Bothell Creative Writing 512 – Poetics Seminar: Art, Technology, and Practice

Explores relationships among art, technology, and creative practice. Examines connections among diverse art forms, inquiring into their social, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions
Overview
How does an artwork know it’s an artwork? a novel, a novel; a poem, a poem; a photograph, a photograph; or a Facebook page a Facebook page? How, in other words, does the question of the medium intersect with possibilities for expression and creativity? Is engaging with an artistic medium like becoming a spiritual medium, one who goes into trance in order to speak in words that are not their own? Or is it more like a biological medium in which cells divide and split and take on lives of their own? Or is it more akin to a technological medium that provides new ways of experiencing and engaging with the world around us?
If an artwork knows it’s an artwork – or if a medium knows it’s a medium – how can this awareness be shared or withheld in order to add context and depth to the work we make as artists? How, in other words, can the question of the artwork itself form a horizon for the poetics of a practice? This is poetics, not as a reflective deconstruction of practice as it already happens, but as the premonitory exploration of how the media we choose dictate possibilities of content.
This course explores questions of media complexity – that is, the ways in which the media we engage with contextualize how and what we produce as creative practitioners. If poetics is the study of “why we write how we write,” this class asks the question of whether understanding the larger context of why we create the way we do also serves to expand possibilities for how and what we produce as creative practitioners. Beginning with examples from the world of visual art, the course expands towards a larger understanding of technology as the code discourse for contemporary art and practice.
On the question of art we will be reading Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics which explores ways in which contemporary (visual) art has begun to re-define itself as a social and philosophical practice, as well as Paul Virilio’s critique of contemporary art in Art and Fear. On the question of technology, we will be reading Martin Heidegger’s seminal text The Question Concerning Technology which provides a way of linking questions of creative practice with larger context questions of media and medium complexity. On the question of practice, we will be reading excerpts from Sherry Turkle’s edited book, The Inner History of Devices which provides many short narrative accounts of the ways in which media influence and reconfigure our relationship to the world – supplemented by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker’s compilation Code Drifts which brilliantly fuses questions of art, practice and technology such as to provide an expansive view of contemporary creative context.
Guiding the discussions in this class will be the question of what happens when art, technology and practice are seen as aspects of the same question – the question, in this case, of poetics as the understanding of why we do what we do as creative practitioners. This is not limited to choices we make on our own, but deeply influenced by the media we use?and the ways in which these media also use us.