Assignments

Readings Presentation — Thinking Through Models

Each student will be required to present weekly readings once during the semester. The readings are organized around 11 topics (see the class calendar). Each thematic group contains 3–4 readings and an associated reading on a model that corresponds with the weekly theme. Students who are presenting will be asked to use readings to critically rethink the agency behind each model. Also, they will be required to find an artistic practice or project that corresponds to the specific topic and model.

Requirements:

Students are required to give a presentation and lead a discussion on the given topic.

Objectives:

The objective is to deliver presentations with clarity, confidence and poise, and to engage other peer students in discussion and give constructive feedback.

Due date: to be defined during the first week of lectures.

There will be 10 weekly student presentations and students are required to sign up for the theme in the first week of the class.

Example student presentations:

The Production of Democracy (PDF - 3.1MB). (Courtesy of Raafat Majzoub. Used with permission.)

The Production of Nature (PDF). (Courtesy of an MIT student. Used with permission.)

The Collective Goal — Curating the Model Collection and Remodeling the Existing Publication Formats

The logic and the organization of the class assignments throughout the semester enables gathering up to 40 models clustered around specific topics. The model collection thus emerges from the semester-long research and practice of individual and collective speculation, experimentation and critical discussions about modeling. It is an aggregate of accidental and intentional, historical and contemporary examples of systemic interferences in cultural, technological and scientific models of production. Designed as a multi-layered terrain of different political and social agendas embedded in objects and modes of production, the collection is far more than a bare corpus of material and theoretical artefacts. It is an immersive object-oriented environment for generating unexpected encounters between different media, modeling approaches and methodologies. Throughout the semester we will host a series of discussions and workshops with designers and experts from from SA+P publications department and MIT Press in order to see how the curating the collection can be transferred into a new model of publication.