A Look Back at an Exceptional (First) Year – Part 1 Creative Discoveries
This year presented some challenges and opportunities for First Year students at Parsons Paris. First, acclimating to a new city, a new language and college meant to leave behind some of their habits and recreate new ones. It meant also to immerse oneself in design, art and see your environment from a new perspective:
In integrative Studio and Seminar 1, students are faced with a foundational exercise: reinventing an existing artwork to question its original meaning in a Remake. Done in groups, these projects taught them as much about art history and researching as about questioning iconography, materials and making as a group.
Slides: 34 (several projects on it)
Being a designer or an artist requires not only observational and making skills, but also critical thinking ones. In Integrative Studio and Seminar 2, students are invited to collect everyday for a week objects or images, sounds and scenes that inspire and influence their work. Through their Curiosity Collections, students share with others their sources of interest and start paving the way of their art and design practice.
In Object Redux, a cross-disciplinary project in Integrative Studio and Seminar 1, students went to the Musée des Arts Décos (MAD) in Paris and selected an object from the XXe and XXIe centuries collection. They were prompted to reinvent their object by changing its scale, material, color, functionality in order to reflect an idea, concept or issue that interest them:
In First Year Studio “Space / Materiality”, students try their hands (and minds) at building as an act of transformation. Giving shape to their thoughts using an array of technical approaches (drawing, disassembling, recomposing, duplicating its parts or changing its scale and/or material), students explore how value is created through playing with a commonly found object.
The dancing chair
Federica Toja, Magalie Moussa, Jiayi Zhu
In other words, the Fall semester was a time of self-reflection and exploration for the First Year students. If the project Atlas (from Integrative Studio 1) invited the students to think back at their past habits in a Map of Habits, they also took Paris – their new home – as a laboratory to explore the landscape, the social fabric, the architecture and landscape of a European Metropolis.
Other students tried their hands at sharing their impressions of some of Paris most renowned locations in the setting of the classroom through a “AD cinema” installation playing on visual and auditory perception.
Andrea Osto, Fernanda Zorrilla Gonzalez, Luna Khanh Ngoc Michel, Mingu Choi, Heterotopia: A Tour, 2019, 4D Cinema