Creative Responses to Conflict and Crises: Japan 3/11 Disaster at a Distance

Instructor: Jegan Vincent de Paul
Teaching Assistant: Matthew Bunza

FIRST CLASS TUESDAY FEBRUARY 7TH, 2012, 7PM
Class:  Tuesdays 7-10p, E15-207
Recitation:  Thursdays 7-10p Room E15-207

This course seeks to develop an understanding of the role of cultural production and artistic intervention in conditions of conflict and crisis. How should one investigate or intervene in such situations through critical reflection, creative agency and participatory action?

Artistic Interventions – Creative Responses to Conflict and Crises will look at disaster as a human-made event that precedes or is continuous with conflict or crises. The course will specifically consider the notion of disaster at a distance: how the location of concern being outside the location of disaster can be an advantage to engender creative and critical responses. As a part of the multi-year MIT Japan 3/11 Initiative, this course is centered on the on-going crises in Japan caused by the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant failures as a real world scenario.

1. During the first half of the course, we will investigate how Japan’s triple disaster has been understood internationally. Students will look at how various disciplines and fields, including at MIT, have approached Japan’s disaster in its immediate aftermath as well as in a long term capacity. Students will then use an artistic medium, including image, video, audio and web to present a creative project to position Japan’s disaster within a larger framework of the technology, culture, and politics of today’s global disasters.

2. During the second half of the course, students will form working groups to propose an artistic intervention to the address the current conditions of Japan’s historic disaster. Groups will dialogue on creative alternatives – including utopian – to institutionalized methods and plans for Japan’s continued crises. Students will study the broad array of existing resources that have emerged on Japan since March 2011, including visual narratives, media reports, interviews and critical texts to conceive and develop a proposal from afar.

This seminar and workshop will contribute ideas, share resources and engage in dialogue with members of the Japan 3/11 Initiative and the ACT course Public Art, taught by Professor Antoni Muntadas. We will have weekly readings, assignments and blogging as a central component for discussion, presentation and online archiving of research and projects.