We are living in the archive. The 21st century, age of the digital and of infinite information horizons, offers particularly fertile conditions for future artists, writers, curators, and educators to meet, collaborate, and reinvent their identities as cultural workers, memory agents, and experimental pedagogues. This program is designed to support students in the arts and humanities who are interested in forging a practice that combines creative and critical engagement with questions of memory, the writing of history, the document and the object, the history of exhibition and display, the gallery, museum, and archive.

We will investigate the ways that cultural institutions, including museums, ethnographic films, and documentary photography have written "official" histories; our own creative experiments will be directed toward critiquing and intervening in these visual narratives by working closely with archival materials. Our studios and laboratories will often be museums and archives; we will visit museums in Seattle and Portland, and we will spend time almost every week in a local archive, getting to know the Washington State Archives here in Olympia as artist-researchers.

This is an advanced program for students who are looking to develop their own research-based artistic practice and who want to pursue small-scale individual or collaborative projects within the context of a program structured around supporting that work through lecture/screenings, presentations, weekly writing workshop and project critique, and seminars on common readings. Students will plan independent work for the quarter under faculty guidance. Students will also share in leading class sessions that may include regular work-in-progress presentations, seminar facilitation, and other presentations of research related to program themes. Projects supported: critical/creative writing (we will do our best to blur the line between these), non-traditional writing for the moving image and performance, video and film, photography, and other visual arts.

Students interested pursuing an in-program internship as part of their academic work in the program should register first, then research their options and contact the faculty to discuss further.