Christoph Draeger

We live in a world that is not only defined but also fragmented by a never-ending flow of information delivered by the media. Thanks to the now almost exclusively digital delivery, we have highly sophisticated instruments to record, duplicate and safeguard more information on our hard drives than we can ever hope to process psychologically. The world views we scramble to synthesize in our consciousness from that information flow – were they visible images – would probably have to resemble incredibly complex Dadaist collages.

But what shall we do with these incredible treasures, these mountains of dirt? One approach could be to pose ourselves questions about the subjective relativity of all things, how images and information relate to our own life.

This is a course on art and media, with the main emphasis on collage, investigating the relation of construction, destruction and reconstruction in image production. Mainly, we will collect materials from newspapers, magazines, books, download images from the web and print them, cut and paste, and produce a holy mess in the studio. All techniques can be applied and incorporated in the collage process.

Research, collecting and finally focusing on an individual project are important steps in the course. We will start by conducting daily exercises focusing on one theme at a time, such as "the representation of the body" (incorporating a live model), "architecture and urbanism", "catastrophe, war and media", thus trying to define a repertoire from which we can each develop our individual projects. In parallel, we will study historical examples by Dadaists, Cubists, Pop Art and Fluxus, and by contemporaries. They will give us a theoretical backdrop and inspiration for our own working process.

Assistant: Christopher Steinweber