Field School: Dig Where You Stand is a collaboration between the Observational Practices Lab, Parsons, and the Laboratory for Art and Research, University of Cologne.

Guests include:
Peter Spillmann, Berlin: mapping.postkolonial.net
Aurora Tang, L.A.: Center for Land Use Interpretation
Stefanos Tsivopoulus, New York: Archive Crisis
Doris Frohnapfel, Cologne

New School Students: Apply through this form.

This remote workshop uses experimental research methods to critically engage our immediate environments—distant and different though they may be—as a living laboratory and the subject of online and offline practices of observation. Inspired in part by the international movement started in the 1970’s promoting active engagement with the history of a place ,“Dig Where You Stand” is a site-based approach to interdisciplinary research in which participants investigate and reimagine the local.

How have images and archives shaped what we think we know about a place, and how do previously-seen images structure our experience when we encounter an urban or rural site with our physical senses? Which histories, what kinds of everyday experiences of place have been overlooked or left unrepresented? Participants will creatively interrupt the mediated images and archives that preserve and maintain the history of a place, and speculatively rewrite their observations back into this history.

This series of workshops and talks will take place in collaboration with students from the University of Cologne—as we explore and exchange methods of engagement with archives, experimental observations of place, virtual walks, and critical responses to digital representations of local sites with invited visiting artists, scholars and the public. The findings of the workshop will be disseminated in a multi-layered and experimental (on demand) publication: a kind of speculative virtual walk through pre-existing digital archives critically disrupted by participants’ personal observations of the everyday spaces they inhabit.

New School Students: Apply through this form.

Field School Visual by Patrick Macdonald.