PHOT-250: Skewing the Archive

Students will read and discuss forms of manipulation used by individuals, governments, and NGOs to form consensus based on identifications and notions of community. Students will confront how these efforts have affected their production, and use that knowledge to assess how the work they produce, or like, and possibly emulate, has embraced or unveiled these ideas. Over the term, students will make work that embraces and undermines these notions, bringing forms of manipulation to the forefront as a more conscious means of production. Open to image making by any technology from AI, to phone, to traditional photo, drawing, painting, design, sculpture, etc. This course is open to students from any major and term level including graduate students. Class time will include discussion around the archive of artistic production-historic and contemporary-and how its use in culture is used to create an impression of humanity that follows a transactional and trajectory model of history. Some themes of the class will include: marketing, commodity fetish, the illusion of choice, manufactured consent.