In this 6-week interdisciplinary course, we will explore different ways of producing creative work through the reexamination of personal memory. Students with a strong interest in writing, photography, and archiving are encouraged to attend, although this should not prevent students of disparate disciplines from signing up.

Through group walks, lectures, readings, discussions, and artist visits we will survey the ways memory can be used as source material; how it can be documented, archived, accessed, and shaped to produce new bodies of work. Students will study a wide range of artwork, literature, music, film, oral histories, and archives which make distinctive use of memory.

We will suppliment our explorations with short excercises and assignments that utilize personal histories, journals, found material, online archives, and self-published publications. We will explore how we can effectively re-contextualize our own memories, construct new meaning, blur the lines between fact and fiction and develop a broader perspective of one’s lived experience and surroundings.

• Understand the various methods and strategies for employing memory in personal projects
• Develop sustainable strategies for documenting, collecting, archiving, organizing, and sharing information
• Become familiar with a breadth of practitioners using memory as a source material for their practices.
• Become familiar with the "art of noticing" and develop strategies to tune into generally overlooked details and components of our environment.
• To gain a deeper appreciation of one’s lived experience and surroundings.

This syllabus is in flux and I expect things to change as I get a sense of our shared goals, and an ideal pace of learning.

Week 1 — Fact or Fiction?

Exploring work that is a direct documentation of personal experience and memory. We will also Exploring work calls on personal memory, but blur the lines between fact and fiction.

Week 2 — Documenting Memory

Exploring how memories can be documented and archived through public projects and museums.

Week 3— Memory & Time

Exploring the ways in which time affects memory and how it can be used as the basis for work.

Week 4 — Walking as Memory Bank

Exploring artist and authors who use the experience of walking to produce bodies of work.

Week 5 — Private Languages

Exploring the ways artists have developed private languages to document and share memories.

Week 6 — Appropriation

Exploring how artists use found materials to construct memories, both personal and collectively shared.

• I Remember by Joe Brainard
• Please Make Sure Your Camper Is Secure by Alex Roth
• Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
• Soho Memory Project
• NYC Tax Department Photographs
• Marking Time with Yuji Agematsu

Alex Wolfe is an artist from Des Moines, IA. His writing and photography are the result of documenting his movement, largely walking on foot, through the urban landscapes of the United States. He is interested in exploring ways of documenting the impermanence of experience and passing of time. Notable walks include: 180-miles from Brooklyn to Philadelphia, 115-miles across Los Angeles, 160-mile across the entire length of Long Island. He is the founder and former editor of Pedestrian, a magazine for people who like to walk and move. His work is collected by the New York Public Library and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. He has guest lectured at Princeton University, The Swiss Institute, and Parsons School of Design. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Index scholarships are designed to benefit underrepresented groups, BIPOC members of our community, and those for whom the class price is not accessible. These need-based scholarships will go to the candidates who best demonstrate why they should be chosen for the free spot to our class based on the following criteria:

• Belong to groups that are traditionally underrepresented in the graphic design and creative industries
• Do not have jobs that would pay for these courses as professional development
• Cannot independently afford the class at list price
• Share our value of intentional community

The number of selected applicants chosen is subject to the discretion of Index and the instructor, but every course will select at least one. Apply for a scholarship here. Applications close September 20th.

We get that things come up, but we rely on headcounts in our programs to survive as a business. If you request a refund...

More than 4 weeks before class begins → 100% refund

More than 2 weeks before class begins → 50% refund

Fewer than 2 weeks before class begins → No refund

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