Learning How to Fall

<p>Beginning with Richard Drew’s controversial photograph of a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11 Learning How to Fall investigates the changing relationship between world events and their subsequent documentation asking:</p><ul> <p> </p> <li>Does the mediatization of the event overwhelm the fact of the event itself?</li> <p> </p> <li>How does the mode by which information is disseminated alter the way in which we perceive such information?</li> <p> </p> <li>How does this impact upon our memory of an event?</li> </ul><p>T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko posits contemporary art and performance as not only a stylized re-envisioning of daily life but inversely as a viable means by which one might experience and process real-world political and social events. This approach combines two concurrent and contradictory trends in aesthetics narrative and dramaturgy: the dramatization of real-world events so as to broaden the commercial appeal of those events in both mainstream and alternative media and the establishment of a more holistic relationship between politically and aesthetically motivated modes of disseminating and processing information.</p><p>By presenting engaging and diverse case studies from both the art world and popular culture – including Aliza Shvarts’s censored senior thesis at Yale University Kerry Skarbakka’s provocative photographs of falling Didier Morelli’s crawl through Toronto and Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom – <i>Learning How to Fall</i> creates a new understanding of the relationship between the event and its documentation where even the truth of an event might be called into question.</p>