Undergraduate Overview

This course plunges students into content and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school, as we consider the role played by the 'critical' in 'visual and critical studies.' For the past ten years, it has been referred to as 'a primer for the art world.' It will still, mostly, provide you with a working vocabulary and crash course as to bodies of knowledge integral to the study of visual culture. At the same time, to productively engage in a reflective critique of society and culture, it will consider 'texts' from as diverse and contemporaneous a group of scholars, theorists, critics, and cultural producers as possible, from both inside and outside the academic institution.

This course plunges students into content and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school, as we consider the role played by the 'critical' in 'visual and critical studies.' For the past ten years, it has been referred to as 'a primer for the art world.' It will still, mostly, provide you with a working vocabulary and crash course as to bodies of knowledge integral to the study of visual culture. At the same time, to productively engage in a reflective critique of society and culture, it will consider 'texts' from as diverse and contemporaneous a group of scholars, theorists, critics, and cultural producers as possible, from both inside and outside the academic institution.

This course plunges students into content and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school, as we consider the role played by the 'critical' in 'visual and critical studies.' For the past ten years, it has been referred to as 'a primer for the art world.' It will still, mostly, provide you with a working vocabulary and crash course as to bodies of knowledge integral to the study of visual culture. At the same time, to productively engage in a reflective critique of society and culture, it will consider 'texts' from as diverse and contemporaneous a group of scholars, theorists, critics, and cultural producers as possible, from both inside and outside the academic institution.

This seminar explores various media industries from both US and Global perspectives. A number of major topic areas are examined. We historically compare the media industries before the Internet era. We then take an overview of a variety of today's media businesses followed by an examination of current global television business and management structures. We also survey the competitive and creative outlook in areas such as programming, distribution, markets and seek to develop a basic knowledge of nomenclature, practices and career paths. Readings include work by media theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Marshall McLuhan and by contemporary business strategists Jim Collins and Morten Hansen. Screenings include documentaries by Adam Curtis and Douglas Rushkoff. Assignments include responses to weekly readings, a commentary on current research, an at home exam that examines readings in-depth, and a project that explores each student¿s interest in the media industries.

This course provides an introduction to social theories of visual communication and to methods of critiquing, producing, and displaying visual representations of cultural phenomena. Drawing primarily from anthropology and ethnographic research, students will explore the significance of visual images to represent and document identity, behavior, and everyday life. This includes examining how even ways of viewing - sight - are shaped, and also vary by and within, culture. Influences from film, photography, and graphic design provide examples of how the social sciences may incorporate these technologies from other disciplines, into behavioral analysis and to understand culture. However, the consequences of visual content creation and circulation (unintended or otherwise), features heavily in the course topics such as: travel photography, photojournalism, social media, and digital activism.

Course readings and ethnographic films focus on documentary developments spanning the 20th century - from the silent picture era, scientific cinema, and cinema verite - to internet media like virtual reality, gifs, screenshots, and Tik Toks. In reviewing this learning content, students will conduct comparative analysis of still, moving, and digital images while also creating their own visual content in the process. Learning activities include in-class breakout groups and students presentations, as well as independent work involving ethnographic drawing, a photo essay, film critique paper, and meme ethnography research project.

Curating today is a dynamic, many-facetted activity with open boundaries: artists, writers, historians, editors, event-, festival- and symposium organizers generate projects, configure actors and move objects across platforms. This course will trace pathways through the many options contemporary art worlds hold. It will explore curatorial rationales, outcomes and support materials by parsing examples through images, readings and site visits. Students are encouraged to develop curatorial prototypes. Both playful experimentation and the framing of more formal proposals will be supported.

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.

Musicking is an analytical methodology developed by musicologist Christopher Small which redefines music as a verb and a performance of social relations wherein producer and audience reciprocally participate. This course uses this approach as a starting point towards broader definitions of participatory culture and investigations of other sensorial media that intersect or compliment musical participation. We examine music's unique position in 'Visual' Studies, fluidly situated between so-called 'high' and 'low' artforms, between pop-culture and creative practice.

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.

This three hour seminar is a professional practice class which examines what it means to have a productive, critical practice. Students not only refine their own identity as generative artist-scholar-citizen but also learn to represent that practice professionally with CVs, portfolios, project proposals, artist statements, and scholarly abstracts. Students also work collaboratively on exhibition projects to experience how different creative roles such as artists, curators, writers, and venue directors interact in the art world.

