G.R.O.U.P. Course Offerings 2006-2007

Catastrophe, Memory and Narrative:
Comparative Approaches to 20th Century Atrocity
Alan Tansman (East Asian Languages and Cultures)
and Mariane Ferme (Anthropology). (EALC 101, Anthropology 189-7.)

This course examines Japanese and Jewish responses to 20th-century atrocity, paying close attention to how catastrophic events are mourned and memorialized in memoirs, fiction, poetry, feature films and filmed testimonies, war-crime trials and historical debates, and popular culture. Throughout, students will analyze how cultures with vastly different artistic, religious, and philosophical traditions mourn distinctive historical events. Is the process of mourning universal? Can nations mourn, and can their mourning be compared?

Death in Art
Thomas Laqueur (History) and Guy Micco (School of Public Health).
(History 100.004, Gender & Women's Studies 111.002).

This cross-disciplinary seminar will explore representations of death and dying in the visual arts: paintings, sculpture, contemporary installations, and perhaps a film or two. Our aim is to understand the relationship between these representations and the cultural exigencies to which they respond. In addition to reading, looking and talking, students working in GROUPs will assemble a dossier of relevant art, give a report about it to the seminar, and make the results of their research more widely available through the web or in some other form. We will have visiting artists and scholars in class. Students from all disciplines are welcome. A physician and a historian are the instructors of record and will work closely with the assistant director of the Center for Medicine, Humanities and the Law who is an art historian.

Social Practices: Art and Human Environments
Shannon Jackson (Theater, Dance and Performance Studies/Rhetoric)
and visiting artist Shannon Flattery. (Rhetoric 240G.)

This course will explore a range of art practices that attempt to make a “social” turn in both the content and form of their practice, linking this much-debated turn to a range of movements and debates in 20th-century philosophical and artistic histories ranging from Adorno to Rancière, from Brecht to Situationist International, to the most recent experiments variously called social practice, activist art, conversation pieces, littoral art, relational aesthetics, community arts, performance ethnography, amongst many other terms.

Technology and Culture of Computer Graphics
Greg Niemeyer (Art Practice) and Dan Garcia (Computer Science).
(Center for New Media 003/Art Practice 169/Computer Science 057.)

Between 1985 and 2005, Computer Graphics Animation technologies (CG) have matured from simply technical illustrations to hyperrealist imaging tools. At the same time, American media users increasingly considered CG images as reliable mediations between abstract information and their lived reality. More and more games, animations, news, and most significantly building plans, surgical procedures, and defense systems enter the minds of their users exclusively through computer graphics. This cultural development is comparable, in significant to the growing relevance of cartography over the centuries. The educational goals of the course is for the student to have a historical and cultural understanding of a technology, which suggests the absence of its own history, as it constantly justifies its development with a gesture towards the future. Students will also understand CG technologies from the ground up, and learn to appreciate deep conceptual issues both practically and culturally.