This course is about prototyping as creative technique and as concept. It combines design practice in the studio with theoretical instruction, as an inclusive method of applied critique. Material and conceptual prototypes are developed and tested against the background of positioning critical design practice in the digital age. In today’s design culture the emphasis has shifted from the realized, manufactured object to the digital concept, which is meant to entice investors to support the advent of a novelty that can be integrated into an existing market. New digital design and manufacturing technologies, combined with communication across media platforms, leads an increasingly shortened cycle of producing prototypes as mere applications (often, literally, as apps). Conversely, prototypes in manufacture are established as models from which other forms can be developed; they are templates or moulds that serve as original forms to be copied and serialized. Prototypes are anterior to the type-form of an object; they establish a typology, a genre or family of things. Through a series of studio workshops and seminars the course thus debates the contrasting practical and theoretical aspects of the prototype. From the distinction between various functions of prototypes, via testing methods, to conceptual notions of typology or genre, the course combines the production of prototypes with their cultural meaning.

This course will chart the trajectory of video essay from its roots in cinema to the contemporary phenomena of post-internet and new media. As an experimental form that pushes against traditional documentary, video essay is a migratory practice, finding its home everywhere and nowhere, from the screen to installation to online interactive platforms. Students will use a wide variety of documentation, research strategies and editing techniques to critically engage this medium. We will look at the works of Trinh T. Minh-ha, Walid Ra’ad, Harun Farocki, Chris Marker, Tony Cokes, Camilo Restrepo, Howardena Pindell, Ursula Biemann, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Laura Huertas Millán, Sky Hopinka, among others. Our consideration of video essay as a material form will intersect with the methodological practice of autobiography. Auto-Ethnography, as it’s often described, offers a praxis within cultural production to counter the prevalence of official histories that often facilitate the erasure of non-normative and non-dominant narratives. Within this space of positional expansion, interventions such as speculative fiction and re-enactment can be realized. We will pay particular attention to transnational essay films of the Global South and the ways in which translation or its refusal, creates added meaning within time-based works. This course considers how these methods can circumvent rendering social groups as monolithic and the trappings of sentimentality. Instead, how can hyperspecificity recuperate the nuances of the global subject–and in taking up this starting point–work towards a sense of collective and community authorship? Weekly viewings outside of class time will be required. Students will have the opportunity to participate in a screening of their short video-essays at the end of the semester.