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.

Course Objectives

Topologies is a theory/discipline seminar providing critical thought within the broad range of possibilities topologies suggests. While inquiring first into the historical forms of pictographs or picture writing, we move quickly into the complex territory of contemporary issues regarding topologies —namely the varied structures of their possible groupings, subsets, distortions or transformations. How, if we are consciously aware of our individual patterns, can we effectively contribute to the future of global and community cultural life, given the speed of current (radical) environmental, social, technological and economic changes?

With an emphasis on research, students guide their work by tuning into the reciprocal exchange and relative scale between "listening in" and "looking out". Course praxis, employing any visual media, is based on (de)scribing experiential representations of interior and exterior places and spaces, natural/man made environments, or other abstract/symbolic representations of the world.

Since maps are miniature in scale, a scale that relates to the human body, maps inherently become stand-in-sites or points referencing physical and psychological spaces we inhabit and navigate. Personal memories, desires, sensations and images are thought to be a sensitive film on which perceptions and experiences are enmeshed. These subjective representations of intentionally (re)imagined sites inform and open discussion to questions, such as: How do we navigate and transform the terrain and conditions of particular places, which we also define ourselves as belonging to, passing through or departing from?

Trajectories

A range of topological map forms and six short assignments initiate the process for locating and collecting fragments, tracks and traces. Final projects engage and enlarge the intrinsic qualities found within complex, organic, biological, non-linear and self-making systems, which (re)cycle or (re)generate over time. Two required texts* and a substantial course reader provide insights through topical writings of varied genre.

*Fritjof Capra's Web of Life and Italio Calvino's Invisible Cities