In this 6-week workshop we will be exploring guerrilla art/poetry through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “History and Becoming.” More specifically, we will be asking you to develop projects that have the potential to function as a murmuration—ways of imposing something on the world without the world being aware of this imposition, to confront ignorance without ignorance realizing the confrontation, to create art that by its very nature functions as a collective moving as one suspended reality. Clandestine art has long served as means to expand knowledge, drive transmutation, and shine a light on the creativity of history itself because it has the capacity to evade bias and, therefore, evade resistance. One does not choose to look at a yarn bombing, a broadside, a dancer in the park, an installation, graffiti, etc. One simply glances, notices, and has, therefore, had an encounter.
Murmurations
Overview
First presented as a virtual program for Arts Letters & Numbers 2023.
WHEN
Winter 2023
WHERE
All classes are held virtually.
REGISTRATION DEADLINE
Registration is closed.
”Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition, but of a fundamental encounter.
—Gilles Deleuze
Image Courtesy of Adrianos Efthymiadis – Arts Letters & Numbers
Guerrilla Art (n.)
“The anonymous publication of art in unexpected and unconventional ways or in unexpected, unconventional, or unauthorized places. It is unique in that there is no external boundary between art and environment making both its means and intentions limitless and also allowing it to exist inherently as a collective because of its interaction with the environment.”
To speak in a murmur, the murmuring of waves, a mumbled or private expression of discontent, implies a thing both indistinct and continuous not unlike the movement of lips without articulation. It is a sound that awakens, coos softly as if calling a flock of starlings into motion—a few hundred birds moving as one suspended reality. How each starling in a flock is connected to every other bird. How physiological mechanisms happen simultaneously in two birds separated by hundreds of feet and hundreds of other birds. It is not purely for defense. It is a striving for distance between the edge and the predator. An impulse to confront the perimeter. Not only a way to disguise, but also to inflict, to articulate, to confront, to expose a boundary.