8.12 - 12.12 2025

Teacher: Doireann O'Malley
Seminar Title: Caught in the Spider’s Web: An Exploration of the Real in Time Based Media

This seminar examines how time-based media—video, performance, sound, and digital art—constructs, questions, and destabilizes the boundary between the real and the artificial. Situating contemporary artistic practice within debates on machine intelligence, students will explore how computational processes, automation, and artificial life reconfigure perception and representation.

Readings and discussions will foreground the interplay of non-binary, animal, and non-human epistemologies alongside indigenous cosmologies that offer alternative models of relation, time, and knowledge. We will consider how these perspectives resist or complicate dominant frameworks of technological progress and control, asking how time-based media can both reproduce and challenge hierarchical divisions between human and non-human, natural and artificial.

In parallel, the seminar introduces somatic experiencing, trans* embodied knowledge, and visualization practices as alternative modes of generating practice-based research and artistic production. These approaches emphasize the body as a site of perception, resistance, and transformation, offering experiential methods that complement theoretical inquiry.

Through critical readings, seminar dialogue, and embodied exercises, students will investigate how artists stage tensions between reality, simulation, and lived experience. Participants will leave with conceptual and practical tools for situating their own work within broader conversations about technology, cosmology, embodiment, and the shifting terrains of time-based media.

Credits: 2

Date/Time: 10:00-18:00 (Dates and place to be announced)

Language: English

Maximum 15 participants.

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