Course Description

• Introduction:

In this course the broad area of discourses on collecting in art is approached with a focus on mostly primary readings from the fields of art history, urbanism, cultural studies, philosophy and history of science. Lectures will introduce you to recent discourses on databases as well as current debates about locative media and cartography as they relate to notions of the archive and memory. Class time will be divided between lectures by your instructor, class debate, student presentations of art projects and meetings about your final project.

You will produce a final project either in a writing or a production track in which you can chose from today's old and emerging media.

If you are an obsessive collector just like Andy Warhol, a video aficionado who collects gestures, an art history student with an interest in identity politics of feminist art practices of the 1970s or 1980s, a computer science major or a picture-phoning location-based blogger-- this will be your class.

• Keywords:

finding, tracing, bagging, tagging, collecting, obsessive compulsive cataloguing