| Topics in Visual and Critical Studies |
Visual and Critical Studies |
3001 (007) |
Fall 2025 |
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Description
These courses draw on the instructor's particular expertise and are pertinent to an understanding of the social influences on and consequences of the production and dissemination of visual images. Topics vary depending on the individual instructor. See topic description for further information.
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Class Number
2293
Credits
3
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| Top:Archives, Sampling, and Appropriation |
Art & Technology / Sound Practices |
3004 (001) |
Fall 2025 |
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Description
This course is a sound production practicum with a focus on sampling and appropriation. Students will engage sound archives as a resource for creative sound design and music production. The seminar will consider contemporary strategies of sampling and appropriation in the context of popular culture, media preservation and intermedia design. Special attention will be given to public sound archives and library collections.
Coursework includes bi-weekly reading responses, a mid-term, and a final project. Final projects can take form as a research based text or as a creative project that blends modes of creative production. Students are expected to actively and critically engage the social, political and cultural factors that inform their practice. Course readings explore the scholarly discourse on Interculturalism with focus on processes, structures, systems, and methodology in relation to the moral, ethical and aesthetic questions raised by working with cultural artifacts as material.
The seminar encourages trans-disciplinary methodology and cross-media production and is structured as a modified in-person course. The hybrid format includes weekly online topics lectures, student led group discussions and individual student meetings. Online discussion groups will be created for each unit. Students are expected to participate in online discussions in response to unit readings, case studies and discussion prompts. In person studio and access to technology and tech support will be facilitated for students who wish to have access to campus resources.
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Class Number
2294
Credits
3
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| Std Sem: The End of Time |
Visual and Critical Studies |
4050 (002) |
Fall 2025 |
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Description
Every society constructs an image of its foundation and conversely constructs an image of its end. The conception of the end of time evolves as our perception of time evolves. This course surveys texts which foreground the concept and structure of time and explore novel forms and depictions of the end of time. We will study a wide range of cultural producers, texts, films and artworks, including: Chronophobia, The Clock, Alphaville, 2001, THX1138, Blade Runner, Sun Ra, Hal Lindsey, Bikini Atoll, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Visions of the Apocalypse, James Hampton's Throne of the Third Heaven Nations Millennium General Assembly, and Last Days of the Earth: The End of the World Documentary.
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Class Number
2228
Credits
3
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| Gathering |
Masters in Fine Arts |
5011 (002) |
Spring 2025 |
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Description
The purpose of this course is to provide an informal critique situation where students from various disciplines meet once a week to present and discuss their work. The faculty leader facilitates the discussion, which is designed to help students articulate a critique of their own work as well as the work of other students.
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Class Number
2008
Credits
3
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| Voids |
Visual and Critical Studies |
5050 (001) |
Spring 2025 |
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Description
When considering the void we are immediately confronted with nothing, absence, vacuity, the invisible, the ineffable, with destruction and rejection. As emptiness, as the absence of everything or as negation, the void is the opposite of life. However, the experience of the void is not emptiness: it is not about nothing, nor is it about absence. The void is a whole, yet a whole which has no noticeable reality and exists as emergent, potential or conceptual. This seminar will focus on the ideologically driven construction of space. The course will explore spaces as concepts and alternately concepts as generative spaces to occupy, as entities which establish an environment for thought and action. Site, as space performed through shared social and psychic schemata, as actual space, as sacred space and as virtual space. We will consider earth formed sites, human approaches to environmental design, computational media, information as landscape in cyberspace, case study homes and closed world site proposals. In this seminar, the construction of the commons, how we exist within it and questions relating to conceptualizing public space are of central concern. Readings and course material encourage trans disciplinary methodologies and cross-media production. Final projects can take form either as research based texts or as a substantial creative project that blends academic and creative production.
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Class Number
2026
Credits
3
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| Psychoacoustics/Thinking Sound |
Visual and Critical Studies |
5050 (001) |
Fall 2025 |
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Description
Psychoacoustic research entered the popular consciousness at the frontier of media studies, imaged as the future of art and listening. This course considers a range of experiments in recorded sound and the growing archive of human sonic ecologies: sonic utopias, cyborg sound poems, the human archiving of self, and popular culture phantasmal media -- a blend of cultural ideas and sensory imagination.
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Class Number
2226
Credits
3
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| Top: Voids |
Masters in Fine Arts |
5050 (002) |
Spring 2025 |
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Description
This course is a graduate studio critique for both MAVCS students and MFA students. The course is structured as a hybrid seminar/critique, with weekly readings, discussions, and studio critique sessions. The course also includes writing assignments as an integrated element of contemporary studio practice. This course may count as studio credits for MFA students.
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Class Number
2226
Credits
3
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| Gathering |
Visual and Critical Studies |
5060 (001) |
Spring 2025 |
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Description
How, where and why do we gather? In what ways is the impulse to gather informed by histories of exclusion? This seminar is a survey of the myriad ways that communities come together to thrive in times of crisis, assemble in times of celebration, come together around shared concerns and form structures with the capacity to take in and hold energy from scattered places and sources. Is the impulse to gather an innate tendency for humans? What informs our social need for connection, community, and shared experiences? And, how do we manifest this impulse in various forms like social gatherings, rituals, celebrations, or even simply seeking out the company of others? This course will consider forms of hospitality and hosting as well as the politics and protocols of gathering as a form of resistance. In this seminar we will explore methods of facilitating small and large group encounters with a focus on participant experience. We will examine how the structure of a gathering informs the identities, roles, desires and biases that individuals import into the group, as well as the emergence of conscious and unconscious group dynamics. This course will focus on community as form, social context as integral to human interaction and the participatory aspects of experience.
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Class Number
2213
Credits
3
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