Upper-Division

Explore media technologies by directly engaging digital platforms, transmission, and storage, as direct rather than indirect practices. Topics covered, through lenses of both theory and practice, include global circulation of media—emphasizing the contemporary digital image, relations between sound and mobile-technology media and the environment, and the technical infrastructure of digital interfaces and data visualization. Critiquing data collection, representation, and curation, student projects build a vocabulary for critical engagement with cultural production and conditions.

Project-driven practicum in arts and design applications of computer languages. Students apply new approaches to ongoing individual and collaborative projects. Students learn to code "from scratch," rather than through the modification of prototype examples. Explore how programming languages function not only as tools but as institutional frameworks, sometimes invisibly shaping social norms and contemporary art and design practices; learn conscientious uses of code that can contribute to accessible technology and the empowerment of audiences, users, and media consumers.

Story-building, participatory creativity, and performance in a wide range of time-based arts and design. Models for storytelling are drawn from film, television, music, theater, gaming, and other media, including collective improvisatory practices, mixed transmission environments from game-based narration to hip-hop. Special emphasis is placed on activist, experimental, and counter-hegemonic narration, Black, Indigenous, feminist, and queer contributions to contemporary arts, design, and performance practices.

Explores the state’s vital queer art communities as a cultural phenomena, primarily through one-on-one interviews with contemporary queer artists in California. In the face of rising homophobia and transphobia in many parts of the country, this course centers and makes visible the work of BIPOC LGBTQIE+ artists, including those with disabilities, and many others. Course develops literacy and comprehension of queer artists and their artworks. Through a combination of lectures, visual presentations, films, readings, short quizzes and discussion boards, students gain the skills and knowledge to become conversant in queer art. For their final project, students conduct their own interview with a queer artist of their choosing, collectively developing their own queer art archive.