about

This blog structures the activities of lensbased class at UdK Berlin.
Lensbased Agenda:
– the class is committed to discussing the material, political, social implications of aesthetic form. Form is understood as an organising principle that is anchored within material reality and which affects this reality in turn. Form is the material of aesthetic production.
– Aesthetic decisions are discussed and evaluated in relation to their context. Any aesthetic choice is made within a historical, artistic, political and social setting. The discussion of the class is informed by a consciousness of how aesthetic form is made, constructed, corrupted and decommissioned by history and passion.
– Discussions often revolve around the various implications of new media and their formal ressources, but are in no way restricted by this. Participants in the class work in all media available and conceivable and are busy inventing new ones. One can expect a cinematic approach to sculpture or a printmakers perspective on performance art, a hard rock angle to landscape painting, a ballistic approach to architecture, a curatorial approach to gambling as well as other arts routinely addressed in this programme. All forms of writing are proactively included into our idea of artistic and intellectual practice.
– Lensbased is committed to developing the legacy of conceptual and reality oriented practices in an uncompromisingly contemporary way.
– the class communicates in international English. It is based at the University of Arts Berlin, but understands itself as an open format.
– We are not interested in genius, obscurantism, and aesthetic, ethical and intellectual complacency. It is considered extremely uncool to try to enroll colleagues as interns for your own projects. We will politely yawn if you want any advice how to make average, hip or worst of all post-internet art. If you want career advice there are plenty of other opportunities at UdK. If you try to hide the failures of your work by invoking the anthropocene, chances are you understand neither. Please stay away, you are wasting your time and our patience. We will however sometimes tolerate vanity art, occasional spamming, risky pretexts and bad hair days.
– We encourage free wheeling speculation, heuristic installation, solo-tasking, charm attacks, a suspicious attitude to anything considered natural (or internet) and extensions to this list.