Humanistic Perspectives on the Arts: Phase Change: Ancient Matter and Contemporary Making

In this course, we investigate questions of material persistence and plasticity through artifacts, embodied practices, and textually embedded ideas of matter and body that emerged in the ancient Mediterranean and carry on today. Moving along three conceptual axes (body, cosmology, change) and working with three primary materials (plaster, rubber, wax), we experiment with practices of close reading; speculative, material-based art-making; different genres of writing; historical analysis; and other strategies of engaging premodern techniques of making alongside ancient philosophies of matter within contemporary materialist projects.