The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA)
and
the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI)

announce 2009-2010 Systemwide Course Series

Fall 2009:
Course Title: Mapping The Desert, Deserting the Map
Instructor: Dick Hebdige
Units:2 undergraduate credit or INT 201MD for graduate credit. Students from other campuses may register by Simultaneous Enrollment for undergraduate credit or via the Intercampus Exchange Program for graduate credit. Please see http://www.registrar.ucsb.edu/Intercampus.htm#sim-enroll or contact your home campus registrar for additional information.

Meeting time: tbd

This is an intensive, low- residency course including participation in a dry- immersion roving symposium scheduled for October 22-25, 2009 in Joshua Tree/29 Palms and the Coachella Valley. The symposium will include tours of the 29 Palms Marine Base, Joshua Tree National Park, and the lower desert dune and oasis systems.

The desert as place of origins, endings and open horizons, as dumping ground and refuge of last resort, as unspoiled wilderness, irradiated hinterland and  theater of war, as speculative real estate development opportunity and as spiritual, technological and artistic test site has for millennia served as a screen for multiple and contradictory human projections.

Using written texts, films, photographs, field trips and Google Earth this class sets out to map the Desert along with the actual desert in which we reside while in the process mapping the limits of mapping (i.e. deserting the map).

Mapping the Desert, Deserting the Map forms part of a larger project entitled Mapping the Californian Desert organized and jointly coordinated by UCIRA, UC Riverside's Sweeney Gallery and the UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center. Mapping the Californian Desert will include temporary installations, talks, performances, film screenings and desert excursions/'dry immersions' scheduled throughout the 2009-2010 academic year. The course is also designed to provide an academic/course-related link to one of UCIRA's new areas of interest - Social Ecologies: California-centric embedded arts research, as well as UCHRI's new California Studies Initiative.

For more information about registering for the course, please visit our website at http://www.ucira.ucsb.edu or contact ZouZou Chapman at zchapman@ucira.ucsb.edu / 805.893.3098
Full information about the required dry-immersion roving symposium is available at http://www.ucira.ucsb.edu/Mapping%20the%20Desert%20Call.html.

For more information about the symposium aspect of this class, please click here.

Winter 2010:
Course Title: Social Technologies: New models of value exchange
Instructor: Kim Yasuda and Marko Peljhan
Short Description:
Throughout history, artists have created new forms of collective practice that enable them to work and operate in the most difficult and challenging economic and societal conditions. From the historical avant-gardes - with their systems of innovative and integrative educational, research and presentation models, through the Productivist period in Russian Constructivism, which created methodologies for art, life and societal integration on an unprecedented ideological and philosophical scale, to collective post-war visionary efforts such as Black Mountain College, the Situationist International and the conceptual art and art/life movements of the 60's and 70's - to current open source/open knowledge systems enabled by the network paradigm shift in the 90's, artists have created participatory practices based on new models of evaluating production and capital. Current economic conditions have precipitated a re-emergence of such forms of collectivism, exchange and 'anticipatory' practices, i.e. those that seek to imagine and address possible future economic and social modalities. This course will establish opportunities for students from across the UC system to explore new methods of value and idea exchange necessary to navigate a rapidly evolving 21st century environment. Visiting artist will include members of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (Los Angeles), Chto Delat (St. Petersburg) and the arts-centered, community organizing project, AREA of Chicago.

Spring 2010:
Course Title: Social Ecologies: California-centric embedded arts research
Instructor: Kim Yasuda and members of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers
Short Description:
With an eye to California's diverse landscape and the often embattled relationship between its natural and developed spaces, UCIRA will provide opportunities for artists to investigate the radically diverse terrains of the state. Embedding artists within various California institutions and field contexts provides support for arts researchers interested in topics as diverse as agriculture, land and water use, emergent technologies and new forms of knowledge production and practice. New modes of visual and material translation will be encouraged, such as experimental cartography (which provides a critical foundation for an area of work that bridges art/design, cartography/geography and activism), eco-literacy (understanding the principles of ecosystems and using those principles for creating sustainable human communities), and urban pedagogy (bringing together art and design professionals with community-based advocates, organizers, government officials, service-providers and policymakers to create projects that present the possibility for new forms of knowledge production). UCIRA has formed a partnership with the Los Angeles Urban Rangers who will be in residence at one or more of the Southern California sites of the UC Natural Reserve System.

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