Postgraduate Course: Lifescape: Landing, Testing, Articulating (ARCH11289)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Lifescape implies that any landscape is not a passive environment but an active domain of many converging systems and processes that span scales of the terrestrial, oceanic and atmospheric. At the same time, spatial practitioners are not passive agents in the deployment of critical practices involved in the interpretation of dynamic environments. From this conceptual underpinning, the Lifescape course focuses on critical spatial practices engaged in the interpretation and articulation of environmental dynamics, supporting students on their own practice based explorations. |
| Course description |
The Lifescape course introduces students to a range of spatial concepts that open up understanding of environmental dynamics, temporalities and processes, interrelated with emergent environmental theories and ethical impulses. Using examples from across art, architecture and landscape architecture, weekly lectures will help students understand how purposeful experimentation can work through relational scales and articulations to bring expression to environmental dynamics.
Students will identify a specific focus for their own practice based enquiry, relevant to the concept of lifescape, such as; deep time and geodiversity, circular economies and materiality, atmospherics and climate action, urban metabolism and food production, the pluriverse and biodiversity, amongst other spatial matters.
Students are encouraged to produce works in-situ, as a process of situated practice that responds to the contextual setting they identify. Emphasis is placed on process and practice, as much as product and outcome, where invention, improvisation, speculation and activism are encouraged. This allows students to test out new modes of practice, which can include a range of spatial articulations across visual, physical, sound, performance, or textual forms.
This course begins with a series of 1 hour lectures running through weeks 1-6. A mixture of individual and group tutorials run through weeks 1-11, allowing students to share interdisciplinary ideas and develop their own projects. There will be a group review in week 6, where work-in-progress will be discussed. Students will undertake self-directed fieldwork, amounting to at least 3 days. A detailed schedule will be communicated through Learn, with teaching activities timetabled as one morning per week.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Identify research causes relevant to contemporary environmental issues and related to specific contextual settings
- Apply a range of critical methodologies and tools as practice based experiments that aim to reveal contextual factors
- Articulate processes and findings as practice based experimentations, interrelated with reflective thinking and theoretical reference points
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Reading List
Barad, K. (1996). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction. In L. Nelson, H. & Nelson, J. (Eds.), Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science (pp. 161-194). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer ISBN: 978-94-009-1742-2
Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012) New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Open Humanities Press. ISBN: 1607852810
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN: 978- 0-8223-6224-1.
Mah, K. and Rivers, P. L. (2022) Situated Practices in Architecture and Politics. University of British Columbia Press. ISBN: 9780929112770
Rendell, J. (2008) Space, Place, and Site. In: Cartiere, C. & Willis, S. (Eds) Critical Spatial Arts Practice. London: Routledge ISBN: 9780203926673
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
The Lifescape course develops student's ability to work with critical awareness of current issues in environmental thinking and spatial practice, while applying critical evaluation through situated studies.
Students demonstrate spatial skills and creativity through a range of experimental methodologies and tools, involving practice that draws on current ideas about critical spatial practice and environmental dynamics.
The course asks students to communicate at the standard of critical dialogue, by synthesising practical experimentation, reflective thinking and theoretical reference points within a visual essay that aligns with current fields of practice based research.
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| Keywords | Fieldwork,Experimentation,Situated Practice |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Mr Ross McLean
Tel: (0131 6)51 5796
Email: r.maclean@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Laura Varga
Tel: (0131 6)50 2430
Email: laura.varga@ed.ac.uk |
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