Theory

This course explores philosophy, architectural and design theory, and communication and architectural criticism, particularly their interdependence and relevance to the creative act. This course examines and discusses the historic and current dialogue and rhetoric of designers, architects, philosophers, and critics and explores the relationship of the individual designer's work to this body of information.

This course explores philosophy, architectural and design theory, and communication and architectural criticism, particularly their interdependence and relevance to the creative act. This course examines and discusses the historic and current dialogue and rhetoric of designers, architects, philosophers, and critics and explores the relationship of the individual designer's work to this body of information.

This course provides an overview of the histories and practices of art education and American public education from the pre-industrial era to present. Teacher candidates investigate philosophical and political theories to better understand the matrix of connections between schooling, society, ideology, and culture.

This course provides an overview of historical, ideological, and economic influences of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy on democracy, public life, and schooling. Teacher candidates critically investigate prevalent forms of multicultural education including conservative, plural, liberal, essential, and critical theories and practices.

This course provides an overview of the histories and practices of art education and American public education from the pre-industrial era to present. Teacher candidates investigate philosophical and political theories to better understand the matrix of connections between schooling, society, ideology, and culture.

This course provides an overview of historical, ideological, and economic influences of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy on democracy, public life, and schooling. Teacher candidates critically investigate prevalent forms of multicultural education including conservative, plural, liberal, essential, and critical theories and practices.

This team taught seminar explores contemporary discourses about landscape as it has developed from the unexplored, to the dominated; from picturesque agrarian to urban. Land as territory, once understood as fixed and bounded, is open, fluid, interactive, chaotic, and in constant flux with the architecture and infrastructure it is asked to support. Landscapes are physical, environmental, and virtual, existing in electronic space, within nature's cycles, and defined and mediated through interactive information and knowledge communication networks. Landscapes, Territory, Fields questions social, political and economic frameworks which inform contemporary configuration of territories and develops awareness and critical understanding of physical and social processes that define and effect changes in place over time .

What are the concerns that drive one's creative practice? How does one set the terms for its future development? This course offers strategies for the evaluation and communication of students' individual practice as artists, designers and/or scholars. Through essential readings, studio projects, and writing, students will generate narratives about how and why they make art. To do so, they will investigate methods (visual, critical, written, and creative) for the reconsideration of their work and of its aims and priorities. Individual mentoring with the faculty member is a central and dedicated component of the class as a means of fostering the self-identification of goals and priorities. Students will also examine historical and contemporary precedents that relate to their own work in order to consider the ways in which their individual explorations can be brought into dialogue with other perspectives. Students participate in broad ranging discussions about the present status and future prospects of art and design through workshops, dialogues, and collaborations both in the class and in SAIC-wide conversations with other Sophomore Studio Seminars. An important function of this course is to build upon these insights in forming a practical plan that helps students effectively map the curriculum and resources of SAIC into their own needs. For more information see http://blogs.saic.edu/sophseminar/

This transdisciplinary studio course explores visual research, and emphasizes tools, techniques, and aesthetic approaches to digital imaging, illustration, and motion graphics. Students are introduced to established software packages as well as programming approaches to generating material for multimedia works. Tools covered in this course involve the Adobe Creative Suite, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects, and the Processing environment. Students are encouraged to experiment, while transforming and refining their ideas and visual research through a sequence of multimedia screen-based projects that build in scope and complexity. Projects focus on the development of visual systems that integrate concept through color, line, form, image, text, and media in meaningful and compelling ways.

This interdisciplinary studio course is designed for students who have a high level of art-making experience who are wishing to explore the possibilities of the medium of light, either as an enrichment to their present artistic direction or in new explorations. The illusionary aspects of light and its ability to define or distort space is investigated through models or environmental scale work. Light enhancement for both 3-D and 2-D art is included, with an emphasis on creating virtual physical spaces often incorporating aspects of motion, real or implied. The course will be tailored to individual interests. Lectures may include a variety of technical matters including air brushing, construction techniques, and electric light hardware and its control.

Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a rigorous investigation of the art of film editing and should provide a historical and theorectial understanding of film editing based on the study of past works. Close reading of films will train the student in the core aesthetic decisions, structures, strategies and demands of editing. This will involve not only screening works but also analyzing these works through shot by shot contemplation of selected scenes. In addition, we will be reading several classic theroretical texts and will involve ourselves with discussion of these texts in relation to the works whown in class. Students should be taking Film 1 Film as Capture simultaneously with this class Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a theoretically based course and is not designed to offer critique for works-in-progress. Instead, each student will be using ideas learned from this class along with the material shot in Film 1 :Film as Capture to prepare for next semester when students will take shot material into the Editing Practicum Class to actually finish a project.

Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a rigorous investigation of the art of film editing and should provide a historical and theorectial understanding of film editing based on the study of past works. Close reading of films will train the student in the core aesthetic decisions, structures, strategies and demands of editing. This will involve not only screening works but also analyzing these works through shot by shot contemplation of selected scenes. In addition, we will be reading several classic theroretical texts and will involve ourselves with discussion of these texts in relation to the works whown in class. Students should be taking Film 1 Film as Capture simultaneously with this class Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a theoretically based course and is not designed to offer critique for works-in-progress. Instead, each student will be using ideas learned from this class along with the material shot in Film 1 :Film as Capture to prepare for next semester when students will take shot material into the Editing Practicum Class to actually finish a project.

Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a rigorous investigation of the art of film editing and should provide a historical and theorectial understanding of film editing based on the study of past works. Close reading of films will train the student in the core aesthetic decisions, structures, strategies and demands of editing. This will involve not only screening works but also analyzing these works through shot by shot contemplation of selected scenes. In addition, we will be reading several classic theroretical texts and will involve ourselves with discussion of these texts in relation to the works whown in class. Students should be taking Film 1 Film as Capture simultaneously with this class Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a theoretically based course and is not designed to offer critique for works-in-progress. Instead, each student will be using ideas learned from this class along with the material shot in Film 1 :Film as Capture to prepare for next semester when students will take shot material into the Editing Practicum Class to actually finish a project.

This introductory course focuses on screen-based new media works, their historical contexts, their specific aesthetics and theoretical concerns. Students gain an understanding of the emerging culture and historical antecedents of new media. Interactive, network and web-based technologies are introduced from the perspective of media art making. New media works are screened, discussed and demonstrated.

Systems, Codes & Spaces critically introduces the art of nonlinear media art via an understanding of its historical and theoretical trajectories. Students view and analyze structurally a variety of works in the mediums of video, installation, interactive media, new media and experimental 3D. Readings drawn from Jack Burnham, Pamela Lee, and Edward Shanken are discussed to assess the contemporary state of the field. Students must enroll in FVNM 2100 New Media: Crash Course simultaneously as a corequisite.

This advanced seminar and production studio aims to examine the politics of tourism and the artistic methodologies available for engaging critically with the discourse surrounding the tourist, and its transformed objects: the city, the street, the ruin, the native inhabitant, etc. Our research will be guided by questions such as: Can we look at traveling itineraries as an art form, as a form of knowledge and experience? How do we 'perform the city'? How do we walk in the city? How do our actions transform the city, and how do we relate our creative processes to tourism, and the relatively new subjectivity of the tourist. How do we mediate the city through our performances? Is our gaze different from the gaze of the tourist? The course is designed for both advanced undergraduates and graduates interested in developing their own projects. Students create performances based on their interests and in response to trips in the Chicago area at different location (touristic attractions, as well as 'ruins', old theaters, the remains of White City, Gary Indiana, etc.)

