Studio: Design promotes multidisciplinary studio experimentation across an array of media and processes. Students explore the organization of visual and other sensory elements in order to understand perceptual attributes and the production of meaning. Using various methods of expression, students may create objects, spaces, and experiences that demonstrate their analysis of composition, color, narrative, motion, systems, and cultural signification. Assignments allow for inquiries into scientific, social, cultural, historical, philosophical, technological, and political topics. Critical and experimental utilization of design principles, which underpin all of the arts, are emphasized. Students are guided through progressive investigations, in which the act of seeing is amplified by the study of physiological and cognitive factors that generate perception. Examined subjects are taken through stages of representation, abstraction, and/or symbolic interpretation to reveal essential communicative properties.

Enrollment is limited to First-Year Undergraduate Students.

Major Requirement | BFA

The goal of Independent Drawing Projects is for students to develop a distinct, carefully conceived, and self-directed body of works through a process of investigation, critical assessment and production. Through a rigorous studio practice, students are expected to identify and develop their own conceptual interests and material approaches. Individual and group critiques support, facilitate, and intensify this process. While drawing concentrators will be given priority, interested students outside of the concentration and beyond the sophomore level may take this course. For the drawing concentrator, the work created for the Independent Drawing Project serves as the culmination of the Drawing Concentration program.

Elective

This course will focus awareness on the intertwined connections between the drawing BODY, ACTION and MARK. In this course, we will move our bodies in directed and experiential ways, sensitizing our bodies and minds to the possibilities of drawing as an embodied action. Embodied drawing practice focuses on drawing as a physical act, inviting awareness of the sensation and intelligence of the drawing body as a catalyst for practice. Through experimentation with embodied movement, action and making, students will experience their own drawing process as meaningful engagement with action. Studio experimentation and research will investigate the formal possibilities of ACTION as movement in time and space, then move to a critical consideration of ACTION in context and as methodology that can both contain and generate meaning. Course methodologies may include: process-focused practice; mindful investigation of movement; individual and collaborative studio experimentation and performance of drawing. Areas of study may include: motion visualization; algorithmic and choreographic approaches to action-based generative composition; body and technology; artistic action as meaningful methodology in social and cultural context.

This course will comprise of in-class studio exercises, slide/video presentations, critiques, short readings and discussions. Through these diverse modes of learning, students will have the opportunity to engage with foregrounding concepts and direct experiences of an embodied approach to drawing practice, focusing on the experience and potential outcomes of drawing as action in context. Students will also engage in independent research to be shared with the class, broadening the array of work we critically engage with. Independent studio research will be ongoing throughout the course, and will culminate in self-directed Midterm and Final Projects.

Elective