Doug Ashford

This course encourages a speculative and nonlinear body of collaborative artistic research and practice that aims to expand definitions of human life, bodies, and politics as experienced by class participants. Key in our work will be designing proposals that challenge the received expectations and qualities of “humanness” as it is defined by the present. Examples could be: the human that is driven toward a wish for death, the body liberated in combination with machines, the historical figure of the monster, the importance of the animal aspect of humanity hidden from culture, the human as a resident of a global city perpetually in revolution, or the critique of what is understood as normality and sanity as an opportunity for regeneration.

These questions will be addressed through a series of selected readings, class demonstrations and discussions. There will be daily collective meetings in which the individual histories and concerns of each participant can be discussed in depth. More centrally, there will be a series of practical assignments that the instructor will also have to follow through a reciprocal participatory set of assignments gleaned from each participant. In other words, we will each propose to the group an alternative to the failures of humanity. The instructor claims no expertise in any aspect of the common dream inherent in the central texts and objects we will examine together, and instead proposes that we invent such expertise together.