THE
PUBLIC
SCHOOL
HELSINKI

Advertising pervades every aspect of our lives.  This class will look at how advertising, the language of the global corporate system, has reached into society.  We will look at the history of marketing, and specifically how it developed in the 20th century alongside psychological theories of the time.  We will discuss topics such as: Is advertising a form of creativity?  How can one resist or fight against ads (looking at detournement, billboard modifications, etc.)?  What are the 'weak spots' in a marketing campaign and how can they be exploited?  What happens when tropes of commercial advertising are used to promote non-profit or artistic ventures?  What about viral marketing?  Subliminal advertising?  Product placement?  

Classes wil be in a seminar/discussion format, perhaps with screenings.  

I cycle everywhere (when the streets aren't covered in ice) but when it comes time to adjust my brake pads, fine-tine my mechs or straighten my wheels, I'm totally and hopelessly lost. 

This would be a basic class to demonstrate these techniques and other basic care such as cleaning, etc.  Presumably this would be done using the minimum of tools, so people can keep their bikes running smoothly without having to shell out lots of €€€ on specialised equipment.

As this was originally proposed in the Los Angeles Public School ...

"In this class, we will view and discuss cinema from around the world, mainly focusing on the discursive essay-film. We aim to catalyze a space in which to explore under-known histories that have been archived in film, with special attention paid to postwar liberation movements, such as the Tricontinentalist and Non-alignment projects (as seen in such films as Hour of the Furances and Videograms of a Revolution). How can these films help us perform an archeology of visions of futurity? What potentialities are still available to us in these visions, and what does our relationship to them reveal? What sorts of political imaginaries can film build? What is the state of the political avant-garde in film?

We will curate a selection of films from the UK, France, Ghana, Senegal, Argentina, Brazil, Iran, and Vietnam, among others. It is our hope that the collective discussions that emerge out of these gatherings can catalyze new audiences, re-open debate and contention, get people thinking about/talking about/making new films, and use film as a screen against which to experiment with new possibilities."

In Helsinki we can follow this format and perhaps look at a Nordic/Scandinavian approach to politics and avant-garde filmmaking, though there are some great films in the original LA syllabus that would be good to check out.   This could also be tied in with the proposed class on the Zanzibar films.  I'm also interested in the populism of 'mainstream' political filmmaking, such as Michael Moore, anti-Iraq war filmes etc. -- and what relationships, if any, these films have with an avant-garde.

This course will survey the works of Pierre Bourdieu,  focusing on his major work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. We will draw links to Marx and Weber, contrast Bordieu's ideas with contemporaries such as Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan.  It will also look at the current reception and use of Bordieu within the academy (and, to whatever extent, without).

This course would survey the career of director John Cassavetes and explore ideas of masculinity as exhibited in his work.  Readings would come from gender and feminist theory (such as Butler, Cixous, and others), critical readings of Cassavetes' films, and published writings and biographies (Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Ray Carney's writings, etc.). 

The class will meet multiple times; each will begin with a DVD screening of one film, followed by a seminar/discussion based on assigned readings from the week.  The course will proceed chronologically from Shadows through Love Streams, with occasional diversions (time permitting) into his own acting work when relevant (for example the Johnny Staccato TV series, The Dirty Dozen, or Mikey and Nicky). 

Some questions we might address: Does the behavior of the protagonists in Husbands comment on their suburban surroundings in particular?  How has cinema contributed to a social construction of 'man', and (though not explicitly metafictional) are the male leads in, say, Minnie and Moskowitz or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie aware of this?  Is Peter Falk's character in A Woman Under the Influence an archetype, or an outlier?  And what do we make of Love Streams?

Though the main topic is masculinity, gender interactions are the core of his work and inevitably the role of women in his film will come under scrutiny.  In particular, performances by Gena Rowlands will be of interest.

The Page + The Screen: Siting Text in the Early 21st Century and Beyond is a class that will examine print culture in the digital era. The discussion will be generated from one or more of the following issues:

• the future of the book, magazine, and newspaper
• the future of journalism and the publishing industry as a whole
• reading in the electronic age
• prose and poetry in the electronic age
• the state of criticism; e. g. how the discipline has been transformed by cross-platform writing via blogs and Twitter, in addition to traditional printed media
• authorship and collaboration
• the switch/flip in the structure of knowledge distribution; transitioning from a broadcast/top-down system to a network/rhizomatic system via the Internet
• the rise of the informational commons, peer-to-peer networks, and the Open Source movement
• the state of the bookstore, classroom, and library in the 21st century
• the archive; both analog and digital

In preparation for the class, it may help to read or view the following:

• if:book A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
• Reading (in) the Future via tvo (watch this video)
• Bookfutures, a blog by Chris Meade, Director of if:book London
• Snarkmarket, a long-running con­ver­sa­tion about media, jour­nal­ism, tech­nol­ogy, cities, cul­ture, design, books, music, movies, the future and the past (Also, see their independently-released book, New Liberal Arts)
• Bookfuturism, mapping the future of reading
• The Future of the Reading Brain by Tim Carmody via Bookfuturism
• Mind Reading, a review by Alison Gopnik on Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain via The New York Times Sunday Book Review
• Dave Eggers on McSweeney’s newspaper project, The San Francisco Panorama (interview by E. B. Boyd via Bay Newser and mediabistro)
• Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper by Richard Rodriguez via Harper’s Magazine
• Makeshift (The future of publishing?)
• Why Twitter Will Endure by David Carr via The New York Times Week in Review
• A Working Library, a blog by Mandy Brown, Creative Director at W. W. Norton & Company
• Networks of writers online: Fictionaut, Saccades Project, Matchbook, Electric Literature, Significant Objects, said object (aka objetpetita), Robin Sloan (and his latest work, Annabel Scheme)
• Architecture blogs/zines: loudpaper, a456, pidgin, BLDGBLOG, Serial Consign (see Greg J. Smith’s post, Matt Storus–Church Machine)
• Graphic design blogs/zines: Design Observer, Task Newsletter (preview the essay by Kate McKinney Maddalena, Another Article About the Benefits of Exercise; the essay is from Task Newsletter #2 Not what if, what if not? which focuses on the relationship between fiction and design), form follows behavior
• PBS MediaShift
• Bonnier Mag+ Prototype
• a growing list of people on Twitter who either talk about the future of print or discuss matters related to it
• Internet Archive
• UbuWeb
• Open Library
• The Reanimation Library
• To give us a little bit of context, here’s A Decade in Retrospect by Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

