Materiality, synesthesia, aesthetics and affects.

In the seminar Die Architektur des Lichts II we will focus the production and discussion of artworks by the students, continuing the conceptual approach developed in the previous semester (Die Architektur des Lichts I). Having these artworks as a starting point, we will reflect on our perception of them and their relation to the material world. How do space, matter, sounds, smells, and light affect our senses and intellect? How has perception changed and was shaped by cultural and social-historical contexts?
The meetings will continue to bring theoretical and historical backgrounds to provide tools to understand how our senses work together and affect each other, and how they were historically separated from themselves and our intellectual abilities after the so-called Enlightenment period. The Romantic, Symbolist, and Surrealist movements proposed in different ways a reunification of the senses with reason, and the connection of the senses of smell, vision, taste, hearing, and touch. Can a sound have a colour? Can a scent have a sound? The phenomenon of synesthesia (when the senses work together and, as hinted in the questions, sounds have colours, for example) has been of particular interest to artists, and to answer to those questions we will analyse the material and cultural nature of light, colour, smell, and sound, how they materialise in space and are perceived by different societies and cultures.
These will be the conceptual grounds to develop artworks during the seminar, with the goal of dismounting the limitations of purely visual forms and expanding our relationship with art, the world, our senses, and the further developments that this may have in the art system and its structure.
We will study works by different artists that address the senses as politically framed, given that the separation of the senses and the intellect was imposed by a Western, European, bourgeois, white mindset and has had an impact on our relationship to the material world and to ourselves. Artworks that defy these separations were produced by, and not only, European artists, and many of them looked for sources in Asian, African, and indigenous American aesthetic productions. We will analyse this relationship, which has deep colonial roots, to understand the role of art and affects in the contemporary world.

The course has an inherent examination character. Presentation and discussion of practical work dialectically confronted with historical facts and theories as well as participation in class discussions will be used for assessment.