UDIST300 Art Life (Social Practice)
Prerequisite: Junior Standing

This class will explore the conceptual, physical, and theoretical issues taking place near the shifting boundaries that define art and life. The term Social Practice includes work as broad as public art, project-based community practice, urban interventions, institutional subversion, web-based interactivity, service dispersals, street performance, and guerrilla architecture. By looking outside, as well as inside the art world for models of communication, problem solving and social interaction, you will be asked to question your relationship to what you identify as your materials and process. The class also seeks to develop a broader vocabulary of critical resources by expanding our dialogues outside the traditional discourses on art. This means debating and researching real corollaries between the unruly world we live in and what we choose to define as our art practice. In addition to field trips, readings, visiting artists, and lectures, there will be several projects that ask you to use your art practice as an opportunity for direct engagement with the world. As the class emphasizes an action-based model of learning, it is imperative that you are willing to participate fully in discussions, projects and critiques.

Interdisciplinary Studios extend a student's cross-school experience from Core Studio up into his or her upper division years. 3 units of Interdisciplinary Studio are required of all majors and must be completed in the junior or senior year.