DXARTS 490: Art and the Environment, Winter 2014
Monday 10:30 - 01:20 RAI205
Add code is required; please contact Yolande Harris directly at <yo@yolandeharris.net>.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Yolande Harris is a visiting artist who is an internationally renown composer and artist who is engaged with sound and image in environment and architectural space. Her most recent artistic research projects Sun Run Sun: On Sonic Navigations (2008-2009), and Scorescapes (2009-2011) explore sound, its image and its role in relating humans and their technologies to the environment. These works consider techniques of navigation, sound worlds outside the human hearing range, underwater bioacoustics and the sonification of data. They take the form of audio-visual installations and performances, instruments, walks, performative lectures and writings.
DESCRIPTION
Artists play an important role in investigating changing human relationships to the environment. In recent decades scientific research has revealed systemic environmental transformations on a global scale. Given this context, artists are increasingly aligning their roles within collaborative, social and technological projects that often emphasize complex interactions at scales beyond human perception. Beginning from this general background, the seminar will operate on three integrated levels: research, lab visits and production. Topics will include: making the inaudible audible and visual, underwater sound, sound and energetic transductions, field recordings and displaced sound/image, mapping visualizations and navigations. Presentations, readings and discussions will locate these topics within a dynamic aesthetic and theoretical context, including land art and acoustic ecology, eco-art and locative media. Students will design questions for research visits to UW labs that sp!
ecifically use audification, sonification and visualization to research aspects of the environment. We will discuss a variety of artistic approaches to environmental technologies and research, to experiment with when working towards a final artistic project.