This course aims to critically examine the affects of race and representation of others. Students will interpret nineteenth-century and early 20th-century material and non-material culture from anti-slavery and pro-slavery sources, including biblical literature, slave narratives, print media, music, visual art, and ephemera. The course considers moral motivations for recognition, empathy, assistance, and liberation of others in an era of sentimentalism. Students will interrogate modern ideas in helping relationships as they learn to 1.) explore the role of cultural materials in preserving trauma or the history of violence; 2.) discuss the role of cultural imagery in the production of charity and empathy; and 3.) ask contemporary questions about the role of desire in feeling responsibility and doing good. Throughout the course, students will be required to travel to several local archives including the Newberry Library and the Stony Island Arts Bank for research.

This course critically examines architecture and the built environment through three expanding lenses: first through form; second through concepts; and finally though politics and civic engagement. Through reading, discussion, and experiential research, students will gain a thorough understanding of the socio-cultural role of the built environment. Students will engage the systems of the built environment to come to an understanding of how social, formal, and methodological aspects of architecture can be deployed, deconstructed and reformulated through critical production.

Readings in the first unit will include spatial theory by authors like Zoe Sofia, Elizabeth Grosz, Michelle Addington, and Georg Simmel and material explorations by authors like Pauline von Bonsdorff, WJT Mitchell, and Peter Schjehldahl. Readings in the second unit explore concepts through Michel Foucault, Mark Wigley, and Roland Barthes. The third unit explores the political work of the Forensic Architecture think tank, as well as texts on gentrification, erasure urbanism, and institutional access.

Each unit will end with a short research paper, or the opportunity to present in-progress work for a longer semester-length research project. The option for a studio project will be presented with specific guidelines for preparing for critique.

Where does an artwork begin & end? Where does an exhibition begin & end? Is an exhibition solely about the materialization of specific works of art, or is it also¿and if so, in what ways¿about the various conventions that go into the making of exhibitions¿which include press releases, announcement cards, checklists, wall labels, catalogues, and digital-based media?
Conventions like these are representations. We engage in different kinds of representations both because of the implausibility of re-presenting, and also because representation is a means by which we further, through the use of language and images, and through a process that is both otherwise and otherhow, the reach of the real. In this respect, moving closer to the artwork involves moving away from the artwork--to look closer at fringes and margins and representations, and ask a very fundamental question: to what extent are these various exhibition conventions actually part of the art--and not merely an extension of it?
While the course is experiential and practical, it also explores conceptual issues underpinning the relationship between curatorial and creative practice. The class is open to both graduate and undergraduate students interested in curating across many historical periods, as well as BFA and MFA students interested in the ways exhibitions create contexts for their work, and how they might participate in the construction of these contexts.

Archives as Art is a project-based seminar that explores the ways contemporary artists use, manage, and create archives as part of their creative work. Our starting point will be the Hans Ulrich Obrist Publication Archive (which Joseph Grigely oversees), but will include case studies in the archive projects of artists like Theaster Gates (Rebuild Foundation), Zoe Leonard (Faye Richards Photo Archive), Mark Dion (environmental archives), Susan Hiller (the Freud Museum), Eyal Weizman (architectural forensics), and Jill Magid (the Barragán Archives). We will also look at various museum archives and their organizational methodologies. Students will do final projects that engage archives as a critical and/or creative practice.

This course explores artistic, tactical, theoretical, cultural and pedagogical approaches to resisting Empire through the work of John Akomfrah, Black Audio Collective, #decolonizethisplace, Sky Hopinka, Tirza Even, Forensic Architecture, Rafa Esparza, Damon Locks, SuperFutures Haunt Collective and Santiago X. We will consider how artists, activists and scholars destabilize linear time, imagine queer futures and utopias by remixing hegemonic forms of social memory including archives, explore community-based knowledges and develop reparative counter-narratives. Structure: Readings, discussions, presentations, visits to Chicago archives, guest lectures, and development of pedagogical materials and/or scholarly/creative projects.

Group research trips include visits to libraries and collections to meet with archivists and researchers, including the following sites: the Gerber Hardt Library for GLBTQ studies, American Indian Center, Leather Archive and Museum, Edward E. Ayers Collection of native studies at the Newberry, Vivian G. Harsch, Harold Washington Special Collections and visits to informal, uncurated collections, including flea markets. Readings may include Eve Tuck, Audra Simpson, Stuart Hall, Russell West-Pavlov, Tina Campt, Gerald Vizenor, Jose Esteban Mu?oz, Arjun Appadurai, Tananarive Due, and Saidiya Hartman.

Students will engage in weekly discussions to readings, 3 written responses, conduct an independent visit to a collection and present findings. Final projects may include hybrid production: written, artistic and/or pedagogical projects, final presentation and critique.