This advanced seminar and production studio aims to examine the politics of tourism and the artistic methodologies available for engaging critically with the discourse surrounding the tourist, and its transformed objects: the city, the street, the ruin, the native inhabitant, etc. Our research will be guided by questions such as: Can we look at traveling itineraries as an art form, as a form of knowledge and experience? How do we 'perform the city'? How do we walk in the city? How do our actions transform the city, and how do we relate our creative processes to tourism, and the relatively new subjectivity of the tourist. How do we mediate the city through our performances? Is our gaze different from the gaze of the tourist? The course is designed for both advanced undergraduates and graduates interested in developing their own projects. Students create performances based on their interests and in response to trips in the Chicago area at different location (touristic attractions, as well as 'ruins', old theaters, the remains of White City, Gary Indiana, etc.)

Topics: Broken Photography This class will poke at the physicality of photographs. We will push through flat representations of space to investigate photographic imagery that inhabits dimensional forms, considering material combinations that incite surface tensions, and constructions that test the evidentiary characteristics of photography. Together we will explore how photographs have the capacity to perform as objects. You will make your work in any form and our class research will examine artists and working methods that interact with the materiality of photographs from appropriation, montage and collage, to strategies that push photographs into three-dimensional space. Gordon Matta-Clark fried photographs in cooking oil, Annette Messager tore apart and strung them up, Anselm Kiefer poured molten lead on top, Cady Noland propped them up as freestanding cutouts, John Baldessari connected the dots, Douglas Gordon burnt holes through, Felix Gonzalez-Torres stacked them up, Rachel Harrison fused them into installations and sculptural forms, and Martha Rosler spliced the war into pictures of home.

Topics: Confronting the Abject The idea of power found in the perverse is a subverted and an imperative critical understanding to possess in consciously interacting with contemporary art, cinema and performance art. This class will investigate the power situated within the abject, through the sexual body as desire, the attraction in the combination of death and eroticism, what is to 'look' at the 'othered' body and the imperative implication of the 'gaze' in creating visual media. These topics will be investigated in relation to contemporary art and how it functions within the abject and resists it simultaneously.

This course will examine the manipulation of images through the on-going history of the Punk subculture. Today, the notion of ?punk? has many different connotations, yet the creative alteration of images has remained a vital means of expression for its various movements. The Queen of England dons a nose-ring and ransom letters over her eyes in a Sex Pistols flyer while Mark Flood turns a seemingly innocent image of Michael Jackson into a disturbing alien in yet another flyer. Punk performances challenge notions of the body, gender, and social normativity. Similar images are distributed through the streets and the Internet in an absolute rejection of what might be deemed mainstream. Addressing the ?culture of fragments? this course will explore the agenda of produced images and the subjectivity surrounding them. We will examine how images can become polarized by varying cultures and manipulated to function for personal intent. From Dick Hebdige's Subculture through John Kelsey's remarks in Rich Texts, we will investigate the mythology surrounding the ?unresolved histories? of modern images. This course will be an in-depth examination of the framing, placement, production and recycling of images for personal and/or political reasons. We will delve into the powerful dynamics of cultural construction and consumption. We will examine the intention of the producer of the image as well as the context that gives an image meaning. Students will be required to complete a variety of assignments including re-contextualizing images for a personal intent and manipulating the images of other students to alter meaning by means of production or presentation. We will be addressing the work of many artists including but not limited to Dan Graham, Raymond Pettibon, Hannah Liden, Kathleen Hanna, Rob Pruitt, Cady Noland, Jonathan Horowitz, Banks Violette, Slater Bradley, Laura Parnes, Sue de Beer and Kelley Walker.

Topics: Photography as a Public Art This course is for the photography student concerned with both visual culture and high art. An investigation of recent public art projects and interventions leads to proposals for and execution of actual photography based projects that occur in the public sphere. We will consider photography's role and use in the general public and find ways to employ similar means of production to artistic ends. Each student will create a final project that to be exhibited in the open- city, suburban or rural space. Students will be required to crate detailed reports, statements, and proposals for their projects as well as create multiple studies that form a basis for the final work.

