Engagement: Attention, Interaction, Participation

How does an image attract our gaze? How does an event draw our focus? Why do some buttons demand to be pushed? And what does it mean to take part in someone else’s activity?

For culture-makers and critics, engagement is a crucial element of how art functions. The question of engagement has implications as well for how we understand society, media, democracy, and the fundamental puzzle of how we talk to each other.

This seminar will explore the cluster of phenomena involved in engagement. Attention: Why do we look at pictures/objects/scenes? Why and when do we look away? Interaction: how do artworks involve us? What “affordances” can be offered by cultural artifacts and what does it mean when we grasp them? Participation: what are the conceptual and social complications that arise when a public becomes co-producer of a cultural event?

Course readings will include perspectives from arts criticism, visual culture, sociology, phenomenology, and science and technology studies, but a key element of the course will be student-led critical investigations of contemporary engagements: how objects and events connect with us. MFA students will develop a hybrid individual investigation that serves their studio practice; PhD students will write and present an article-length paper appropriate to their degree program.