IMAGING ENERGY (CS-500-1)
San Francisco Art Institute
Fall, 2010
Faculty: Meredith Tromble
Course Description Energy, as a cultural construct with theoretical, metaphorical, and practical manifestations, is the focus of this seminar. Our understandings of this protean force are constituted through physical experience, mathematical analysis, and visualizations of many different kinds. In Western culture, the laws of energy, known in scientific language as thermodynamics, are thought to govern the activity, exchange, and transformation of everything in the known world. In conjunction with discussions of the work of artists such as Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys, Lygia Clark, Hilary Harris, and Robert Smithson, and scholars such as Manuel De Landa, Peter Galison, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, we will look at energy and the way it is imaged in physical, biological, and social systems. The course considers wide range of cultural images including visual art (film, video, photography, sculpture, and painting), scientific imaging (molecular biology, high-energy physics, and medicine), and popular culture.
Course Purpose This course familiarizes students with a broad range of historical and contemporary art, cultural images, and ideas about energy, demonstrating manifold visual and theoretical approaches to a subject of general human interest and building an understanding of the ways images function in analysis and rhetoric.
Course Outcome Through this study students acquire a cross-disciplinary view of energy, gain understanding of the relationship between visual methodology and content, and of the translation of theoretical or experiential information into visual form. They also apply this understanding in their own art practice.
Texts
• E=mc2, David Bodanis, Crown Publishers, 2005
• A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Manuel De Landa, Swerve Editions, New York, 2000
• From Energy to Information, ed. Bruce Clark and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Stanford University Press, 2002
• In the Beat of a Heart: Life, Energy, and the Unity of Nature, John Whitfield, Joseph Henry Press, 2006
