Visual Arts
- ARC 378/VIS 378: Collage Making in ArchitectureA graphic skills course that focuses on the techniques, craft, and ideologies of collage as a form of architectural representation. There are in-class workshops and weekly projects involving (handmade) collages. There are also a limited number of supplementary readings to situate our work within the context of architectural history and theory.
- ART 106/VIS 106/ENT 106: Looking Lab: Experiments in Visual Thinking and Thinking about VisualsIt can be remarkably easy to take the process of looking for granted. Each day, humans contend with an onslaught of visual information. Education primarily focuses on teaching people how to read, write, and deal with numbers. But what about learning how to look closely and critically at images, at the world around us, and at ourselves? In this transdisciplinary course, we will question common assumptions and our own about looking; interrogate the anatomy and physiology of vision; develop our looking muscles; practice visual problem-solving strategies; and together design new tools to help people engage with the visual world.
- ATL 499/VIS 499: Princeton Atelier: The Store as ArtBefore the invention of the artist as a solitary genius, all artists, as artisans, had shops in which they had direct contact with their customers. This arrangement held until the Modern era, when the twin ethos of specialization and purity separated artists from the corrupting influence of commerce. This class will begin with critical discussion of the many artists who have reimagined the role of art (and its relationship to commerce) by opening stores, analyzing how the inherent critique and conviviality of the gesture has inspired new art forms. Students will then conceive, make, and launch their very own "Store as Art" in Princeton.
- CWR 347/VIS 340: Screenwriting I: Short Screenwriting for FilmmakersThis course will introduce students to the foundational principles and techniques of screenwriting, taking into account the practical considerations of film production. Questions of thematic cohesiveness, plot construction, logical cause and effect, character behavior, dialogue, genre consistency and pace will be explored as students gain confidence in the form by completing a number of short screenplays. The course will illustrate and analyze the power of visual storytelling to communicate a story to an audience, and will guide students to create texts that serve as "blueprints" for emotionally powerful and immersive visual experiences.
- CWR 349/VIS 349: Introduction to Screenwriting: Writing for a Global AudienceHow can screenwriters prepare for the evolving challenges of our global media world? What types of content, as well as form, will emerging technologies make possible? Do fields like neuroscience help us understand the universal principals behind screenwriting and do tech advances that alter the distance between audience and creator, man and machine, also influence content of our stories? This class will use fairytales, films, games and new media to illustrate universal script principles while creating a rich interdisciplinary lens to explore the innovative intersection of narrative screenwriting, science and technology.
- CWR 405/VIS 405: Advanced Screenwriting: Writing for TelevisionThis workshop class will introduce students to the fundamental elements of developing and writing a TV series in the current "golden age of television." Students will watch television pilots, read pilot episodes and engage in in-depth discussions about story, series engine, season arcs, character, structure, tone and dialogue, which will be applied to their work. Each student will formulate and pitch an original series idea, write and rewrite a detailed treatment of the concept, and complete the first 30 pages of the pilot episode by end of semester. Students will read all drafts of each other's work and give verbal feedback every week.
- DAN 357/AMS 358/THR 357/VIS 357: Are You For Sale? Performance Making, Philanthropy and EthicsIn this class we study the relationships between performance-making, philanthropy and ethics. How are performing artists financing their work, and what does this mean in relationship to economic and social justice? How did we arrive to the current conditions of arts funding? What is the connection between wealth and giving and when are those ties inherently questionable? What is at stake in the debate of public versus private support? Does funding follow artists' concerns or delimit them?
- ITA 310/VIS 443: Topics in Modern Italian Cinema: New Italian Cinema: History, Politics, and Society (in English)This course looks at the way Italy has expressed its historical, cultural, political, and social individuality in major cinematic works from the 1960's to the present. Directors such as Bertolucci, Tornatore, Benigni, Ozpetek, and Sorrentino offer a panorama of a generation of filmmakers that has contributed to the renewal of Italian cinema. Topics will be drawn from current issues, and will include the Holocaust and questions of memory, terrorism, political violence, migration, gender ideologies, the Mafia. Emphasis on film style and techniques.
- THR 213/MTD 213/VIS 210: Introduction to Set and Costume DesignThis course introduces students to set and costume design for performance, exploring theater as a visual medium. Students will develop their ability to think about the physical environment (including clothing) as key components of story-telling and our understanding of human experience. Students will expand their vocabulary for discussing the visual world and work on their collaborative skills. We'll spend half the semester focusing on costuming and half focusing of the scenic environment, both in a practical, on your feet studio class taught by professional theater practitioners. Absolutely no experience required.
