Integrated Arts courses are primarily designed to combine the study of two or more arts, whether from a critical-historical point of view, or within creative workshops. Note that the courses may be cross-listed from other programs.

This course is designed for the artist interested in multimedia, whether it takes the form of a video installation, site-specific installation, interactive situation or live performance. Producing work in this way demands bringing together disparate elements of movement, visuals and sound and learning how to incorporate formal elements and concepts from our various traditional art fields into a new form. The use of space, the gallery or public space as a site for art events offers new possibilities for art expression and can be as diverse as projections in the gallery to DJ/VJ spectacles on the dance floor. Our aim is to continue the development of production skills, conceptual strategies and research methods for the Upper College student who is prepared to undertake two projects, one individual and one in collaboration with another member of the class. Class time will be oriented around student work-in-progress presentations. The establishment of regular work habits and the ability to discuss working methods is assumed. Demos and workshops will be organized in response to students' specific needs. Required guests, screenings or trips to galleries may occur outside of the regular class time. Open to Upper College Integrated Arts majors, and others by permission of the instructors. All interested students should fill out a proposed project description form prior to registration. Forms are on Prof. Ahwesh's office door.

Language is the essence of humanity; poetry is the essence of language. The reemergence of the oral tradition in the digital age has given an edge to word art which this course follows to the culture heart. Exploding Text is a hands-on exploration of a full-bodied literature, providing a theoretical basis for spoken word poetics via deep reading and analysis of text with a launch into physical analogues via performance practice. There is a microphone in the room. This semester we will concentrate on griots, the keepers of geneology, history and the oral tradition in West Africa, with visits from the Susso family of The Gambia. US griots we will study include Ed Sanders, Staceyann Chin, da levy, Ani DiFranco and Amiri Baraka. Hiphop, Dada, Futurism, New York School, Rock, Beat, Black Mountain and other traditions weave through the curriculum. We engage media other than print: video and audio recordings, live music collaborations, poets theater, and the internet are all considered. Students will participate in class collaborations with painters and musicians, and create a performance in at least two media as a final project.

It was Richard Wagner's stated intention to create in opera a total work of art that would incorporate the mediums of poetry, painting, theater, and music into a single composition in which each art might achieve its maximum potential. The implications of Wagner for literary and visual art are manifold. In this course we will study select Wagner opera(s) in order to examine the ways in which the several art mediums actually operate together, to be followed by a reading of some of the major late 19th century and early 20th century avant-garde poets with a view towards how their understanding of the total work of art transformed their poetry, as well as how their view of music itself shaped their production of texts. (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke Mallarme,). Visual artists often reacted against Wagnerian synthesis, in favor of a pure form or radical originality (we will look at the films of Germaine Dulac); yet others sought out new modes of collaboration with non-visual artists (Schwitters, Masson, and Bellmer with the writer Georges Bataille.) Antonin Artaud - actor, poet, visual artist, script writer, radio artist, and theorist of the theater of cruelty - is perhaps the most important early modernist figure for an integrated arts; in Artaud's theater there is a powerful effort, as in Wagner, to return art to its ritual function. Readings in philosophy, poetry, theory of art, opera, and cinema; also Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". An ongoing exploration. Students will be encouraged to produce both critical and multidisciplinary responses to the work under study.

As filmmaker, photographer, sculptor, graphic artist -- even as a jazz pianist, Michael Snow's wide-ranging art has had a significantly influential presence from the early 1960's to the present day. The seminar will focus primarily on what is arguably the core of his achievement, the fifteen or so films which he has made since 1956, with particular attention paid to the major works like Wavelength, La Region Centrale, and Rameau's Nephew. By way of relating Snow's films to his substantial work in other media, we will try to understand the concerns of a radically formalist artist, whose rationalist and witty sensibility approaches the spirit of philosophical inquiry. Snow's concerns include the ontological status of photographic reproduction, the relation of sound to image and language to image as expressive gestures, the quest for the absolute properties of cinematic utterance, the invention of mechanized conceptual structures, etc. As a text, we will use the monumental four volume "The Michael Snow Project," which includes an entire volume devoted to the artist's own theoretical writing, criticism, and working notes.

Meditative silences have always been valued in Eastern traditions of philosophy and art, but it wasn't until the 20t^h century that silence became a major preoccupation in the West. The explorations of silence that one finds in modernist and contemporary art are to some extent direct consequences of the changing palate of noises in mechanization, industrialization, the acoustics of the expanding metropolis, the electronic intimacy of the global village. But the fascination with silence is also connected to scientific discoveries of "invisible forces", relativity, the uncertainty principle, the incompleteness theorem; Freud's theory of the unconscious; the disasters of modern wars and holocausts; heightened awareness of social oppressions. These experiences have sensually and conceptually foregrounded silence in new ways - as object of terror and desire; experience of absence, emptiness, limiting principle; social and political construct. In the early fifties John Cage redefined silence as, not the absence of noise (a physical impossibility), but the ambient noise we're not attending to. This makes the incorporation of silence available as explicit compositional element. This course will investigate aesthetic, spiritual and social silences as they enter selected poetry, visual arts, film, music, performance arts, and multi-media compositions. Students will write a series of short essays and complete two projects - each in a different medium or combination of media - encompassing uses of silence. Required texts by John Cage (Silence, and others), Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as selected essays on aesthetic principles, forms and compositional methods.

(see respective programs for complete descriptions)