A supplemental reading list is available at aaaarg.org.

Participants may also want to consider creating their own “commonplace books” in which links of interest and/or text from printed materials may be compiled to help facilitate the discussion. (See Matthew Battles post on commonplacing & the modern longue durée)

The Zanzibar film genre is usually used to describe a series of about fifteen films made in France in the aftermath of May 1968, all financed by Sylvina Boissonnas.  The most famous filmmaker to be associated with the group is Philipe Garrel, but it also included Serge Bard, Patrick Duval, Pierre Clementi and others.

This would be a class to screen whatever of the films can be found (which may be difficult), and examine them in the context of political agit-prop filmmaking of the time, as well as general trends of experimental filmmaking.  How did the Zanzibar films respond to the political upheaval of the time, in terms of both content and formal/stylistic strategies?  What precedents were there to these films, and what 'legacy' (if any) did they leave?

Sally Shafto's Zanzibar: The Zanzibar FIlms and the Dandies of May 1968 is (as far as I know) the only book-length study of these films, which we can use as a source text;  we can also look at various online resources and look at thinkers and theorists who may have influenced this line of thought.

Fueled by the rise of the Chicago School of neo-classical economists, the Reaganite and Thatcherite revolutions of the 1980s initiated a 30-year run of neoliberalist reform that has profoundly reshaped global trade through policies and institutions that foster both national and international deregulation.  From the privatization of everything from public works to prison systems, the measured excision of state oversight and control has been conjoined with a systematic rollback of expenditure for social services.  A myriad of major multilateral and bilateral trade agreements like NAFTA (1994) MAI (1995_1998) have reduced tariffs and facilitated the unchecked flow of capital across national borders; GATT’s formation of the WTO in 1994 has since made it the dominant supranational institution that dictates global economic policy; and the last vestiges of Keynesianism have been squeezed out of the IMF and the World Bank, which have now become the global strong-arm to convert the world’s poorer national economies to the neoliberalist agenda. Overall, this wave of neoliberalist reform has meant a diminishment of state sovereignty. Seeking to open new channels for the flow of capital that were previously limited by nationalist protectionism, the state has become an agent of multinational corporations, as one can easily glean from the ominously sequestered G8 summits.  All this is happening under the ambiguous, divisive designation known as globalization--outsourcing production to the global south, systms of flexible accumulation, the production of financial speculative wealth--which has lead to the current economic downturn and intensified the crisis of global precarity.

This description offers a standard macro-economic perspective on the reigning global economic paradigm, but it does little to explain how neoliberalism actually functions at the micro-levels of culture, politics, and society.  How does this economic doctrine produce and articulate forms of subjectivity, identity, and affect?  How does it connect to parallel scientific paradigms such as cognitive psychology, chaos theory, or rational action theory?  How is it realized through the myriad operations of biopower and biopolitics?  How is it transmitted in forms of cultural production?  How does neoliberalism fundamentally change our understanding of human labor power, techno-politics, and the attention economy?  This course will concern itself with these and other question by tracing the story of how a recondite economic doctrine was extended into every aspect of social, cultural, and political life through the theory of human capital.  If neoliberalism is the reigning global economic paradigm, human capital refers to the way that paradigm becomes installed through discrete technologies of power and the self toward the management of populations.

The course will consist of a set of close critical readings of primary sources that directly advocate or contest the development of a theory of human capital.  Readings may include: Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Gary S. Becker, Milton Friedman, Frederick von Hayek, T.W. Shultz, Leo Strauss, Thorstein Veblen, Emile Durkheim, Nikolas Rose, Brian Holmes, and others.

Do you like beer?  Do you like aggressively hopped, intense beer that challenges the taste buds?  Does the word "experimental", in description of beer, entice you instead of scaring you away?  Do you find all mass-produced Finnish beer to be sadly lacking in taste?  Well, make your own!

We will learn how to make beer at home, but explore techniques not commonly used by other homebrewers: stealing yeast from commercial beer, throwing weird ingredients in, and overloading any/all elements of beer. 

The class participants would split the cost of materials and make some insane ales, which would then be bottled after a few weeks and split evenly among the participants.  While we wait for the wort to boil, we will drink some of our favorite beers.  As a "textbook", we can refer to Sam Calagione's Extreme Brewing.

We have ways to preserve creative work that falls into easily-defined categories: writings, recordings, films and videos, etc.  Ephemeral experiences are often something that we desire to have preserved, and live events that are usually documented through video often fail to properly capture an experience. 

This course would look at strategies of preservation and documentation that are currently in use, looking at the art world as well as the current theories of digital preservation and information science.  What are the significant properties of, say, an event of performance art?  Which of these properties does video or transcription fail to convey, and can there be solace in just accepting that something has passed (without needing a record of it)?