Fall 2019
Instructors: Chris Falliers and Leslie Carol Roberts
From contemplation to advocacy, the symposium asked students to interrogate the materiality of ecologies, from messaging with language to messaging with form through the creation of artifacts. The class explored how systems of language, making, and representation engage emerging ecological change, a condition some call global warming and some call climate change -- and some completely deny as a condition at all.
Situated in the Graduate Writing Program, and co-taught by instructors from Writing and Architecture, graduate students from multiple programs experimented with short form writings and collaborated on group projects, developing both internal dialogues and speculative artifacts for external communication. Presented in an interactive exhibition setting, the projects explored the production of visual/spatial/physical/written representations of environment developed as a ‘compelling’ communication/position on a contemporary ecological situation(s). In short, through research and speculation, each group produced a designed artifact as a collective message. The class revolved around a thought: Humans have the power to come together to create ideas and to use these thoughts and ideas to shape the world into the way they want it to be -- not to wait to see what the world is telling them to be.
Ecopoesis Seminar, fall 2019: Slade Gottlieb, Edith Friedman, Grace Galletti, Hannah Lamb-Vines, Jamie King, Jingyi Qiu, Joseph Holsworth, Margot Becker, Olga Gonzalez Latapi, Palak Japlot, Rob Bailey, Sean Nishi, Sonal Ravi, Sydney Mondry, Thais Derich, Almer He, Yohannes Tesfamichael