City as Material
September 7, 2009 by Giles Lane
Exploring GF Watts Commemoration of Heroic Sacrifice, Postman's Park London
This week we begin teaching a course on the city as material for artistic practice with students from Vassar College‘s International Program in London. We’ve planned it as a co-creative course, intending to act as facilitators and guides to the students in devising and conducting their own investigations of the city and creating their own interventions. The students will be creating a blog to document their activities, as well as publishing eBooks about their individual projects.
The course is fortnightly (from early September to the beginning of December 2009), based in our studio in Clerkenwell, from where we’ll engage in walks, watching, making, drawing, discussing and eating.
From our course introduction (eBook A4 | US Letter PDF 240Kb),
The focus for this class will be in considering the role of the city as material for artistic experimentation and creation. Only inadequately understood as “public art,” urban interventions produce public space where it does not exist, foster new modes of urban citizenship and participation, render legible the force of political and financial power shaping the global city, expose the mutability of “public” and “private” entailed by new media transformations of social space, create alliances between varied urban stakeholders, challenge the zero-tolerance policies of the increasingly securitized city, and broaden the repertoire of political resistance and direct action. In addition to contemporary practice the course will consider the rich histories of urban intervention by artists in London and elsewhere.
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This person might be of use to you: just over the road on the Strand
Ed
Dr Mark Miodownik
Head of Materials Research Group
Engineering Division
King’s College London
Strand, London, WC2R 2LS
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7848 2442
email: mark.miodownik@kcl.ac.uk
web: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/materials
mat-lib: http://www.materialslibrary.org.uk
podcast: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/tours/materialslibrary/
Thanks Ed, I’ll pass it along to the students.
Thanks also to Marie, who took some great photos of our first walk and blogged about ittoo:
http://mdinlondon.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/academics-oh-right-week-a/
the students have now set up their research blog for the project: http://cityasmaterial.wordpress.com
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