1. THE MA IN
CRITICAL
THEORY
4
AND
CREATIVE
RESEARCH
Geoffrey Mann Flight Landing, Long Exposure Series (solid trace echo of a bird landing, materialized)
Photograph © Sylvain Deleu

2. VISION, RATIONALE, AND THEMES

3. NEEDS ADDRESSED BY THE MA CT+CR
Increasing numbers of artists and artisans carry out research
before executing a project in a medium or combination of
mediums, yet this research often lacks rigor or even criteria for
judgment—a problem shared by society at large as protocols for
authority, authenticity, and imprimatur disappear or change
radically. At the same time, attention is increasingly being paid to
non-quantitative research--research based on the creative
process.

4. We find ourselves immersed in virtually infinite streams of
information and lack adequate means of arranging, patterning, and
making meaning of them. The nexus of art and research addresses
itself to this major problem, a problem whose solution will require
people capable of switching back and forth between the analogue
and the digital, the linear and the nonlinear, the visual and the
textual, the past and the future.

5. Cultural historians predict that within the next one to two decades, the
number of individuals capable of thinking both critically and creatively
and with historical and theoretical depth will diminish radically.
Projected top-jobs lists, accordingly, include “poet,” a reference to the
rare individual capable of combining rigor, precision, and imagination
—of thinking completely outside any box.

6. The arts remain divided into verbal and visual domains at the same
time as technologies are increasingly blurring the lines between them.
Our understanding of the relations between Image-Music-Text, to cite
the title of Barthes’ book on the empire of signs, has changed as have
the meaning and significance of information; the concepts of medium,
mediation, and materiality; sensation and perception; theory and
practice in multiple, radically different realms; humans and machines.

7. The number of graduates of art, design, and architecture schools
as well as university arts and humanities programs exceeds
available jobs in appropriate fields, yet there are many new types
of work for which we do not yet have names or standardized forms
of monetization.

8. The term human is now commonly modified by “post” and “trans,” the
former suggesting a world after us; the latter, the desire to transcend
the condition. A new system of ethics will have to be developed in
response to the new conditions made possible largely by
digitalization. This new structure will, necessarily, be based on
knowledge of the particularities of new media—what they facilitate
and what they retard—and with the realization that aesthetics will play
a crucial role in determining future courses. As, arguably, a mode of
being and feeling in the world without ethical content per se,
aesthetics will be used to make certain developments palatable and
attractive and, conversely, to resist other developments. Can we
devise a new humanism and system of ethics based on new realities,
and how shall we go about doing that?

9. RECAP OF PROBLEMATIC CONDITIONS
Problem: division of the arts into verbal, visual, and aural domains at a time when technologies
have increasingly blurred and sometimes erased the divisions between them
Problem: an increasing number of artists see themselves as doing research-based art; at the
same time, research protocols, methodologies, and goals are unclear or unknown
Problem: immersion in virtually unlimited data streams, the meaning of which is largely
unfathomable. Machines unable to pattern these flows at present in a humanly meaningful way
Problem: lock-in as a major design problem with far-reaching implications
Problem: constant, incessant change—inability to process information and make accurate
judgments due to sheer velocity
Problem: uncreative problem-solving based on largely false divisions between theory and practice
Problem: increasingly nonrepresentational, non-sense-based intelligence—neither verbal nor
visual, strictly speaking
Problem: de-monetization of cultural production
Problem: public policy on the arts increasingly unsuccessful
Problem: the philosophical and ethical void left in the wake of the death of humanism

10. GOALS AND ATTRIBUTES of the MA in CT+CR
New possibilities in research, the search for, location of, and contextualization of
knowledge. New criteria, new protocols, new applications, new formats, new
platforms
Rigorous study and theorization
Cultural critique, aesthetic critique, institutional critique, technological critique
Crossover between multiple domains--visual and verbal, analogue and digital,
linear and nonlinear, seeing and knowing, the archaic and the contemporary
Creativity coupled with rigor, exactitude, nuance, and complexity
Performance of the task of reframing, reconfiguration, reinvigoration, reinvention,
and intervention as well as knowing when “the creation of the new” is not the task
at hand and, indeed, may be the problem
Insistence on the critical role of perception and the senses for the future of
intelligence

11. Mediology not media studies. The archivists as the new humanists (Sloterdijk)
The creation of possibilities for artistic production outside the gallery and the
museum
The return of the workshop and material production
Interest in new knowledge management technologies and their critique
An understanding of the world, of past knowledge systems and genealogies,
and the ability to extrapolate from these systems
Understanding of the role of media in a surveillance society, the impact of
digitalization, the reality of ubiquity
Analysis of the role of aesthetics in contemporary developments and
movements

12. IDEAL CANDIDATES FOR THIS PROGRAM
Ideal candidates include artists and designers who want to deepen their
work conceptually and theoretically; writers interested in the relation of
word and image; students of philosophy, theory, and criticism; journalists,
documentarians, and filmmakers; sociologists, anthropologists, and
scientists whose work intersects with the arts; and all those interested in
combinations of aesthetic and socio-political critique and in new
possibilities at the juncture of art and research.