- THR 420/ARC 420/VIS 420: Designing NarrativesCo-taught by design collective dots, the course aims to explore the world of visual storytelling, with an emphasis on collaboration as an essential part of the process of designing 3-dimensional space for narratives. The course will present narrative design processes as adaptable to many media including theater, film, installation and architecture and hopes to empower students with the ability to recognize their role as the designer of their own stories. Through individual research and a group project, we aim to encourage students to develop unique points of view within the context of a design that is worth more than the sum of its parts.
- VIS 201/ARC 201: Drawing IThe great thing about drawing is you can do it anywhere! This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing. We'll introduce basic techniques while also encouraging experimentation, with a focus on both drawing from life and drawing as an expressive act. Students will be introduced to the basics of line, shading, proportion, composition, texture and gesture. You'll also maintain a drawing journal, and use it as a regular space for observation and personal expression. Through exposure to a variety of mediums and techniques, you'll gain the skills and confidence necessary to develop an individual final project of your choosing.
- VIS 202/ARC 202: Drawing IThe great thing about drawing is you can do it anywhere! This course approaches drawing as a way of thinking and seeing. We'll introduce basic techniques while also encouraging experimentation, with a focus on both drawing from life and drawing as an expressive act. Students will be introduced to the basics of line, shading, proportion, composition, texture and gesture. You'll also maintain a drawing journal, and use it as a regular space for observation and personal expression. Through exposure to a variety of mediums and techniques, you'll gain the skills and confidence necessary to develop an individual final project of your choosing.
- VIS 204/ARC 328: Painting IAn introduction to the materials and methods of painting, addressing form and light, color and its interaction, composition, scale, texture and gesture. Students will experiment with subject matter including still life, landscape, architecture, self-portraiture and abstraction, while painting from a variety of sources: life, sketches, maquettes, collages, photographs and imagination. Students will progressively develop personal imagery that will inform an individual final project. Princeton will provide all materials for the painting class.
- VIS 208: Graphic Design: LinkIn this introductory studio course, participants explore the world wide web as an opportunity for self-publishing. We'll understand the web's history and original design as a decentralized system for publishing on one's own terms. But it's easy to forget this, as today the corporate and platformed web captures and sells our data and attention. Through hands-on exercises and projects, this course aims to demystify the web, removing barriers to basic web coding and publishing by focusing on the foundational skills in making websites with HTML and CSS. We'll remember what makes a web a web: links made by humans.
- VIS 212: Analog PhotographyAn introduction to the processes of photography through a series of problems directed toward lens projection, the handling of light-sensitive material, and camera operation, beginning with cyanotype printing and culminating with large format film exposure and processing. These processes trace the origins of photography. Final projects will examine new potentials in photographic expression including images that hybridize analog and digital interfaces.
- VIS 213: Digital PhotographyThis studio course introduces students to the aesthetic and theoretical implications of digital photography. Student emphasis is on mastering digital equipment and techniques, managing print quality, and generally becoming familiar with all aspects of the digital workspace. Popular media, found photographs, and the "life" of digital images will also be investigated. Slide lectures, readings and class discussions of student work in critique format will augment visual skills with critical and conceptual understandings of contemporary photography.
- VIS 217: Graphic Design: CirculationThe practice of graphic design relies on the existence of networks for distributing multiple copies of identical things. Students in this course will consider the ways in which a graphic design object's characteristics are affected by its ability to be copied and shared, and by the environment in which it is intended to circulate. Through hands-on design projects, readings, and discussions, students will delve into different material forms of distribution - the printed newspaper, social network software, the community radio station, the PDF.
- VIS 220: Digital AnimationThis studio production class will engage in a variety of timed-based composition, visualization, and storytelling techniques. Students will learn foundational methods of 2D animation, acquire a working knowledge of digital animation software and technology, and explore the connective space between sound, image, and motion possible in animated film. Screenings, discussions, and critiques will relate student work to the history and practice of animation and to other media, art, and design forms.
- VIS 222: Sculpture IThis class will be a studio introduction to sculpture, with particular emphasis on the study of how form, space, and a wide variety of materials and processes influence the visual properties of sculpture and the making of meaning. A balance of indoor, outdoor, and/or transient assignments will lead to the development of an understanding of contemporary sculpture, as well as basic technical facility with found objects, common materials, natural earthworks, ergonomics, and three-dimensional design.
