Global Arc

This seminar will give senior Practice of Art concentrators and certificate students in the visual arts a more structured and collegial environment for developing their thesis exhibitions. Over the course of the semester students will research and develop their art, their influences, and their aesthetic underpinnings to be presented as a formal proposal for their thesis project for group discussion. Material choices, exhibition design, and publicity strategies also will be addressed. Assigned readings will support and challenge received ideas of what art is and what the form and content of an art exhibition might entail.

This class will explore the art of storytelling through the aesthetics of film editing. By focusing on the editing process, students will not only learn how to edit their work but also how to better plan the writing, casting, sound design, and shooting of a film to better serve the editing process. Through screenings of award-winning films, informal class discussions with their directors, and exclusive access to raw scenes and footage, students will learn how to conceptualize the entire film production process as well as be introduced to accomplished professionals in the field.

This class will be a series of material investigations in relation to the human body at rest. Each student will design, build, and critically analyze a custom bed frame that exploits the inherent properties of a singular material-ash wood-across a spectrum of rigid and flexible structures. Laboratory testing and creative work will be augmented by lectures on the cultural history of "the bed" as a site of function, fantasy, aesthetics, and politics, from Egypt and the Bauhaus to John Lennon and Yoko Ono. One larger goal (among many) in the class will be to compare methods of evaluation in visual art, engineering, social policy, and the occult.

This class concentrates on the editing process. Students will re-edit samples from narrative and documentary films and analyze the results. We will also critique ongoing edits of your own thesis films. Guest speakers will come to talk about rough-and find-cut editing, sound design, and sound mixing. Editing is about shaping the story through image, dialogue, additional sound and music. No matter how well (or badly) a film is directed and shot, its final result depends profoundly on the artfulness of its editing. This course will give you a better understanding of how many ways there are to approach and solve the puzzle of editing a film.

A studio course in which formal problems are raised and explored through a range of materials. The central focus is on analysis and exploration of the nature of sculptural space. One four-hour studio class. Prerequisites: 221 or 222 and instructor's permission.

This seminar examines the radical possibilities of collaboration as fundamentally a process of radical composition through which collaborators bridge different modalities of creative expression - textual composition, artistic composition, speculative composition, among others - that span multiple media, forms and practices. By modeling and exploring collaboration as radical composition, this course seeks to reframe it as more that a dynamic of participation and coordination, and to recognize it as a generative methodology for producing critical scholarly and creative work.

A script is only the beginning. Then come the interesting decisions: the actors, the visual style, and the sound design. In this class, each student will be given one segment of a script which they can interpret in any way they choose. Will your part be done as a film noir? A musical? Will it be shot in black and white? Acted in the nude? Reimagined as a documentary? At the end of the term, all the segments will be strung together to make a complete film--a surprising collage of everyone

With roots in political art and community activism, publicly engaged art inserts itself into specific public contexts in a direct engagement with communities and its audience - often with the hope for social change. It endeavors to make social structures as art rather than objects. This class will investigate public art today through readings, case studies, and creating projects that engage the spaces on and around campus. What kinds of societal questions can art pose while still being art? In what ways can forms of collaboration and audience participation be part of artistic practice? Can art provoke social change?

This class is equal parts screening, filmmaking, discussion, and artistic critique. We will watch, discuss, and dissect works by artists and filmmakers from across the globe that use personal form and distinct techniques to communicate idiosyncratically. Readings will explore contemporary notions of time and cinema while screenings prioritize nonfiction and fiction works (as well as art pieces) that have mainstream audience potential. Students will use video cameras to complete assignments that will expand their filmic language as they work over the semester toward the completion of a short film that employs a singular structure.

This seminar will explore the idea of color through a wide range of scientific, philosophical and aesthetic theories. While the eyes of normally sighted human beings render color in roughly the same manner, our reactions and ability to "see" color vary. Far from being a fixed entity, color is a deeply personal and psychological component of human perception and art. In addition to readings, presentations, and discussions, students will be required to keep two kinds of color diaries-one using portable watercolors and another using language-to chronicle their color perceptions, as well as write a paper on an artwork they encounter on campus.