PREVIOUS COURSES AND THE HISTORY OF THE CURRICULUM:
THE ARTISTS’ WORKING GROUPS
In the wake of the 2016 election, many artists found themselves feeling powerless and irrelevant. The Working Groups began to convene out of a sense of need for community and purpose during this time, and grew into an ongoing structured community of discourse, organization, resource-sharing, and production that helped numerous artists find a place in systems-building, culture-generation, and using their creative and intuitive intelligence in ways that pushed beyond only activism.
THE FRAMEWORK
Meet offline only - WG meetings require a discourse with rich interpersonal context, opposed to the subtextual vacuum of electronic communications
Emphasize artist’s capacities for anticipation
Tap into artist’s eclectic social networks
Recognize artist’s social and factional fluidity
Encourage artists to think systemically - connecting dots and studying cause and effect
Inquire into individual artist’s resources and knowledge bases, and compare them to the needs of problematic systems
AWG strategic communications experiments: 2017 Inauguration Confetti, and custom clothing by MAGAAACORE
In only a few months of meeting, the Working Groups have developed new cognitive frameworks to intervene in toxic or antidemocratic narratives in media and social media; culture jams such as politically discordant apparel design and protest-primed inauguration confetti; intervention and information-sharing in support of military and law enforcement concerned with potential complicity in unconstitutional orders; and training for effective discourse and debate in politics, social strife, and other asymmetrical power dynamics (Engage/Improvisational Rhetoric). Continuation of this framework will be a seedbed of innovative interventions and solutions, from which ideas can scale and be amplified for maximum impact.