ARC465H1 F2
Instructor: John Shnier
Meeting Section: L0103
Fall 2024

More than ever, we have at our disposal, convenient and affordable means to make images that move This course asks students to create “drawings” that are literally kinesthetic, that is sentient and animated, via the medium of a 3-minute digital video. This video will include a soundscape. While the video need not have a conventional “narrative arc”; it must, nevertheless, be experiential and engaging.

We begin with a cursory overview of the 18c Venetian architect and polymath, Gian Batista Piranesi (1720-1778) whose prolific representations of Roman architecture provoke speculation in their meanings and continue to influence contemporary modes of architectural representation. We will promote a series of characteristics, abstractions and actions that can be gleaned from within Piranesi’s work, and used to create a discourse that students will apply to their creative methodologies. Your projects will begin by selecting an image from the 18c Venetian Architect’s 16-plate series: Carceri Invenzione. from which you will extract your initial themes and inspiration. In speculating on Piranesi’s techniques or theses, you will develop your own narratives. They may take on any topic. The work can be seen as curatorial, documentary or fiction; they can be plausible fictions, challenging yourselves and the observers to accept speculation as fact, imagination as real. You are encouraged to play with genre.

Yet, this seminar is not asking you to become experts on Piranesi or 18c history, but rather to imagine yourselves behaving today, in a Piranesian manner as applied to your creative imaginations to create these kinesthetic images.

It is anticipated that you will work in groups of 3 based on enrollment. Each group will present a continuously developed iteration of the film every other week for a total of 5 times culminating with accompanying feedback from the instructor and colleagues with a final screening in front of invited guests, during the week of Exams. The continuous presentation of iterative developments is THE KEY to the success of your projects.

We are not asking you to be film makers but rather to be architects who are using (or abusing) a film/video medium to deliver a kinesthetic and immersive experience that represents a thesis or narrative.

Key Expressions: Lingering in the Penultimate; Triumph of the Fragment; Pleasures of the Incomplete; Zeno’s Paradox; Non-Linear; The Space of Imagination