Global Arc

This is a project-driven course for the intermediate or advanced studio student. This course explores the variety of ways contemporary artists use photography, including but not limited to, documentary, conceptual, alternative processes and experimental methods, installation, narrative fiction or directional, collage, and serial images, as well as traditional modernist methods. Each student will produce two independent projects that are intended to emulate the methodology and practice of a chosen contemporary artist.

This course will explore ways that language can take on material properties and how objects can have syntax and be "read". Through studio assignments, readings, and discussions, students will investigate the idea of language as a tangible material that can be sliced, bent, inserted, reproduced, embedded, and scattered, as in the work of such modern artists as Guillaume Apollinaire, Susan Howe, Marcel Broodthaers, or Jenny Holzer. In each instance, our perception of meaning through language, and our perception of lived experience through material form, are both altered by their engagement with the other.

Over the past fifty years, many visual artists have taken up the process and methods of academic research as an impetus for works of art. Through readings, discussions, case studies, and studio projects, students in this class will engage the immediate context of the University as source material for their artworks, and as a means of exploring the effect that research and knowledge production might have on contemporary artistic practice. How does art produce knowledge? How does the knowledge it produces differ from that of other disciplines? In what ways do artists and researchers use similar source material to different ends?

What we'll be writing together won't quite be art criticism and it won't quite be traditional historical writing either, what we'll be writing together is something more akin to poetry, fiction, art criticism and theory fused into a multivalent mass. Keeping in mind that language can hold many things inside of itself, we'll use somatic and idiosyncratic techniques as a lens, reading a range of poets, theorists, critics, writers and artists who are all thinking with art while writing about bodies, subjectivity, landscape, and the inminiable forms that emerge from the studio.

Students will learn techniques of wildlife surveillance photography using remote cameras to photograph animal populations on and around Princeton's campus. The photographs and apparatus will be considered as both ecological research and works of art. As such, the methods and results will be critically examined for population index studies as well as philosophical ramifications. A final exhibition of the images will highlight the secret wilderness of the area while posing questions about our relationship to non-human animals and the narrative ramifications of the gaze of surveillance photography.

New Orleans is decades ahead of any other U.S. city with respect to climate change. The city's culture embodies exuberance and improvisation, and inspires confidence, openness, and collaboration. These qualities, married with scientific inquiry, may be a strategy for the city's survival. Visiting scholars and artists show how cooperation between cultural and scientific communities can provide valuable, sustainable strategies. The class will spend Spring Break in New Orleans visiting sites of artistic and scientific intervention. Students will create models, media, and other creative works in response to research data.

This course will examine photography's ongoing negotiation of evolving color technologies. Students will use film and digital cameras to explore color as a physiological phenomenon and a technology of image reproduction as well as a virtual construct to be created at will. The analog darkroom and the digital lab will be used to make prints for periodic critiques. A range of new tools will be introduced, including sheet film development, less used Photoshop tools, and analogue color pigment printing. This course will require independent and collaborative assignments, augmented by field trips, readings and discussion.

This course is designed for students who are interested in learning the fundamentals of working with clay. A wide variety of hand-building techniques will be taught, enabling students to make utilitarian vessels as well as sculptural forms. Students will learn about glazing and colored engobe application methods and how to operate electric and gas kilns. Studio work will be complemented by readings, field trips, and slide presentations.Two studio classes, five hours per week.

This course is designed for students who are interested in learning the fundamentals of working with clay. A wide variety of hand-building techniques will be taught, enabling students to make utilitarian vessels as well as sculptural forms. Students will learn about glazing and colored engobe application methods and how to operate electric and gas kilns. Studio work will be complemented by readings, field trips, and slide presentations. Two studio classes, five hours per week.

This course will explore the use of sound in relation to moving images, including film scoring, musicals, soundtracks, music videos, and experimental sound and video art. Significant attention will be devoted to digital technology and media soundscapes,and we will return to several questions throughout the course: How does sound reinforce regimes of audiovisual representation? How does it disrupt them? To what political ends do artists deploy sound, music, and noise? What role does technology play in their effectiveness? Screenings will range from Hollywood blockbusters and immersive media to fine art, video games, and independent cinema.