Projection/Installation/Intervention

The course will focus on the ways in which designers and artists can help monuments \”entrenched in the past\” to become enlivened for the living — be relevant, meaningful and critically useful in the present and for the future.

Blank facades and blind eyes of lofty civic monuments face the speechless and estranged residents living in their shadows. The city monuments and the city residents seem to be in need to be animated, even reanimated. In this way, the art of animating monuments may include the animation of ourselves as existential and political subjects, the re-actualization and critical mobilization of built symbolic structures among which we live, thereby developing our more conscious and meaningful relation to them.

The course will primarily focus on video, sound and light projection as tools in interrogating and animating monuments, though students are also encouraged to work with installations and performance as supplementary media for their projects.

These projects will be supported by readings, discussions, and reviews as well as a response and input from guest consultants and critics.

This workshop-seminar will be developed within the context of a planned projection-animation project, engaging the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard. Interested students will be encouraged to take part in social and media aspects of research, development, production, post-production and reception of this project.