The Media Lab: The Image as Theory and Practice
Offered by Kari ROSENFELD and Sheila ZAGO on Sunday mornings and/or evenings.
The course will be hosted for early birds from 10 am to 1:00 pm AND night owls from 5 pm to 8:00 pm provided that no less than five participants sign up per class.
The Media Lab is a visual arts practice based course focused on photography with workshops on video, performance, and poetry. Each class will address three aspects of a visual arts practice: theory, history, and craft. This course will be a practice based course on how we use theory. We will look at the the history of photography as a contemporary art and will address the different ways in which photography can be used as a visual medium. It will focus on how art and theory can become not just frameworks for one another but interact. The lab will directly address the issues created by this separation of art and theory and apply it to the creation of work that pushes against this separation by radically and intentionally questioning the traditional notions of formality. Half of each class will be directed at craft. We will take cues and inspiration from looking at history and theory, then we will put these ideas into practice with small projects each class that each focus on one particular element of the photographic craft. In the second half of the semester the Media Lab will guide students through a focused project that will culminate in a group art show at the end of the semester allowing students the opportunity to think about creating work to be displayed.
We recommend this course for anyone wanting to experiment with new ways of seeing and making art. While this course is focused on photography, it will include workshops in poetry, film, and performance in order to expand the possibilities of a visual arts practice. We also recommend this course be taken in conjunction with “Why Do I Love You? (The Structures of the Beautiful)”.
Topics by week:
Offered by Kari ROSENFELD and Sheila ZAGO on Sunday mornings and/or evenings.
The course will be hosted for early birds from 10 am to 1:00 pm AND night owls from 5 pm to 8:00 pm provided that no less than five participants sign up per class.
The Media Lab is a visual arts practice based course focused on photography with workshops on video, performance, and poetry. Each class will address three aspects of a visual arts practice: theory, history, and craft. This course will be a practice based course on how we use theory. We will look at the the history of photography as a contemporary art and will address the different ways in which photography can be used as a visual medium. It will focus on how art and theory can become not just frameworks for one another but interact. The lab will directly address the issues created by this separation of art and theory and apply it to the creation of work that pushes against this separation by radically and intentionally questioning the traditional notions of formality. Half of each class will be directed at craft. We will take cues and inspiration from looking at history and theory, then we will put these ideas into practice with small projects each class that each focus on one particular element of the photographic craft. In the second half of the semester the Media Lab will guide students through a focused project that will culminate in a group art show at the end of the semester allowing students the opportunity to think about creating work to be displayed.
We recommend this course for anyone wanting to experiment with new ways of seeing and making art. While this course is focused on photography, it will include workshops in poetry, film, and performance in order to expand the possibilities of a visual arts practice. We also recommend this course be taken in conjunction with “Why Do I Love You? (The Structures of the Beautiful)”.
Topics by week:
- The photograph as contemporary art and using light
- Curation: the museum as collective memory and archival practice
- Poetry Workshop
- Social Media: acts of curation
- Connecting Art and Theory
- The rising of ephemeral and urban art
- Photo stories and narrative
- Film workshop
- Ethics in Art
- Performance Workshop
- EXHIBITION PREP
- EXHIBITION PREP
Kari ROSENFELD is from Houston, Texas. She worked as a fashion photographer and producer before studying analytic philosophy at the University of Texas. She has since worked as an artist using writing, video, and photography. She serves as the Artist in Residence at CILAS Alex.
Sheila ZAGO, The Nomad Curator, is an art professional, an educator, an institution and a woman. She founded an art collective in Brazil in 2008 and has been working around the world for the past years. Latest projects include art and educational programs with Conexus Project for Palestinian and Syrian refugees (Beirut, Beqaa Valley, Damascus, Miniara and Tripoli), curated exhibitions in Doha, Venice and Islamabad, a collaborated art program in the Brooklyn Children's Museum (New York), a workshop for Azerbaijani emerging artists at Yarat Contemporary Art (Baku), multiple projects on decentralisation of art in Cairo and other Egyptian cities and the participation as a curator and art educator at Something Else - Off Biennale Cairo. Currently based between Beirut and Cairo, and with the collaboration of international and local art institutions, The Nomad Curator offers an international art residency, educational programs, consultancy for solo and group exhibitions and development of independent projects.