Toward the end of our sustained engagement with the elements, we anticipate that many works of art, music, and literature will inspire you, while others will confound or challenge you or perhaps leave you wanting more. Along the way, each of us will have given deep thought to what the elements afford in terms of our thinking, creating, listening, looking, becoming kin, etc, and our political coordinations and collaborations.
As a creative capstone to our seminar on elemental thinking, you will create an ELEMENTAL OVERTURE. The word “overture” comes from the French ouverture, meaning an aperture, opening, or beginning. Over time, it became a musical term as well, signaling the opening movement of a larger work like a ballet or opera, often introducing the main themes of the work to come. We invite you to let your imagination soar: sketch a grand-scale or miniature artistic work of any medium or style that is fully enmeshed with the element(s); sketch a plan of political activism responsive to elemental life.
To share your creative vision, you will record a five-minute, three-slide video "pitch." Before you begin, consider:
The project’s intended expressive impact on elemental thinking
To get started, conduct a short review of existing, relevant artworks or imaginative models (literature, music, art, film, political interventions, etc.) positioning your pitch within the broader creative, political, and/or scholarly conversation
How best to pitch an engaging, and descriptive introduction
While you need not state explicitly an answer to these questions in your pitch, you should --- in a Q&A--- be able to answer the following: what is this project doing that is needed, new, or reanimating (or departing from) earlier models or traditions?
Generate a prose “outline” of the way your proposal would unfold, practically speaking, including
descriptions of form and content
materials or personnel required
anticipated audience
theories or scholarly models / methods you would draw upon
the local/global scope of the work
(In short, imagine yourself in front of the producer, conductor, grant-funding committee, press, or studio to whom you're giving your pitch....and they LOVE IT! But they have questions. So, you should have these answers in hand).
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The sky is the limit, your proposal need not spare any expense or time frame in its imagined realization. If you can imagine it, pitch it!
DUE DATES
OVERTURES DUE: Wednesday, December 10, 5:00PM (along with a portfolio of your sketched notes to questions 1 - 3, above)
CODA: Monday, December 15, 5:00PM, DUE : Each seminar member will respond to two “pitches” in writing, offering your classmates feedback on their ideas and ways to develop and expand the horizons of their vision. Prompts for responses will be posted in early December.