COURSE DESCRIPTION

NSCAD University

Media Arts Division

Introductory Printed Matter MDIA 2100 (3 Credits S.)

Instructor Bruce Barber bbarber@nscad.ca Office Phone # 902 494-2981

T.A.  Meaghan Banks

Tuesdays: 1.00pm-5.00pm

Venue: D500 Boardroom and other venues as required.

Printed Matter NYC Interior

Calendar Description:

The student will engage in a series of short projects that reflect the range of both avant-garde and popular production of unlimited edition works. These projects will introduce the student historically and practically to serial and narrative constructs and documentary image text formats, the artists’ book-as-object, “mail art” (postcards, broadsides), DIY and independent web publishing. A seminar component each week will discuss historical precedents for these activities as art.

Print, n. an impression; a mold or stamp; a mounded pat of butter; exactitude of plaiting, crimping, or setting, printed state; printed characters or lettering; an edition; a printed picture, a newspaper, a positive from a negative, a printed cloth; a plaster cast in low relief.

Print, v.t. To press in to impress, to mark by pressure, to impress on paper by means of type, plate or blocks; to produce or reproduce by such means; to cause to be printed; to produce from a positive to a negative, or from negative to a positive (photo)

Print, v.i. to practice the art of printing, to publish a book; to yield and impression, or give a positive etc.

Matter, n. that which occupies space and with which we become acquainted by our bodily senses; that out of which anything is made; material; subject of material or thought, speech, writing, dispute etc.

Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary

Printed Matter the title of this Intermedia course represents both more and less than the sum of its parts. The history of the avant-garde in which printed matter reveals its signal forms has revealed an emphasis upon the interrelationships between the rival arts: visual art, literature, poetry, theatre, music, dance and film; and within visual art the competition between painting, printmaking, photography and design. The locus of this emphasis has often coalesced around the antagonistic relationship between word and image and the reproducibility of the work of art as an implied route toward increased social and political efficacy.

This course will encourage students to explore some of these ideas -- interrelationships – through their independent and assigned projects in printed matter, lectures, readings and discussion