Images can do many things: show, reveal, shape perceptions, extract intimate truths, trigger emotions, carry memories, provide companionship, map and capture. The list, of course, is much longer, and it keeps expanding. Images live between bodies and media; they are also seen as protagonists that can act. Images function as an apparatus that can read our mind, or bind affect, visual experience and creation. Visual media are intimately entangled with aspects of the mind, emotions, memory processes, cognition and imagination. In different moments in history the working of the mind was compared to medium, or a recording technology. Analogies have been made between traumatic memory and photography, or consciousness and film, computers and the mind. Many artists examine and complicate this relationship. Their works create an image space, which reflects on the memory function of images, their relationship to technical media and open ways of looking, which are more in touch with traumatic, subjective, material epistemologies. They resonate with the realization of Antonio the protagonist in Calvino’s short story “The Adventure of a Photographer” that photographing photographs is the only course he has left. Moving from one image to the next, opens a space for a visual archeology that retraces the life of objects and materials and reveals the capacity of photography to create orders and typologies. Photographic images are also characterized by a parallel tendency towards entropy and loss memory, which is amplified, or accelerated by digital technologies. They provide us with a sea of data, which surpasses our capacity to handle it, saturates attention spans, and results in entropic flattening of experience. A series of artworks will take us on a journey, or one possible journey, in which the image and its medium reveal themselves as models of both mental processes, and a form of knowledge.

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Design Theory Course 

Images have manifold power to show, to affect, and to shape perceptions. They simultaneously draw and resist the gaze. They are places of negotiation of meaning and critique, of resistance. They trigger debate, articulate forms of knowledge, and invite thinking. But they also invite empathy, fascinate, and trigger passions and capture us in the complexity of visual experience. Their affective and public power is entangled with their presence between media and the force field of the body. We live with, and we make images on the surface of a page, a screen, as a projection, or as a mental image. The hand, the mind, or a medium, are equally protagonists in the process of image making, which involves skill and gesture, object, material, substance, technology, but also imagination, paying attention to detail, and thinking along not so obvious paths as resistance, reduction and considering failure as a productive moment.

For each session of the theory seminar we will read and discuss two texts, which examine a similar object, concept or question from a different perspective, and thus create a productive tension or a counter-point. The course material includes an interdisciplinary selection of key texts, which will allow us to drift through a network of questions and concepts belonging to design theory, art theory, visual studies, media studies, philosophy of design, anthropology of images. We will engage in discussions of the fluctuating identity of images and artefacts, processes of making, visibility and performativity of images and objects. The selection of concepts and texts creates an open constellation, and provides model of how to work with conceptual tools without losing the key issues of one’s own creative practice out of sight. The texts will be introduced by a short lecture, to be followed by a group discussion. The students will develop skills to formulate questions in a productive way, and to mobilize the potential of the selection of theory fragments into their own creative practice and research.

The course includes a theory seminar every two weeks, followed by a group critique session, and individual talks.