THE CREATIVE CITY

SM3138 | Sem B, 2015 | School of Creative Media |Prof SHANNON WALSH

WHAT IS A CITY?

Most people in the world now live in cities.

Cities are places of life, work, love,play, creation, leisure, discovery, pain, migration, exclusion, joy,

construction...etc..

different ways of inhabiting, and using the city, dynamics of

migration, access, play work and leisure, inequalities and exclusions, separations and disappearances, old and new…

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COURSE OUTLINE

BLOG PLAN:

http://thecreativecityscm.wordpress.com/structure/

Week-by-week breakdowns

Lecture Slides online

Missions and Adventures

Meetings and Tours at various locations over the term

Creative Art Works

READ |WATCH | MAKE

ASSIGNMENTS

1 Inequality 20%

2 Work & Leisure 20%

3 Non-Human Time 20%

4 (Un)Official Histories 20%

Personal Map 10%

Presentation/Missions 10%

PERSONAL MAPS

Over the course, you will be creating your personal map. This map will trace the movements that you make in your particular world.

The map should reflect what is important to you, what is central to your journey through the city streets and campus, perhaps even your emotional world of friends, acquaintances, family.

Your map will be like a reflective log of the term.

GPS coordinates for points on your map must be somehow recorded, where available, so as to link your map coordinated with others.

Each map will be plotted together at the end of the course to create a global map of our movements through the term.

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8from Flaneur Society’s “Guide to Getting Lost”

WHERE ARE YOU?

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (SI)

A philosophy of space &

political action

Formed in Italy 1957 through

the 1970s

Guy Debord, Michel de

Certeau, Henri Lefebvre

Student movement &

university movement in

France 1968

how could everyday life be

subverted radically 10

Psychogeography

Psychogeography is

"the study of the precise laws

and specific effects of the

geographical environment,

consciously organized or not,

on the emotions and behavior

of individuals.”

- Guy Debord

Psychogeography

Explore everyday

environment and

streets of the city;

open up to play and

chance;

“transforming ‘the

whole of life into an

exciting game’ — the

play principle before

the work principle.”

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Dérive

Drift…”migrations undertaken with the intention of discovering new

perspectives on city life”

“a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances”

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“The need for the dérive is necessitated,

according to situationist theory, by the

increasingly predictable and monotonous

experience of everyday life trudged through by workers in advanced capitalism.”

“The dérive grants a rare instance of pure

chance, an opportunity for an utterly new and

authentic experience of the different

atmospheres and feelings generated by the

urban landscape.”

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Autonomy & Power

The dérive held assumptions

of race, class, gender,

privilege — who could walk

freely, leisurely, curiously,

and where could they

walk…?

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ART OF THE WEAK

“Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about,

shopping cooking etc.) are tactical in character if they

become independent from the rhetoric of power.”

-Miche de Certeau

“This was about describing how gestures of resistance

among the ‘disenfranchised’ or ‘the other’ give the powerless a way to survive and, at times, even thrive

within or against dominant cultures.” Flanagan 190

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EarthWorks & WalkingArtists like: Sol Lewitt, Maya Lin, Christo, Nancy Hoyt, Richard Long,

Robert Smithson

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ART MADE BY WALKING IN LANDSCAPES | RICHARD LONG

WALKS MADE INTO TEXTWORKS | www.richardlong.org

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HAMISH FULTON | "If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art"

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As Henri Lefebvre argued, capitalist

spaces are systems of property relations,

surveillance, and consumption.

“It is through

everyday habits,

and through the

body, that people

experience urban

space”

The Production of Space (1991)

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Artists’ Locative Games

Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design, 2008

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“People have become divorced from authentic

experience, are passive spectators of their own

lives and no longer communicate or participate

in the society of the spectacle. The dominant form

of spectacular commodity production and

consumption ensures that people do not engage in

self-directed or autonomous activity, but answer the

needs of the spectacle.”

-Adam Barnard

ARTISTS’ LOCATIVE GAMES

Cruel 2 B Kind (C2BK) locative game

Dérive App

Let’s play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kTukct98vA