium-specific analysis to inquire how the affordances and characteristics of concrete media objects and practices give shape to creative acts of futuring.

Content

Playful and speculative design, satire and humour, new forms of fiction, decolonial counter movements, collective making, or (queer) joy as a form of resistance: these are just some examples through which artists and designers meet the societal challenges of our time and rehearse for a better world. These challenges include, for example, political polarization and the lack of social cohesion, feelings of alienation in a digital society, social media fatigue, racial and ecological injustice, and gender inequality.  In response, artistic and creative practices produce alternative scenarios and worlding strategies to present ways of doing things differently. They engage, in short, in creative acts of futuring. Through medium specificity and situatedness, these practices are acts of active thinking.
 
This is what we will call arts-led thinking and thinking through practice, a theme that runs through all the courses in this package. In this course, we will explore what this means by studying a broad range of performative, screen-based, location-oriented, embodied and interactive works and events. You will learn to recognise how the medium specificity and situatedness of these works produce thoughts and questions about the subjects under scrutiny, and how users or audiences are invited to engage with them. 
 
Topics addressed may include environmental storytelling, smart fashion, the politics of science fiction, situated screen practices, social choreography, creative AI, deep listening, critical media art and games, intersectionality in performance, pleasure activism, or intergenerational legacies.

The assignments in this course comprise a group presentation and individually final paper. For the presentation, you will also submit annotated presentation slides that identify, describe, and compare the situatedness and medium specificity of artistic and creative objects. In your individual paper, you describe, explain, and analyse how the specificity and situatedness of the object or practice of your choice a) acts as a form of arts-led thinking in relation to contemporary culture and society; and b) presents alternative scenarios and worlding strategies for a different future.

This course is the first course in the specialisation track Performing Arts and Creative Technologies.

Additional information

Priority rules
This course has priority rules and a waiting list. Your enrolment is guaranteed if you

- are a student in the BA Media and Culture and this course is part of your specialisation (verdiepingspakket)
- are a student in the BA Liberal Arts and Sciences or Taal- en Cultuurstudies and this course is part of your specialisation (kernpakket)
- are an exchange student and meet the course’s entry requirements

In all other situations, you will be placed on a waiting list if you enrol in this course. For any remaining slots in the course, lots are drawn among the students on the waiting list.