INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMINAR           COURSE OVERVIEW

Topologies

The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities.
    —Artists play a major role in forming a city’s cultural vision and future.

Given the speed of current (radical) social, economic, environmental and technological change, how may we, as individuals, effectively contribute to the quality of future global community life?

Topologies, a mostly studio/city practice seminar, provides critical thought within the broad range of cartographic possibilities topologies suggests. While inquiring first into the historical forms of pictographs or picture writing, the course moves quickly into contemporary issues—namely the formless territory of topologies, their malleable, amorphous groupings, subsets, and distortions that we might encounter as we become aware of our individual patterns and habits and their transformative possibilities.

With an emphasis on research and personal mapping, students are asked to (de)scribe experiential exterior and interior places and spaces, while attuning to the reciprocal exchange and relative scale between “listening in” and “looking out.” Employing any visual media, environments of study may include natural or manmade places, imagined or symbolic experiences, including modes of transportation (i.e., walking, taking the bus, subway or train) as velocity and systems for moving between starting points and destinations also impact physical sensations.

Since maps are miniature in scale (a scale that relates to the human body), personal maps may visually serve as “sketches” for recording the physical and emotional spaces we inhabit or navigate. By exploring a city on foot, without an official map, “feeling space” amplifies how the physical body becomes engaged, finding one’s way, often evoking associative memories and desires that coalesce a sensitive film-like substance where new impressions may emerge allowing one to reimagine or transform a previously an unknown sense of belonging, departing or simply passing through environmental conditions.

trajectories

A variety of topological map forms and short exercises initiate the process for “practicing space” while collecting fragments and traces between a specific starting point and known destination. Final projects will then enlarge to include tangible intrinsic qualities of manmade, organic, non-linear and self-making intuitive “systems” that could potentially serve to (re) cycle, (re) purpose or (re) generate one’s perception of inner and outer spaces. Three required texts* and a reader of selected short passages provide insight toward trans/disciplinary perspectives.

*Fritjof Capra's Web of Life, Italio Calvino's Invisible Cities, Guattari & Deleuze Rhizomes.

topologies was first offered as an interdisciplinary seminar at the san francisco art institute © 2002