Contemporary attempts to resurrect modernism are destined to exist in continuous complicity with everything that created modernity, like for example capitalism, industrialization, secularization and a political and ideological system based on numerical values. With its formal purity the flowers of evil make modernistic minimalism an irresistible indulgence to let histories' horror become the sweetest pain of culture. Form seems to evacuate from the burning house in the maelstrom without a scratch. This course will look at the brightest and darkest moments in modernity, looking for existential substance versus style in trying to grasp repercussions of trauma, longing, vertigo, propaganda, angst and dystopia, created during this time. If it's true that there has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism, all that's left to us is to turn the argument on its head and hope that there is no barbarism, which does not create an opening for culture.

Topics: Voice Lessons: Learning and Applying 'Practice' What are the artistic strategies, themes and sub-themes, production modes, and visual vocabulary that embody your artistic practice? How does your voice become singular in a crowded field of artists? Can your work transcend the fog of the derivative? Can you have a more aerial understanding of your work, seeing the past, present and future more capably? This class is designed for self-motivated students who are willing to put a large number of hours outside of class into the challenges of the curriculum. Each student will produce a 100+ page book during the course of the term that answers a large number of visual and textual assignments. These weekly assignments will provide a rapid framework within which to create new work whose form will, at times, not be about producing a final piece but consist of artistic gestures, visual and textual, amassed on the way. Assignments will point to students' interests, instincts, wit, politics, visual vocabulary, obsessions - the touchstones of their 'artistic voice.' The class will also set a rhythm of constant production that will embolden independent artistic practice and experimentation. By the end of the term, students will understand the difference between a project statement and artist statement, and be equipped to write, edit, and publish their artist statement within their book project.

A topical review of issues affecting the contemporary design field. This course includes reading, lectures, and discussions of design developments within their social context.

This course explores philosophy, architectural and design theory, and communication and architectural criticism, particularly their interdependence and relevance to the creative act. This course examines and discusses the historic and current dialogue and rhetoric of designers, architects, philosophers, and critics and explores the relationship of the individual designer's work to this body of information.

This course explores philosophy, architectural and design theory, and communication and architectural criticism, particularly their interdependence and relevance to the creative act. This course examines and discusses the historic and current dialogue and rhetoric of designers, architects, philosophers, and critics and explores the relationship of the individual designer's work to this body of information.

This course provides an overview of the histories and practices of art education and American public education from the pre-industrial era to present. Teacher candidates investigate philosophical and political theories to better understand the matrix of connections between schooling, society, ideology, and culture.

This course provides an overview of historical, ideological, and economic influences of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy on democracy, public life, and schooling. Teacher candidates critically investigate prevalent forms of multicultural education including conservative, plural, liberal, essential, and critical theories and practices.

This course plunges first-year students into visual theory using texts and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school. We work through basic 'formal' subjects (lectures on Form, Color, Time( at the same time as we explore more 'advanced' subjects (lectures on Religion, Ideology, Visual Theory). The course is vocabulary-intensive and intended to give students the widest possible exposure to visual discourse in all cultures and disciplines (The Survey is meant to do the same for visual artifacts).

An introduction presents an overview of the academic field known as Media Art Histories as well as the specific genealogies of relevant academic disciplines (i.e. of Film Art, Video Art, New Media Art & both filmic and digital Experimental Animation) as well as genealogies of specific media technologies (i.e. cameras, computers and software; electric lights, radio and sound; chemical, magnetic, and digital forms of storage and the industrial and capitalized structures that they require). These interwoven histories of shared theory/practices are investigated in relationship to independent/experimental/art media in contemporary cultures by asking: How do artists develop methods to work with, against, and around these techno-social forms? Readings will include Kittler, Zelenski, Grau, Gunning, Gaudreault, Musser, Schivelbusch, Auge, Adorno, Kluge, and Krackauer.