13. NEW POSSIBILITIES AT THE JUNCTURE OF ART AND RESEARCH
CT+CR prepares students for careers in
Academia and emerging platforms for knowledge production and dissemination
Curation of many different sorts
Creative direction
Research in museums, foundations, think tanks, and corporations
Media and communications
Reconfigurations of documentary, journalism, and nonfiction narrative
archival work
Art criticism, cultural critique, and social analysis
Socio-political aspects of community design and urban planning
Public policy and political office, and new forms of public intellectual presence and
intervention
The program offers competitive postgraduate teaching assistantships and internships.

14. WHY SITUATE A PROGRAM LIKE THIS IN AN ART SCHOOL?
(1) Art schools have been honing the fine art of formal-aesthetic critique, evaluative
protocols, and rigorous means of judgment for several hundred years. They have
steadily been developing highly nuanced means of analyzing visual and verbal
phenomena as well as developing cultural forms that are simultaneously affective and
objective. This is not a “subjective” matter but, rather, a matter of objective forms that
eventually function as autonomous modes of agency and transformation in the world.
(2) Art schools have, thus far, escaped over-professionalization and, accordingly, are
still capable of fostering sense-based forms of intelligence. As Rudolf Arnheim
suggested some time ago, we are literally weeding out certain forms of intelligence
that may be quite valuable—indeed, irreplaceable.
(3) Artists can be said to possess a form of intelligence that is not only sense based
but also profoundly extrapolatory—a kind of pattern recognition that is not purely
arithmetico-logical. They understand how images work and are dedicated to what
might be called “the labor of imagination.” As Georg Simmel remarks, they literally see
differently, respond to time differently.

15. McLuhan in his remarkable essay “Challenge and Collapse: The Nemesis of
Creativity” (Understanding Media), is a person of “integral awareness” capable of
sensing across time. “‘The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history
of the future,’” notes Wyndham Lewis, quoted approvingly by McLuhan, “because
he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.’”
(4) Creativity is much touted today but, in actuality, may be in short supply; art
schools are devoted precisely to keeping it alive. On top of this, creativity and
critical thought seem increasingly divorced—this divorce may signal a serious
problem. Some cultural historians are already predicting that within the next
decade or two, the number of individuals capable of thinking both critically and
creatively and with historical and theoretical depth will diminish radically.
Projected top-jobs lists, accordingly, now include “poet,” a reference to the rare
individual capable of combining rigor, precision, and imagination—of thinking
completely outside any box. We are interested precisely in such students.

16. KEY TERMS
RESEARCH
PROCESS
COMPRESSION
DISTRIBUTION
UBIQUITY
THE ARCHIVE
DOCUMENTATION
DOCUMENTARY
NARRATIVE
ATLAS
ARCHITECTURE
SYSTEMS THEORY
AESTHETICS, RETURN OF
PERCEPTION AS INTELLIGENCE
SENSORIUM
MEDIOLOGY
KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS
CULTURAL THEORY
CULTURAL NETWORKS
GEOGRAPHY
PROBLEM-SOLVING
LIFEWORLD

17. EMERGENCE/EMERGENT PROPERTIES
PRACTICE
CREATIVITY
COLLABORATION
TRANSDISCIPLINARITY
CROSS-OVER
SYNTHESIS
ART/CRAFT/DESIGN (ACD) AS CULTURAL INVESTIGATION
SYNCHRONY
SYNERGY
MATERIAL IMAGINATION
INTERVENTION
FIELD
EXCHANGE
EXPERIENCE
THE NEW HUMANISM
“ETHICS, ENERGY, AESTHETICS”
“MIND AS PASSION”
THE LABOR OF IMAGINATION

18. KEY THEMES AND PREOCCUPATIONS
INTERVENTION
Real Time
Literalism
Sense-based Intelligence
Lock-in
MEDIA WARS
21st-century Iconoclasms
Critique of Critique
The Visible and the Invisible
Archive Fever
Social Media
New Documentary
Affect
Object Studies
Interface
Distributed Systems
Post-Museum
Counterveillance

19. Invisible Technologies
Archaism versus Futurism
The Forecast
Risk
AESTHETICS
Nonfiction Studies
Style and Stylization
Design and Experience
Parallelism
SENSE RATIOS
Aesthetic Labor
Ethical Vision
The Academy
Pattern/Anti-Pattern