In the first week of Themes in Contemporary Art, the professor introduced us to the main content of the course, how to study the course, gave us an idea of what Themes is, told us about the assignments and how to reflect on our learning, and asked us to download the necessary software tools to prepare for the course.

Before the course started, I watched a video by The Weird – James Clegg to learn about some of the creative writing associated with Weird. One thing that struck me was James’ comment that creative writing is similar to making pickles. My understanding of this theory is that if you are constantly writing, after a period of time, you may find that some of the content has changed in some form when you revisit your previous writing notes, perhaps because of a change in the writer’s mindset, or perhaps because new ideas have come to the writer during this period of time, so that when you read the same notes again, you will feel a different change, I think it is similar to making I think this is similar to the fermentation of kimchi, where the same vegetables are fermented to produce a different flavour.

The second pre-course assignment was to read the Weird Studies article and I have to admit that after reading it I didn’t fully understand what it said, but what I can remember is that ‘weird studies’ is not a real academic field but it’s not a joke either.

My final course preparation assignment was to listen to the audio of Bonus Sample: Reality Bites: The Tragedy of Magical Thinking, which I understood to be a pseudo-scientific claim that can be imaginative thinking, which can lead to creative ideas and can provide effective problem solving, but that such a pseudo-scientific claim But such pseudoscientific claims can make the environment deceptive or lead to worse outcomes.

At the end of the first week, I completed my Weird-o-Verse assignment in Miro. The subject I chose to study was Comparative Esotericism, and in this category I looked for a book on Western Esotericism called Hermes in the Academy: Ten Years’ Study of Western Esotericism at the University of Amsterdam”. I didn’t finish the book, I just read the Preface section to get a general idea of what the book was about, and then chose the chapters I was interested in – Astrology, Western Culture, and The Academy in Glimpses of Research – to read and find information about. I first searched for definitions related to Astrology, and then searched separately for astrological cultures in the East and West, and found related divination, tarot, horoscope, yin and yang, the five elements, and so on. Finally I searched for artworks related to these and the one that interested me the most was the official video for Dior’s Spring/Summer 2021 Haute Couture collection – The Tarot Castle. This is a story of female self-discovery told by designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, drawing inspiration from contemporary Italian writer Italo Calvino’s novel The Castle of Intertwined Fates and the Tarot cards, and Italian director Matteo Garrone. And the founder of the Dior brand, Mr Dior, also has a great love of divination and tarot cards and created Dior based on the guidance of a diviner. Western mysticism and astrology is a mysterious, magical and cosmically related discipline, with no scientific theories to back it up and even some concepts that cannot be explained, but this has not stopped people from ancient times from being fascinated by it and studying it.

In the second week of class we learned about the Weird Machine concept and presented our own Weird Scene to our group. of thinking that developments in technology will also come to a standstill. The new word I coined after this lesson was Universe Spirit, and I have distilled some key words from my Weird Scene: Esotericism/Astrology Magic/Energy/Tarot/Constellation/Divination/Prophecy. Based on these, I would like to create a new word, Universe Spirit, to express that there are always people who believe in the magical energy of the universe to help them divine and predict the future, a mysterious and magical energy that comes from the magnetic field of the universe, a belief that is worshipped as a universe spirit.

The final session of the second week, A Conspiracy Theory Workshop, involved finding links between two unrelated variables, linking and supporting them with news or literature, and using conspiracy theories to create a Weird Scene or Weird Theory. science, space, and technology he Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation, and by finding relevant news and building the links step by step, we came up with our conspiracy theory: when sales of books about technology news increase, people should be more vigilant and the number of suicides will increase. When sales of books about technology news rise, people should be more vigilant and the number of suicides will rise.

Throughout these two weeks of classes I have been thinking about how exactly might a work of art break in on our habits of perception? I think that a work of art is not created by a single element, but by artists who do not look for these elements in the way that ordinary people do, they are unrelated. It’s like the unrelated variables mentioned in the conspiracy theory earlier. The artist then connects these unrelated elements in a particular artistic way to create a unique work of art. This is why each person always interprets the artwork differently when viewing it, and finds beauty in it that he or she can appreciate. Perhaps, after a period of time, one will find some different artistic elements in the same artwork, much like James Clegg’s concept of creative writing and making kimchi.And then, Do ordinary things become uncanny? I think the answer to this is yes, the process of creating conspiracy theories is to make otherwise ordinary things uncanny, yet because there is some news and articles to support it, there are some people who will believe in such anti-intellectual and pseudo-research.

These are my reflections on the first two weeks of classes.

Sprint 1 ‘Weird’ Assignment–1,000 words that critically responds to this scenario / Borui Zhang / Themes in Contemporary Art (2022-2023)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0