A hands-on introduction to digital art making using computers and related technologies. We will think creatively, work digitally and explore techno-centric art making as a new form and medium, engaging both technical and conceptual considerations. Through readings, discussion, demonstrations, viewing sessions, technical tutorials and hands-on projects, we will explore the techniques, practices and aesthetics of a broad range of current and emerging digital art practices.

This course will explore how to integrate digital processes with traditional printmaking techniques. Students will learn the basics of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and develop and create imagery through those programs. They will then use digital devices such as laser cutter, router and plotter to turn a digital file into a physical printing block. The final art form will be hand-printed work, utilizing relief printing, engraving on wood, collographs, and monoprinting. This course also covers print-based digital animation.

Painting I is an introduction to the fundamentals of the discipline and practice of acrylic painting. We will investigate both historical and contemporary strategies of painting and engage in observational and imaginative uses of materials and subject matter. This course promotes and includes a wide variety of opportunities to enhance our educational experience including guest artists, an emphasis on sketchbook habits and critique skills, writing exercises, material experiments, and student presentations on contemporary painters.

This intermediate digital arts course explores how open-source movements and contemporary art have cleared the way for play as a powerful metaphor for cultural participation. We will explore interactive tools, technologies which reframe our senses, and professional practices in environmental installation. We will consider the role of historical and social knowledge in the creation of interactive experiences and audio-visual environments, looking at work which tends to be discursive, which argues for a story or sets out a case, or which operates as a metaphor for our own digital realities.

In Sculpture I, demonstrations and introductory projects will familiarize students with the tools and processes used to form and manipulate materials such as wood, metal, plaster, paper, wax, and glass. Students will also be asked to explore the potential of combining new technologies in media and fabrication with traditional approaches into immersive sculptural experiences. Each project will present students with a series of conceptual problems to solve. In this way, art-making is positioned as a process of finding individual and independent solutions to three-dimensional problems.

The primary goal of this course is to provide strategies for each student to develop an individual studio art practice. Through experimentation, thematic development, strong sketchbook skills, and research, students will begin the process of developing and articulating a conceptual focus in their own art production. Students will be asked to draw on technical skills acquired in 200-level medium-specific courses to create independently generated projects.

Reading across a spectrum of disciplinary focuses (e.g. philosophies of aesthetics, post-structural feminisms, Black cultural studies, and queer of color critique) this course asks the question what is the nature of aesthetics when it negotiates modes of difference? This course explores the history and debates on aesthetics as it relates to race, gender, and sexuality with particular emphasis on Black diaspora theory and cultural production.

Concentration on individual artistic development. Emphasis will be placed on experimentation, thematic development, and critical review. Students may elect to take this course more than once.

This seminar explores Romance languages, literatures and cultures through the prism of translation. By comparing translations from Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian between each other and into English, we will map out the boundaries, intersections and middle grounds of this language family. Students will engage with the different traditions of translation studies in these languages and critically analyze translators' paratexts.

This studio course introduces a series of design investigations around particular themes and approaches to architecture and the built environment. Students will develop visual communication and architectural design skills (sketches, plans, elevations, sections, projected drawings and model making) to tackle interdisciplinary and socially pertinent design problems.