Taking Stock: One Revisit your original concept map and the field
experiments
you've produced over the past few
weeks. Write a short paragraph articulating your inquiry progress, including 1–3 specific
questions you'd like to pursue. What has become more interesting to you? What has become less
interesting? What do you still want to understand?
Taking Stock: Two Compile a preliminary bibliography or source list of 5-10
sources you've encountered so far. These can include books, articles, artworks, archives,
photographs, interviews, or other materials. For each, briefly describe what it offers your
research. Identify what kinds of information or perspectives are still missing.
Adding On Conduct one new piece of research. Choose one of the following:
— Have a conversation with someone who might offer insight into your subject.
— Visit or investigate an archive, collection, or institution.
— Find and closely examine a new primary source relevant to your inquiry.
Field Study V: Encoding Take a look at Dear Data (Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie
Posavec), PTT Telephone Cards (Karel Martens), and Data Portraits (W. E. B. Du Bois).
Consider how each designer or artist translates information into visual or physical form. What
rules determine the use of color, shape, scale, repetition, or material? For this field study,
you will invent a visual language to represent information from your ongoing research inquiry.
COLLECT: Collect a set of 10-20 new observations or records related to your inquiry.
These might
be numerical, descriptive, categorical, or observational.
ENCODE: Consider what information your records contain and how that information might be
expressed through shape, color, size, position, repetition, texture, or other visual
properties.
For example, color might represent a category, size might represent frequency, and
position
might indicate time.
COMPOSE: Create two different visual compositions using your information and encoding
rules.
Experiment with different ways of encoding the same records. Your compositions can be
drawn,
printed, collaged, stitched, constructed, or designed digitally. They do not need to
resemble
conventional graphs or charts, but each must use a set of rules that connects visual
characteristics to your information.
Separately, create a small key or legend explaining your encoding rules.
If working digitally, please print your two compositions for class.
Field Study IV: Intervention Take your Time micro-archive as a starting
point.
Add information, questions, annotations, or other forms of visual interventions to at least five
records. If possible, expose an absence. Identify something your records fail to capture in your
visual
response.
If desired, you may use a collection other than the one you created for the Time field study.
Read Mimi Ọnụọha, What's Missing Is Still
There. Think about what Ọnụọha means by the idea that something missing
can still be present. Who or what determines what gets collected or preserved? What might be
missing from your Time micro-archive, and what does that absence tell you?
Week 5 10/05
Set up index for peer sharing
Reading the index: keywords on paper
Slides & Discussion: Representation through Collections
Collective Mapping & New Questions
Time permitting: begin homework
Assignment due10/05
Field Study III: Time Choose one continuous hour of your life.
Document that hour by creating at least fifteen records, and up to 60. Your records can take
different forms—photographs, writing, drawings, screenshots, sound, found material, notation,
etc.—or you may choose to use one form consistently. Each record should include a time and/or
short caption.
Then, using those records, design a micro-archive of the hour.
Choose the form and tools you find most appropriate.
Read Georges Perec, An Attempt at
Exhausting a Place in Paris. Think about how Perec approaches the act
of exhaustively documenting a place. What does he decide is worth recording? What patterns
emerge through repetition?
Week 4 09/28
Share: Trace Recording Field Studies
Slides & Discussion: Cybernetics, Counterculture, & the Crowd-Sourced Archive
The Cybernetics Image Library
Cybernetics Library Browse
Time permitting: one-on-ones
Assignment due10/05
Field Study II: Index How can a subject be constructed through the
selection of records?
Create an index of 20 records that, taken together, construct a particular understanding of your
subject. Your records may be found or made and may take any form. Consider what you choose to
include, what you leave out, and what your selection suggests about the subject as a
whole.
Your 20 records may be found, documented, or made. They can include photographs, screenshots,
scans, drawings, diagrams, maps, quotations, advertisements, documents, objects, signs, data,
text, or other forms of visual evidence.
Research Inquiry Write one paragraph (150–250 words) describing an area you
would like to investigate for your semester. This does not need to describe what you
will ultimately make. End your paragraph with a preliminary research question: one clear
sentence ending in a question mark.
Week 3 09/21
Reading/Listening Discussion: Dirk Vis Reading & Everything Is Alive
Introduction to Trace/Rubbing
Fieldwork for Trace How can a place be recorded through physical contact?
For this field study, you will use rubbing as a method of recording.
Work inside Parsons and/or within the designated area immediately surrounding campus. Create at
least 10 rubbings from different surfaces or locations. Look for traces of activity or change:
use or repeated contact, wear, repair, removal.
For each rubbing, make decisions about framing, scale, pressure, direction, material, and
composition. You may use graphite, colored
pencil, crayon, or another dry drawing material. Make as many attempts as you need to produce 10
records you want to keep.
On the back of each, note where you made the rubbing and, if
useful,
what you believe the trace records.
Assignment due09/28
Field Study I: Trace How can a place be recorded through physical contact?
Create 10 compositions OR a GIF from the rubbings you collected during Field Study I.
Think of your rubbings as source
material rather than finished images. You may crop, scale, layer, repeat, reorder, erase,
obscure, draw on, annotate, cut, or otherwise transform your records. What I am interested in
here is how you transform your records to reveal something new.
Next Week's Field Trip We will be at The Cybernetics Library at: 424 West
54th Street, New York, NY 10019. Please let me know if you have any issues getting there or
require accomodation.
Are.na Channel Connections Add three more records to your own Are.na
channel. At least two of these should be existing
records from other Are.na channels.
Respond Choose one option: In 150–200 words
write... (1) About something you have made—inside or outside of design. What did you
discover through making it? Did the process change your original idea, question, or
understanding? Consider your
experience in relation to the reading. (2) A monologue (or interview) from the POV of one of
your six objects.
Six Everyday Objects Choose six objects from your everyday life that can
fit into a tote bag. These objects can be (1) meaningful, (2) mundane, (3) thematic, or (4)
diverse. Bring these to class.
Write a 200-word response. What does it make you think of (even tangentially)? Does it raise
questions? Does it make no sense? (This goes without saying, but I prefer scribbles to
AI.)