Media Studies Course Spotlight: “Lab Urban Tactics & Performance” and “Movement Lab”
The New School for Public Engagement: Media Studies
CO:Lab Urban Tactics & Performance
Spring 2018
NMDS 5593 / CRN 6835
Instructor: Prof. Nitin Sawhney, Ph.D.
6 East 16th Street, Room 611
Thursdays 4:00 – 6:45 pm
How do we make sense of the urban through sensory and embodied experiences?
How can we engage in everyday places through tactical media, performance and artistic interventions?
In this co-lab we explore these questions through experimental media, embodied performance practices, and site-specific projects. The course brings together perspectives from art, technology, urbanism, media and activism. We examine embodied practices from dance, ritualized movement and street theater, the use of bodies in public spaces for mass protests, sensory ethnography and artistic or media-based interventions conducted around the city. This is a hybrid seminar/production course and may be counted as either designation toward a student’s Media Studies MA or Media Management MS degree.
The New School for Public Engagement: Media Studies
MOVEMENT LAB
An informal lab open to students across The New School
led by visiting scholar/dance artist Sasha Portyannikova
assisted by artist/dancer Agnese Cebere
Fridays 2:00 – 4:00 pm
Location TBD
Contemporary choreography is regarded as ‘movement managed in the space’. The everyday human movement of a city can be recognized as an implicit dance in which we are all participants. What are the steps and the rules of this dance? A media saturated world overstimulates our visual perception and can dampen our other senses. In this movement lab we will focus our attention on the kinesthetic perception in order to become more sensitive and aware of our bodily behavior in the city. We will investigate the conventions of public spaces and discover how to illuminate them through performance and artistic interventions.
“I’ll never know my body, never know
myself as a body… By contrast, I’ll always know others as bodies.”- Jean-Luc Nancy.
Let’s consider this poetic statement not as the truth but as a challenge
This is not a course, so there is no need to register. The first session begins February 2, 2018. Please email Agnese Cebere at cebea604@newschool.edu to indicate your interest in joining the lab this spring.