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The instructors for this course generated and selected --via conversation-- a course title, a few memes (such as machine, system, and organism), a few resources, and a few project ideas. Fortunately our efforts also gathered a few participants. From these elements the course is designed to organize itself and generate its own content.

It was a conscious choice on the instructors' part to NOT begin the course with assigned readings on the history and theory of generative art, its antecedents and current practitioners, etc. There is of course a minor risk in this of encouraging participants to re-invent the wheel. But we wagered there is a much greater risk in squelching the kind of creative problem solving that goes into something like inventing the wheel in the first place if students are required to read and study what everyone else had already done before they get to do anything themselves. In other words our bet was that the habit of separating study and action is deleterious to learning because it encourages us (teachers as well as students) to become at worst simply passive and at best benevolently passive-aggressive critical thinkers who stop short of inventive action.

The GenArt course itself embodies the logic of thought+action. It constitutes a clear and thoroughgoing example of action-research within 21st century higher education, with roots as well in the reflective practice movement. Or, put more simply, it is an attempt to do higher education in an inventive, context-responsive, audience-responsive, reflective way.

Like academics including William Doll and Jane Davis-Seaver, we in part use principles derived from chaos/complexity science (principles including self-organization, emergent order, sensitivity to initial conditions, self-similarity of scale, and strange attractors) to intelligibly render and enact an instructional format that 1) blends thought and action, and 2) involves students in building their own synapses individually and in interaction with others.

Further, within the arts-focused context of UNCSA we attempt to be responsive to an audience of learners who already think+act in the context of composing, singing, designing, painting, drafting, writing, staging, costuming, acting, filming, dancing, etc. If we want to follow the advice of contemporary cognitive science and build on what our audience already knows, we need to find ways for our students to substantively think+act in their academic courses just like they do in their art practices. This is what GenArt attempts to do.

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Chaos Theory