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Imagine every creative artifact—story, poem, essay, video essay—is the result of a process of radically optimistic disruption. Using writing, moving image and sound as modes of creative and critical inquiry, participants in this program will seek to understand and make use of the generative potential of processes that require a deliberate and mindful break, rupture or deviation from our sense of meaning and how it is represented and communicated. We will explore concepts and processes such as adaptation, recursion, translation, mutation, permutation, erasure, multiplication, fragmentation, hybridity, and more.

Over the course of two quarters, students will generate a body of creative work in text, moving image, and audio, engaging in a process-based interrogation of the relationships between form and content. Working iteratively, students will radically adapt their work in response to successive formal constraints designed to catalyze leaps of imagination, to inspire rigorous critical inquiry, to cultivate a deeper connection to individual voice, and to introduce a variety of creative forms and practices.

Program participants will learn about and develop skill with the elements of narrative, lyrical and time-based discourse through workshops, presentations, seminar, screenings, critique, and through iterative critical and creative writing assignments. Participants will experiment with different ways of engaging their work independently and as a community of artists: developing a sustaining creative practice, building and participating in an online community, and going away together for extended creative retreats.

Texts and assignments will facilitate deeper awareness of the relationship between critical and creative thought and practice. There will be a strong emphasis on writers and artists whose perspectives and work exist in the borderlands of identity, genre, and discipline. Authors and media artists currently being considered for the program reading list include Claudia Rankine, Lia Purpura, Bhanu Kapil, Susan Howe, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Pipilotti Rist, Laurie Simmons and others. 

Quarters

Fall Open Winter Closed

Location and Schedule

Campus Location

Olympia

Time Offered

Day

Advertised Schedule