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.

This course enables upper-level students to develop a well-researched thesis project on a topic of their choice. Such a thesis project may be linked to their final BFA thesis or studio project, and may be useful for students considering graduate school in a field in which research and writing expertise is required. Students may choose to enlist innovative formats and incorporate a variety of media. Topics as diverse as 'Gay Cinema,' 'Culture as Industry,' 'Is Rap Subversive?,' 'The Art and Science of Fragrance,' and 'The Morphology of the Toy Soldier Body' have been explored. Class meetings are used to share research methods, discuss the given challenges of various projects, and present works-in-progress for critique.

This course offers several graduate-level trajectories through visual studies, each with its own historical precedent, some drawn from neighboring disciplines and some manufactured sui generis, but all sharing one common concern: how power manifests and what it might mean to bear witness. Each week begins with a canonical text and extends its lineage to contemporary thinkers invested in how a schematic of power concretizes through the shifting context of our current moment. Contained here are multiple histories of ways of seeing, state surveillance and policing, biopower and state sovereignty, queer embodiments and the representation of gendered and raced bodies, time and its illusions, visual networks and otherwise occluded spaces of technology, and the spectacle of capitalism. The final half of the term will be devoted to your own work, in the form of shared research, lecture-conversations, and seminar papers. [This is a required course for first-year students in the MA in VCS program.]

This course spans centuries but focuses on the thin line between looking and reading, imagining and writing. Considering the question, ?What is language?? leads us to readings in linguistics from art historical, literary-theoretical, philosophical, and ethnographic disciplines. We also pursue connections between ?seen words? in movements such as pop art, conceptual art, concrete poetry, language poetry, and conceptual writing by comparing works in various media that revolve around distinctions between speech, writing, the static and moving image. Notable authors and artists include Vito Acconci, Bob Brown, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jacques Derrida, Carl Dryer, Paul Friedrich, Luce Irigaray, Roman Jakobson, Rene Magritte, Ed Ruscha, Sapir-Whorf, Hannah Weiner, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others.

Buzzfeeds is a course in experimental cultural production, open to MFA/MA graduate students and upper-level undergraduates with an interest in the poetics of speculation (futures, speculative fictions, simulated histories), the politics of contemporaneity, and the possibilities of post-internet aesthetics and interventions. It combines group speculations, individual performance lectures, research-based poetics slideshows, and readings that range from Tung-Hui Hu¿s Prehistory of the Cloud, Legacy Russell¿s Glitch Feminism, and Aimee Bahng¿s Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, to sci-fi shorts, McKinsey Consulting white papers, the films of Adam Curtis, 19th-century art historical analysis of the intertwined rise of morgues and history paintings (both genres of ending and becoming), and engages the work of Hito Steyerl, JJJJJerome Ellis, Debit, Diane Nguyen, Bernadette Corporation, Philip K. Dick, David Graeber, and others. If you find yourself ¿ or your studio or critical practices ¿ interested in theory as a medium of performance and what it means to think (together) in public, or if you see the seminar room as a space to get weird and rehearse one¿s political and social relations with the world, this might be a good course for you. We measure our days in death and social media metrics and watch the very first episode of Days of Our Lives. We are Danny Brown and Murphy Brown and Dan Brown and Barbara Browning and Brown University¿s Department of Media and Mass Culture and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown¿s undoing and the unincorporated community of Brown, Oklahoma; we are also the reason why ¿disambiguation¿ appears in print twice as often as ¿solidarity¿ (Google NGram already owns your rhetorical frequencies). Never forget: The Sopranos started with a single psychotherapy session, and the world ends not with a bang, but a laser printer.

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.

Publishing yourself and publishing others will both be addressed in a start-to-finish manner as we cover the key aspects of publishing as a creative enterprise, from pitching and editing to fundraising and promotion. We will look at various historical and current models for both digital and print publications as students develop and produce their own publishing projects.

The thesis, as the final requirement to be fulfilled for the Masters of Art degree in Visual and Critical Studies, is expected to constitute an original contribution to the current body of research in its field. For the thesis, students are encouraged to use innovative approaches to research and analysis, and the formats with which they disseminate the outcomes of their research. The thesis requirement may be satisfied in a variety of ways incorporating visual, sonic, and verbal media. This seminar assists the student in selecting, researching, analyzing, designing, and, organizing the thesis. During this semester, the student selects her or his thesis advisor and two other faculty committee members and defends the proposal before this panel. The student also completes most of the research and the preliminary work for the thesis. This seminar is required for the Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies. Open to MAVCS students only.