ARC3709H F
Instructor: Laura Miller
Meeting Section: L0101
Wednesday, 3:00 - 6:00pm
Location: TBD

The fabricated world that surrounds us is a world we as architects, designers, and artists simultaneously engage and hope to alter through our own creations. This seminar examines some of the ways cultural significance and value are negotiated, qualified, projected, and received through the material artifact. The status of the artifact is considered through a broad range of literary, historical, and theoretical frameworks (such as: models of making, the role of representation; magical and symbolic artifacts; collecting and seriality; classification and indexing; materiality and memory; categories of use (i.e., tool/weapon); nature and artifice; commodity and exchange). Each student will choose a contemporary, everyday consumer artifact to examine and research, selected according to an index of cultural conditions in a state of flux and redefinition today. It is a fundamental assumption of this course that knowledge is embedded within the act of making. Recognizing the often difficult task students face in attempting to apply theoretical concepts to studio work, this seminar engages multiple forms of speculation – from text-based (reading, writing), to visual and material constructions – in testing out ideas from course readings.

Image: Christian Patterson, Telephone Deconstruction #1, Archival pigment print, 32”x40”