Dark Study is an experimental program centered on art. We take this absence of the studio and the university’s full support as a profound opportunity. In our faculty and students, we are in search of a cohort of minds distributed around the world. We are digitally-rooted and virtual-first.

Dark Study takes up the work that the university prevents through regulation, intellectual property ownership, and massive debt. Dark Study serves the underserved and underrepresented locked out of the racket of higher education. Dark Study acknowledges the risk, precarity, and failures inherent to pursuit of a creative practice today. Dark Study strives to teach art and design as understood through materialism, history, economics, critical theory, and philosophy, all within the context of new technologies. Through a transparent, open methodology and a commitment to flexibility, Dark Study encourages the potential of artistic production for direct impact on a society in crisis.

This program is a place of resource redistribution aimed towards nothing less than liberatory ends.

Study

Dark Study involves two tracks. The first track is Advising + Course of Study, in which an applicant is selected for advising. The Advising Track allows for five total advisees this year - one person per each of our advisors. We will be carefully matching applicants with each advisor, to generate constructive, energizing conversation that will best facilitate their practice. In addition to one advisor, the student will select two directors to form a diverse soundboard that guides the work. As an advisee, the student must also take a minimum of one class, so they can be part of the Dark Study community.

The second track is the Course of Study alone, in which a student can take as many classes as they like. For this year of study, all courses will be taught in English.

Courses

Divergent I

Caitlin Cherry

This hybrid lecture-seminar course will review instances in modern and contemporary art (with a focus on painting) where the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge, from Manet’s Olympia, the New School and the FBI, to David Hammons’ tarp-covered abstract paintings. We will examine artistic production’s relationship to politics, class, and personal identity by reviewing excerpts of the following books: Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade; Saturation: Race, Art, and The Circulation of Value; Abstract Expression as Cultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period; Martha Rosler’s Culture Class; Andrea Fraser’s 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics; and Ben Davis’ 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. This course will pose this question: Can artists navigate the world with progressive politics intact?

From Critique to Critical Resistance

Nora Khan

How do we bring the loving critique and analysis we lavish on art, design, and media, to bear on the state? This seminar will examine the play of artists, theorists, and organizers, as they convert critique into collective, strategic, and visionary practice, and into modes of critical resistance. We pose critique and criticality as encounter, deploying the deep read, the shared, collective eye, and the intimacy with a subject, developed through observation. This seminar will be a space to articulate in one’s voice just how complex, opaque systems - computational and social - are designed, built, and function. And there is no more fit space for mapping how economic and social oppression are reified, than emerging technology and the art made through it. We will float through critical theories of technology, within the history of cybernetics, the U.S. military, corporate design and Silicon Valley’s lore. We’ll create taxonomies for the ideologies that technologies embed: from their affectation at neutrality and apolitical purity; to logics of quantification, punishment, and policing, to the ways machine intelligence shapes language and cognition. In this collective, roiling critique, we’ll ask more of our own critical making. Is it enough to ‘unveil’ or reveal unjust design in an artwork? As cognitive laborers, can we better analyze our own technocratic impulses and ways of seeing? Can we close-read systemic imperatives we can’t see, barely track, are disenfranchised from determining? In close-reading the politics of computational design, simulation, and AI, we find clues to reprogramming for transformative systems and politics.

Art For Whom?

Nicole Maloof

Art arises from a particular maker, one who lives in a given culture in a particular time and place. Often, art can seem to emerge from outside society, unattached to the material conditions of its origin, and is often discussed as if this is indeed the case. To speak of “art for art’s sake,” of a universality of spirit, of an art separate from society—these concepts do not exist. This course will consider the ways in which all ideology has a material source and how, since art is an ideological form, it cannot but reflect a particular position in society. We will begin by looking at the world, to understand the general social organization that exists, and from there examine how those in different positions of society view that structure. From there we will then investigate what it means to know, and the process through which knowledge comes into being. Finally, we will end the course with a deep dive into the social process of art making, beginning with the question: “Art for whom?” This course will involve an intensive study of the external world, as well as an exhaustive look at oneself, as a member of society and as a maker.

FAQ

I am interested in your program. How much art experience should I have?

At this moment, we are looking for students who have a developed art practice, one that they are looking to further enrich with discussion, debate, and critique. However, you absolutely do not need to be in an MFA program or have any kind of art degree to apply. And what do we mean by art? The definition is expansive: we include any developed artistic, conceptual, theoretical, or critical practice that extends beyond traditional disciplines. We also welcome individuals who are in school, but may not fit in well because of their practice, or will be taking time off this coming year.

Great. How do I join?

Our application is now live. Please submit your application by Monday, September 28th, 2020, 9:00am EST.