ARC3020Y F
Instructor(s): Miles Gertler
Meeting Section: L0105
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

Schedule + Assignments

The studio will advance in three parts. The results of each will be logged in a collectively produced, single-issue magazine.

Part One

Representation and Language / Weeks 1 and 2 Output: Typological Survey (Lexicon, Archive, Diagrams, Magazine Framework, Ad Hoc Exhibition)

The first two weeks of the semester will be occupied by a two-pronged, group-wide effort to develop a) a discursive vocabulary for parades and ephemeral assemblies and b) to collect and analyze historical and contemporary representations of parades and spin-off typological events. This will culminate in the production of an ad hoc exhibition featuring a typological survey and a working guide to the representation of ephemeral assemblies which will form the first segment of a single-issue magazine that the studio will produce over the course of the semester.

Part Two

A Report / Weeks 3-6 Output: Event Analysis (Illustrated Article, Guided Reading)

Over the following four weeks, students will work alone or in groups of two to examine a single ongoing, recent, or historical parade or processional event and develop a comprehensive visual report documenting its instrumental tactics and formal performance. Students will contribute their work as articles to the collective magazine that will serve as a discursive preamble to the work that they will present at the semester’s close. In the article, each inquiry will articulate a key theoretical finding communicated through a text and the production of drawings of a given research event’s form, breadth, and performative tactics, as well as a larger mapping that accounts for the complete expanse of the parade or processional event’s duration. This assignment will culminate in a performative, guided reading of the collective document’s contents.

Part Three

A Demonstration / Weeks 7-12 Output: Articulation of Tactics, Design of a Float Device and Ephemeral Situation, Schematic Outline for Thesis (Drawings, Live Presentation/Performance, or Video)

Over the final weeks of the semester, students will identify 1 to 2 useful tactics uncovered in their research and theorize them as pragmatic tools for city-building. Equipped with their strategic devices, students will then begin to speculate, simulate, and rehearse parades, protocols, situations, and other forms of ephemeral assemblies that instrumentalize procedure, logistics, and ceremony in service of the improvement of daily life. To that end, students will identify frictions, failures, and ruptures in their own backyard—wherever that may be in realms both material and digital—that point to opportunities for productive intervention. The semester will conclude with a first sketch of a float vehicle or device, an ephermal situation that it belongs to, and a schematic outline for the thesis to come, which is where students may lean into the format of parades or depart from it entirely. Final assignments will add to the collective magazine begun earlier in the semester and be presented additionally through live presentations, performances, and videos.

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