Fine Arts Seminars are intended to broaden and clarify students' perspective on contemporary art practice. Each semester these seminars shift in focus and subject matter. Seminars may concentrate on art from the perspectives of art history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and so forth, or may take the form of a discipline-based critique focusing on the history, theory, and practice of painting, sculpture, and photography, among others.____This class seeks to resist the artist's tendency to close down the terms within which his or her work is formulated, by reinforcing fierce exploratory experimentation. A supple agility and promiscuous curiosity will be supported through a series of mind- and practice-bending researches inside the confines of the artist's current work. With an eye on the Futurescope, as well as to the multiple personalities that exist within all of us, a set of lenses, prisms, and algorithms will be mapped onto and into the artist's studio procedures to see what the shape of things to come could be, as well as what the shape of things that already are could become. In short, artists will be asked to enter The Anti-Closing Down Machine. The entrance of the Anti-Closing Down Machine is a hall of mirrors equipped with sliding floors, beyond which the artist encounters a wobbly, reconfigurable environment that extends both within themselves and without. This is the region where there lurk moveable holes that can be grabbed and repositioned. It is the realm of Borges' Library of Babel, where Richard Artschwager's blips are equivalent to the U.S. Constitution and the Communist Manifesto; the Rubber Universe within which life and death may or may not take place. The interior of the Machine is scary to the timid, but exciting to those drawn to the foreign and unknown within themselves.Hybrid course sections will be delivered both online and in-person. Required online synchronous meeting times are listed as the meeting pattern for this course section. Additional course components will be delivered asynchronously or in-person as outlined in the syllabus.

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