TEACHING

Strategies of Silence and Stillness
2008, Winter Semester, MFA Program, Concordia University, Montréal.

John Cage established that silence is chimerical; its purity is conceptual, it is an impossibility. As such, silence haunts all creative acts, and provides the constitutive ground for these acts. Silence is the empty vessel, the syncopal background agent that rhythms the foreground. This course surveys various manifestations of silence from a primarily Western perspective and outline a provisional taxonomy of silence. In fact, it is necessary to speak of silences, plural. In addendum, an examination of stillness and a variety of related terms (waiting, immobility, idleness) will situate the primary theme of silence in the materiality of the body and the specificity of place. A broad selection of texts will be examined from diverse fields: literature (Celan, Kafka, Sarraute, Rilke, Steiner), philosophy (Deleuze, Heidegger, Lyotard), ethnography (Basso, Boas, Taussig), dance (Lepecki, Schwartz), sound (Cage, Rée, Dokic), visual arts (Sontag, Bois), and a significant portion dedicated to cinema (Bergman, Tati, Duras, Debord, Bresson, Marker).

Audio Art In the Visual Field
2008, Winter Semester, MFA Program, Concordia University, Montréal.

This course surveys the recent literature and examine the tactics and strategies by which audio art interrupts, infects, and interpenetrates the visual field. The course will investigate the methods utilized by contemporary artists to diffuse sound through various media: installation, performance, video, cinema, recording, radio, internet. The myriad methods of diffusion and the connected issues of intention and reception will be considered in the same breath as issues of technique and technology. In addition, the course examines key terms such as silence, noise, voice, speech, echo, listening as they are evoked and deployed by both artists and theorists. Of particular interest will be considerations of the following questions: What stakes are implicit when a viewer is asked to listen? How do gallery and museum spaces sound? Can one speak of exhibiting sound? How does sound affect the notion of presence? What are the spatial, temporal, sensorial and social dimensions of a sound work?

Writing Aloud: Language Arts
2007, Winter Semester, MFA Program, Concordia University, Montréal.
2004, Summer Session, Dept. Performance Studies, Tisch School for the Arts, New York University.

A course exploring the notion of the word as a wager of presence. The word and its materiality; its negotiations between the formal and the formless; its various embodiments, its lawfulness and its unruliness; its precision and its slippages—the word (and the unword, its attendant specter) as the pervasiveness, persistence and proliferation of the performative. Performative writing will be considered here as an amplified term where the gaps and overlaps between writing, reading, listening, touching will be examined. Particular attention will be paid to the cross-pollination between the visual arts and experimental literature. Along with forays into the plethora of manifestos of the historical avant-garde (from ‘Pataphysics to Lettrism to Oulipo), we will study works by On Karawa, Roman Opalka, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Adrian Piper, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel de Certeau, Nathaniel Mackey, Kurt Schwitters, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, amongst others.

Performing Failure: Techniques of Mutism
2005, Winter Semester, MFA Program, Concordia University, Montréal.
2004, Winter Semester, MFA Program, Concordia University, Montréal.
2002, Fall Semester, MFA Program, Concordia University, Montréal.

A course on the interruption, the glitch, the misfire, the mistake, the syncope, the failure, the click, the cut. The shutting up, the shutting down. I prefer not to, the repeated polite refusal of Melville’s Bartleby, indicates a path of resistance often dismissed—passivity is rarely considered as a form of action but that languid state is anything but static, and dwelling in the gap engendered by failure and disruption has been a recurring tactic in contemporary art. Giorgio Agamben states that, “what hampers communication is communicability itself; humans are separated by what unites them,” thus this condition where disconnection is that which connects, and vice versa, is expectedly central to a contemporary context where global traumas continue to haunt. This course will cover a heterogeneous range of material, from the psychopathological and the physiological, to experiments in the digital degenerations and degradations of software and hardware. Utilizing conceptual handles such as the syncope in Catherine Clément’s The Philosophy of Rapture, Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster and Deleuze’s notion of the particular we will examine current contemporary art practices which enact mutism and perform failure under that obligation to reconsider the relation which Beckett articulates.

Analog Studio Techniques
2005, Undergrad Music Program, Concordia University, Montréal.

Interdisciplinary Studio Seminar
2002-2003 , IDYS 300, BFA Program, Concordia University, Montréal.

Performing the Body
2002, Undergraduate Drama Dept., Tisch School for the Arts, New York University.

An investigation into the various ways artists have constructed and deconstructed, configured and disfigured, mobilized and paralyzed the body. This course will focus on performance art as it emerged out of the visual arts from the post WWII period until today (with particular attention to its emergence between 1960 and 1980). Through the work of artists and thinkers such as Adrian Piper, Marina Abramovic, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Vito Acconci, Hannah Wilke, Julia Kristeva, Yoko Ono, Georges Bataille, Kristin Stiles, Amelia Jones, Chris Burden, Linda Montano, Bruce Nauman, etc. we will examine radicalized notions and manifestations of endurance, repetition, pain, pleasure, display, abjection, ritual, narcissism and resistance. The objective is to familiarize students with this challenging body of work and thereby to enable and develop a discursive exploration of the body in all of its complexity.

Writing The Essay
2000 - 2001, Expository Writing Program, New York University.

Summer Audio Workshop
1996, Studio Division, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (NSCAD), Halifax, Nova Scotia.