New Class, New World

Design and Society is over, Imaging Cities has commenced. I have to say DK has been lovely, but it's getting stranger (and more interesting) by the second. The first three weeks were useful, since they were spent pretty much just absorbing anything and everything - it got to the point where I was either sleeping or actively "experiencing" Copenhagen, and it was this very enriching, Academic with a capital A kind of deal. This new course is different. I discovered yesterday, for instance, that the majority of my next two weeks here will be spent in an enormous empty storefront in the country's largest mall. We will be making things there, which should be excellent, and it seems like an awfully odd place to plug in a studio project but that's the point - nothing says "urban intervention" like staging artistic disruption in a shopping center, eh?

The professors are American and most of the class started preparing for this trip to Scandinavia five weeks ago with a precursor course at UC Denver, so in addition to the material and approach the make up and progression of the class is considerably different from D+S. Even though it's only been one day, I can already feel the tides turning. I feel completely in my element as far as the proposed projects even though this is my first real studio-based class, and my impression is that there's some serious competence, talent, and good vibery here.

Today is our first "event," which involves hosting members of the community at the storefront (the space is called Work/Shop: what can I say, it's a punny world we live in), interviewing them, and doing some sort of installation. I'd talk about it in more detail if I could, but that's as far in the planning stages/execution as we've gotten. It seems like a lot of the projects we're going to do will be conducted in this manner - largely, that is, on the fly. This aspect is terrifying. But also kind of cool. So LOOK OUT! Something definitely weird and potentially awesome is afoot.