(Music)
(Ominous music)
What we have here in the Hodges Library at The University of Tennessee is the Centaur Excavations at
Volos—a adult male centaur that was excavated near Volos, Greece in the early 1980s.
And there are a variety of artifacts that are a part of the centaur burial, and even includes and Iron Age implement
which apparently is the cause of death of this particular specimen.
When you come to campus and look at the centaur, it asks you the question, “Do you believe in centaurs?”
And you can either decide that, “Yes, I believe in centaurs,” or maybe there are enough ironic clues
that the centaur is a work of fiction; a kind of prank. (Record stopping noise, music stops)
This serves as a model for the freshman seminar “Pranks” class that I teach. In this class we study pranks, we stage them,
we produce fake flyers, we create fictitious student groups and organizations; it’s a way of looking at pranks,
but also asking ourselves about the ethics of pranks as well.
(Music)(Yells gibberish)(Screams)
Why is it that we’re interested in “Punk’d” or “Jackass” or “Candid Camera”?
(Yells jibberish)What is it about pranks that represent a kind of playful, creative mischief?
(Music, Ashton Kutcher speaks, in-discernibly in background)Sometimes pranksters
are kind of an annoyance, but also they can serve as a critique of institutional processes and systems.
I’m very much interested in that edge between fiction and fact. There are so many ways in which we experience that in terms of
media culture, television, and the internet. “Can I believe it, is it real?” The same with the centaur here.
So the pranks class provided a way for me to engage a real broad set of students in terms of the experience of playfully commenting on
and undermining and becoming actually critical in their understanding of consumer culture, media culture and so forth.
There are a lot of wonderful details in the Centaur and I hope students, while they’re here, will take time to appreciate the Centaur itself.
It’s something that really distinguishes The University of Tennessee.