Utopians, Prospectus!: tentative explorations of Russian Avant-garde art, literature and book arts
This preliminary assignment applied analytical approaches developed in lecture and discussion to a web-based scholarly medium. Working with Dietrich, students gained an insider's view of a scholarly tool in progressive evolution, and grappled with the unique affordances of Scalar as a "tool to think with." The Russian Avant-garde, and particularly the materials of focused study from Perloff's Explodity, such as Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Pomada (Pomade), provided numerous liberating conceptual metaphors for methodological innovation in ways of seeing art and literature: abstracted, trans-rationally, simultaneously, backwards, upside-down, non-Euclidean, rotated, contra-Gutenberg, etc. Ideas from the subject matter of the course, in other words, informed the students' developing methods of critical analysis.
"Prospectus!" projects provided a benchmark work product for identifying students' baseline "visual information literacy" proficiencies. Formative assessment in a media-rich research curriculum with significant technology integration and collaborative project work is critical to address unique challenges for each student early enough in the semester to ensure a coherent final work product. Research using web-based visual materials often defaults to a Google Image search as the first step in a process. Subsequent inquiry was redirected back to the Getty Research Institute's rich trove of visual materials related to the Russian Futurist books.
Student Projects
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- Malevich, K. "Death of a person simultaneously on an airplane and on a railroad," in Vzorval' (1913)
- Kruchenykh, A, and Khlebnikov, V. MirsKONtsa (WorldBACKwards), 1912 (cover)
- "Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 0.10" (15 December 1915–17 January 1916, Galerie Dobytschina, Saint Petersburg)
- uTOPians proSPECTus (assignment sheet)