This survey of independent video art attempts to identify the unique properties of the medium as a tool for personal expression in the major categories of electronic imagery, conceptual/narrative works, and documentaries. Works are analyzed in terms of formal structures, coding processes, and social, psychological, and philosophical implications.

This seminar explores questions of cinema and television in relation to the larger issues concerning visual representations and definitions of sexuality. Themes and approaches include theories of spectatorship, in particular, feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories of looking as related to sexuality; stereotypes and social roles; the interplay between unconscious processes and forms of representation; and the political implications of sexual iconoclasm, concentrating on homosexuality. The course consists of weekly discussions based on screenings of films and videotapes, as well as critical and theoretical texts that, from a variety of perspectives, address these issues. Films and videos include works directed by Dorothy Arzner, Stuart Marshall, Rose Troche, John Greyson, Richard Fung, Gregg Bordowitz, Sadie Benning, Sonali Fernando, Isaac Julien, Jennie Livingston and Todd Haynes, among others.

Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a rigorous investigation of the art of film editing and should provide a historical and theorectial understanding of film editing based on the study of past works. Close reading of films will train the student in the core aesthetic decisions, structures, strategies and demands of editing. This will involve not only screening works but also analyzing these works through shot by shot contemplation of selected scenes. In addition, we will be reading several classic theroretical texts and will involve ourselves with discussion of these texts in relation to the works whown in class. Students should be taking Film 1 Film as Capture simultaneously with this class Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a theoretically based course and is not designed to offer critique for works-in-progress. Instead, each student will be using ideas learned from this class along with the material shot in Film 1 :Film as Capture to prepare for next semester when students will take shot material into the Editing Practicum Class to actually finish a project.

Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a rigorous investigation of the art of film editing and should provide a historical and theorectial understanding of film editing based on the study of past works. Close reading of films will train the student in the core aesthetic decisions, structures, strategies and demands of editing. This will involve not only screening works but also analyzing these works through shot by shot contemplation of selected scenes. In addition, we will be reading several classic theroretical texts and will involve ourselves with discussion of these texts in relation to the works whown in class. Students should be taking Film 1 Film as Capture simultaneously with this class Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a theoretically based course and is not designed to offer critique for works-in-progress. Instead, each student will be using ideas learned from this class along with the material shot in Film 1 :Film as Capture to prepare for next semester when students will take shot material into the Editing Practicum Class to actually finish a project.

Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a rigorous investigation of the art of film editing and should provide a historical and theorectial understanding of film editing based on the study of past works. Close reading of films will train the student in the core aesthetic decisions, structures, strategies and demands of editing. This will involve not only screening works but also analyzing these works through shot by shot contemplation of selected scenes. In addition, we will be reading several classic theroretical texts and will involve ourselves with discussion of these texts in relation to the works whown in class. Students should be taking Film 1 Film as Capture simultaneously with this class Editing Strategies and Critical Histories is a theoretically based course and is not designed to offer critique for works-in-progress. Instead, each student will be using ideas learned from this class along with the material shot in Film 1 :Film as Capture to prepare for next semester when students will take shot material into the Editing Practicum Class to actually finish a project.

This introductory course focuses on screen-based new media works, their historical contexts, their specific aesthetics and theoretical concerns. Students gain an understanding of the emerging culture and historical antecedents of new media. Interactive, network and web-based technologies are introduced from the perspective of media art making. New media works are screened, discussed and demonstrated.

Systems, Codes & Spaces critically introduces the art of nonlinear media art via an understanding of its historical and theoretical trajectories. Students view and analyze structurally a variety of works in the mediums of video, installation, interactive media, new media and experimental 3D. Readings drawn from Jack Burnham, Pamela Lee, and Edward Shanken are discussed to assess the contemporary state of the field. Students must enroll in FVNM 2100 New Media: Crash Course simultaneously as a corequisite.

