Aesthetic Transformation & Sources of Inspiration

About

Aesthetic Transformation embraces processes of mutual inspiration and influence within the arts and other fields of cultural and scientific knowledge production. It is based on the fundamental idea that every creative work operates in a system of relationships to other fields, disciplines and to what others already have created. 

A focus lies on the idea-generating process. How does inspiration come about? How do we find ideas? 

In this seminar, we will initiate a transformation process in which participants from a variety of artistic disciplines take their inspiration from a work of a predecessor to create their own work, enabling new ideas to emerge, and preparing them to encounter the unexpected. This includes the application of chance operations, strategies of improvisation and provisional solutions in order to accelerate the creative process. 

This course is geared towards artists of all disciplines, designers, architects and people working in the creative sector who would like to experiment in an interdisciplinary environment. The participants will make use of a transformative strategy to find inspiration and develop their ideas. Group conversations and readings allow for a critical inquiry of contemporary art practices. 

The starting point for this seminar will be determined with the participants. One option could be: a chosen site in the city space of Berlin.

Artists active in sound, performance, dance, sculpture, visual art or conceptual work, as well as designers or architects, will produce a work of art as a first response to the chosen topic. Sequential works will be developed that act upon multiple interpretative statements of the participants. Individual works are connected to others, and, in this way, a collective, multi-perspective investigation on the chosen topic unfolds. 

But also, within their respective mediums and practices, artists will be encouraged to focus on hidden or latent aspects of inspiration and influence by posing following questions at the end of the course: What was referred to or emphasized on in the transformation process? Where does an idea pull itself through? What was dropped? And looking back at their own work: What impact did it have?