Neobridge Part 2: Form-bridging in Contemporary Art Practice and Education—Endless Forms, Infinite Discoveries

Guest talk session hosted by Can Yang and shared by Christopher and Kathleen Sleboda. This is an opportunity to meet the founders of Draw Down Books, associate professors of Art and Graphic Design at Boston University on Zoom. During the session our guests Christopher Sleboda and Kathleen Sleboda will discuss their publishing imprint, Draw Down Books, a project initially founded as an experiment in publishing forms, with each release planned as a different format (offset printed booklets using duotones, a tabloid publication on newsprint, a DVD of video art, an artist multiple, photo zines, mini-zines, and a hardcover artist monograph). Christopher and Kathleen will discuss how their interest in form exploration and process-driven discovery impacts their work in the classroom. The pair will discuss how they annually reinvent the advanced form-making course they co-teach and share the approaches that have encouraged students to be prolific and daring makers. Their form-making course invites students to use tools and their imagination, as well as the world around them, to produce prolific and bold work. With an emphasis on learning through making and process-based discovery, the pair's pedagogical approach has itself become an experiment in reinvention. While the number of briefs varies from twelve to twenty assignments in a single term, the course has consistently included an explicit focus on public-facing work distributed through social media and printed publications. Christopher and Kathleen will reflect on their half-decade of facilitating form generation in an academic setting, discussing simple straight-forward iterative projects, a term devoted to geometric shapes, and their most recent (online) semester, structured around the letter Z (zig, zag, zero, zoom, zebra, zoomorphism, and zenith).