'Reality television,' despite the furor, is not a particularly new idea. Direct precedents for shows like 'Survivor' and 'Big Brother' can be traced back to 1970, to 'An American Family' or its subcultural counterpart, 'The continuing story of Carel and Ferd'. Some of the most powerful and provocative independent film and video being produced today draws on the age-old fascination with the border between 'document' and 'fiction'. The class would provide a context for producing and critiquing student work, and provide a historical/critical grounding in examining work of video and cinema 'verite' as well as 'experimental narrative' and 'new documentary'.

What possibilities do re-enactments offer in revisiting events of the past? How is history transformed or reclaimed in the process of re-enactments? This course actively researches artistic strategies of re-enactment in contemporary media art and performance, investigating the increased interest in this practice and its variable forms. Students produce work based on their interests and in response to assigned readings (Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Italo Calvino, Inke Arns, Henry Bergson) and works viewed in class. (Jean Rouch, Jeremy Deller,Rod Dickinson, Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco, Pierre Hughe, Zbignew Libera, Omer Fast, Felix Gmelin, Daniela Comani, Artur Zmijewski, Marina Abramovich, etc). Knowledge of video or photography is required. Supplemental technical workshops will be provided if needed.

This 3 hour reading and discussion class is designed to familiarize students with historical and contemporary philosophy, critical analysis, and contemporary thought relevant to photography and the visual culture. The course's aim is to prepare students for a higher level of discourse in anticipation of either graduate school or life as an artist in the greater realm of the ?art world.? Discussions of contemporary work in this atmosphere are aimed at making clear the connection between theory, research and an artist's practice. Students are expected to do critical readings (generally one essay per week), complete short, informal writing assignments, participate in class discussion, and to engage in theoretical research as part of their own practice.

What is a document? How do we evaluate its credibility? Why did Western concepts of objectivity, evidence and truth come about? Why did our culture need to invent them? We will examine photography's special relationship to the document. How much do we still believe in images? How do they continue to affect us even when we think we don't believe? In addition to photography, we will look at a range of documentation in other categories of experience, such as anthropology, law, and science, to consider other conventions for establishing or exhibiting information and knowledge.

What possibilities do re-enactments offer in revisiting events of the past? How is history transformed or reclaimed in the process of re-enactments? This course actively researches artistic strategies of re-enactment in contemporary media art and performance, investigating the increased interest in this practice and its variable forms. Students produce work based on their interests and in response to assigned readings (Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Italo Calvino, Inke Arns, Henry Bergson) and works viewed in class. (Jean Rouch, Jeremy Deller,Rod Dickinson, Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco, Pierre Hughe, Zbignew Libera, Omer Fast, Felix Gmelin, Daniela Comani, Artur Zmijewski, Marina Abramovich, etc). Knowledge of video or photography is required. Supplemental technical workshops will be provided if needed.

This course plunges first-year students into visual theory using texts and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school. We work through basic 'formal' subjects (lectures on Form, Color, Time( at the same time as we explore more 'advanced' subjects (lectures on Religion, Ideology, Visual Theory). The course is vocabulary-intensive and intended to give students the widest possible exposure to visual discourse in all cultures and disciplines (The Survey is meant to do the same for visual artifacts).

This class offers a graduate-level introduction to the history of visual studies, from English cultural studies in the 1960s to the present. It also considers the deeper historical roots of the field, going back to late Renaissance hermeneutics and nineteenth-century German historical research. The class's second objective is an introduction to the theories currently prevalent in the field, including postcolonial theory, identity politics, and theories of high art and popular art. Readings include Spivak, Michaels, Eagleton, Crimp, Mirzoeff, Mitchell, and Benjamin. [This is a required course for first-year students in the MA in VCS program.]

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.

A topical review of issues affecting the contemporary design field. This course includes reading, lectures, and discussions of design developments within their social context.