Art and Photography I
Full course for one semester. This course introduces students to the fundamentals of black and white photographic processes and investigates the use of photography in the context of contemporary art. The class will cover camera operation, principles of exposure, basic understanding of light, film development, and darkroom printing. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of photography are explored through shooting assignments, readings, slide presentations, lab work, and critiques. Students will learn to respond to assignments with technical competence and critical clarity. Prerequisite: Art 161. Studio.
Art and Photography II
Full course for one semester. The course will introduce color, larger-scale printing, fiber-based printing, and medium-format materials. With elementary skills and historical context in place, the class will focus on manifestations of the photographic image as an art object, both physically and conceptually. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities of photography are explored through shooting assignments, readings, slide presentations, lab work, and critiques. Class time will be spent in lecture, slide presentations, lab work, critique, and occasional field trips. Students will be expected to respond to assignments with technical competence and critical clarity. Prerequisite: Art 190 or consent of the instructor. Studio.
Digital Video and Coding Interactivity
Full course for one semester. We will explore the use of the moving image, digital video, and interactivity as related to art. Students will be exposed to the concepts and visual strategies surrounding digital media, and techniques of nonlinear, nondestructive video editing and interactivity. Students will learn nonlinear video editing (Final Cut) and interactive graphical programming (Max/MSP/Jitter) while being exposed to the history and discourse of video art and new media art. Class time will be spent in lectures, viewings, lab work, critique, and occasional field trips. Students will be expected to respond to assignments with technical competence and critical clarity. Enrollment limited to 12. Studio.
Media Practice After Machine Learning
Introduces students to creative uses of machine learning for generating and transforming text, images, sound, and video. The course approaches these tools as both unavoidable and contested, and asks students to explore their possibilities alongside their limitations and risks. Students will develop a working understanding of core concepts that underlie contemporary ML systems, including datasets and labeling, training and inference, tokenization and next-word prediction, embeddings and vector space, large language models, and diffusion-based image generation. Studio.
Internet Literacy: AI Coding, Culture, and Art Practice
Full course for one semester. Students will develop an understanding of the technology and the issues surrounding the Internet and the web through studio activities, readings, and fieldwork. Students will gain literacy in web development languages (HTML, CSS, and javascript) and design web applications. We will cover the history of the use of computers and networks as a tool for empowerment, explore topics such as hypertextuality, non-linearity, interactivity, authorship, web as archive, net-neutrality, and the open source movement. With the newly acquired literacy in hand we will investigate how the convergence of the web/social-media with social practice/activism reconfigures the ways in which artists and citizens view, participate in, understand, and narrate real-world issues. Prerequisite: one 100-level studio art course. Studio.
Photobook - Narrative and Sequence in Photography
This class builds upon the foundational engagements with photography, emphasizing independent work alongside structured exploration of photo books, narrative, and serial photography. Through independent projects, students will deepen their practice, exploring the daily act of photography as a medium for expression and social engagement. Prerequisite: Art 190 or one 200-level studio art course. May be repeated for credit up to 3 times.
New Media/Old Media—Experiments in Optical Media and Computation
The course will examine and experiment with various forms of old and analog media combined with new and speculative twenty-first-century media technology to see if they can be productively remade and integrated into contemporary art practices. Technical, aesthetic, and conceptual possibilities are explored through studio workshops, projects, readings, lab work, and critiques. Students must be highly self-motivated and will be expected to design independent projects. Enrollment limited to 16. Studio.
