Seminars
From Chelsea Wiki
Seminar Options at Chelsea evolve over four weeks and enable specific topics and themes to unfold in more depth and within a discursive environment. Some of the seminars include:
Phenomenology: Appearance and Perception 2009-2010
- The topic of this seminar will be phenomenology. What phenomenology asks questions about is the directedness of perception, thought and action towards the world. For example, when you hear a bell ringing, how is it that the perception in you is of the bell out there? Or when you think of Rome in the age of the Caesars, how is your thought now about Rome then? And when imagining a unicorn, where does the unicorn exist that you are thinking about?
- One of the things that the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty repeatedly emphasized was that what perception is directed to takes the form of a Gestalt. Cinematic montage, for example, he suggested worked because of Gestalt perception. A Gestalt is a figure, a shape, whose parts take on a meaning conferred on them by the whole. So, the individual shots in a film montage take on a meaning in relation to the sequence of which they are part—we perceive it as a Gestalt, just as objects in our experience generally, appear for us as part of a wider context.
- So, in this seminar we will explore some basic aspects of the phenomenology of perception, following the ideas Merleau-Ponty and other writers. Our sessions will be based on readings from phenomenologists on perception and appearance. The discussion we will seek to develop will be grounded in ideas and examples drawn from these texts and extended to specific art objects and cultural practices.
Thinking about Meaning and Culture 2007-2008
- What is the relation between culture and meaning? Are there 'meanings' outside culture? If an individual, for example, were to develop a language all of their own what would give its terms meaning? In what sense do the acts and gestures of animals mean anything? And what, ultimately, is the 'meaning' of culture's meanings?
- In this seminar together we will explore these and related questions in the course of our discussions. Our starting point will be examples given in the so-called 'private language argument' contained in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
Beginning with Being and Time 2008-2009
- Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time first appeared in 1927. The book is a fragment of a larger project that was never finished, at least not in the form Heidegger envisaged. What can now be read bound and published under the title of Being and Time could be said to be an exercise in ‘philosophical anthropology’, exploring the social existence of human beings.
Read the brilliant introductory notes
Art & Knowledge Option and the updated Art as Knowledge 2008/09
- This option series will look at some of the ways that art has been and can be understood in terms of knowledge. As artist and art students, we can be seen as “producers and consumers” of forms of knowledge, participants in a “knowledge producing enterprise”. But what is this knowledge?
- This option assumes that the various practices of art are entwined within the values developed by and displayed in a wider material and media culture. Recently, within this wider material culture interest has shifted from the sites of material reproduction to the spaces and forces of consumption – simply put, in our collective imagination the factory has been replaced by the shop.
- The starting point for this project workshop is the so-called ‘educational turn’ in the art-world. This ‘educational turn’, (as seen with exhibitions/events like Unitednationsplaza, Documenta 12, and Night School-New Museum) has been turning away from the art educational institutions and towards the art-world. This project re-turns the exploration of art and pedagogy to the educational site, in this case Chelsea, as a venture between students in dialogue with each other and the institution.
- Free Culture is about exploring whether a model of collaborative, FLOSS like, Gift economy based cultural production is a useful for us as artists. Software is deployed as a metaphor, a model of a process and a possible practice
Seeing Connections 2006-2007
- In this seminar key ideas about seeing and understanding from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations are explored in light of practical examples drawn from film and art.
- Wittgenstein warns that in examining things we often find only what we, by way of our prejudices, put into them:
One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it. (§114)
- Researching modes of documentary
return to Lectures and Seminars