- VIS 228: The Trace of An Implied PresenceThis course explores Dance Black America (DBA), a festival program presented in 1983 that featured Black dancers, choreographers, scholars, and dance companies. DBA centered on Blackness and the African Diaspora over the span of 300 years and showcased the richly diverse traditions of African American dance. This course, hybrid in form, will include film presentations, lectures, live filming session, site visits and guest speakers who are featured in the project. We will collectively produce research on dancers, choreographers, and dance companies to work to bring forth names that have been overlooked in the past and present.
- VIS 230: Video InstallationThis studio course investigates video installation as a contemporary art form that extends the conversation of video art beyond the frame and into live, site-specific multi-channel environments. Screenings, visitors, and readings augment critical thinking about temporal/spatial relationships, narrative structure, viewer perception and the challenges of presenting time-based work outside of a theater. Technical workshops will hone video-making and presenting skills. Students develop research interests and apply their skills sets to short exercises and expanded self-directed projects culminating in projects designed for exhibition.
- VIS 231: Methods of Color PhotographyThis course takes an exciting approach to color photography using methods of cameraless and lens based analog photography. We will experiment with Anthotypes, Lumens, Chlorophyll printing, and Polaroids. Several of the materials needed for this course can be found in your backyard or kitchen cabinet! Students will receive a kit for all necessary materials. Participants are encouraged to experiment, using the medium to convey observations and ideas. The possibilities of color in photographs are endless and together we will expand the ability to interpret color. The class is augmented by lectures, readings, critiques, and a visiting artist.
- VIS 232: Collage: Diversions, Contradictions, and AnomaliesThis course is an introduction to the fascinating history of collage. Students study techniques employed in the iconography of China and Medieval Europe, and expand to its historical resurgence in the form of keepsakes and scrapbooks. Students evaluate the relationship of collage to historical advancements in photography, assemblage, and décollage. Students discover collage's relationship and technical developments to the radical histories of trauma, disruption, and desire by studying contemporary artists. Projects are structured around mixed media drawing, printmaking, painting, along with found object sculpture.
- VIS 265: Narrative Filmmaking IAn introduction to narrative and avant-garde narrative film production through the creation of hands-on digital video exercises, short film screenings, critical readings, and group critiques. This course teaches the basic tools and techniques for storytelling with digital media by providing technical instruction in camera operation, nonlinear editing, and sound design paired with the conceptual frameworks of shot design, visual composition, film grammar and cinema syntax.
- VIS 309: Printmaking IIn a digital world, this course promotes hand-made printed images. Students will examine two kinds of printmaking: relief and intaglio. To make images that matter, students will learn to cut blocks, fashion stencils, plan and execute color layers, etch and drypoint copper plates, and understand the range of mark making possibilities available in printmaking. Students are encouraged to draw regularly to cultivate themes and content, and to develop a basic knowledge of print in contemporary art. Woodblocks have been around since the 8th century; etchings for 500 years. Students will make something completely new from something old.
- VIS 321/CWR 321: Words As ObjectsThis course will explore ways that language can take on material properties and how objects can have syntax and be "read". Through studio assignments, readings, and discussions, students will investigate the idea of language as a tangible material that can be sliced, bent, inserted, reproduced, embedded, and scattered, as in the work of such modern artists as Guillaume Apollinaire, Susan Howe, Marcel Broodthaers, or Jenny Holzer. In each instance, our perception of meaning through language, and our perception of lived experience through material form, are both altered by their engagement with the other.
- VIS 324/ENV 312: The Visible WildStudents will learn techniques of wildlife surveillance photography using remote cameras to photograph animal populations on and around Princeton's campus. The photographs and apparatus will be considered as both ecological research and works of art. As such, the methods and results will be critically examined for population index studies as well as philosophical ramifications. A final exhibition of the images will highlight the secret wilderness of the area while posing questions about our relationship to non-human animals and the narrative ramifications of the gaze of surveillance photography.
- VIS 354/DAN 354/THR 354: Performance as ArtThis studio class will explore a broad range of approaches to art-based performance: from instruction pieces and happenings, to the body as language and gesture, to performance as a form of archiving. We move through the history of performance to investigate techniques of narrative, site, the audience, duration, voice, movement, installation, with a particular emphasis on documentation and how performance has engaged virtual spaces. Readings and critiques expand vocabulary in assessing performance art. Exercises explore different forms of performance building a foundation of techniques and positions for developing art-based performance work.
- VIS 363: Documentary Filmmaking IIThere are unlimited ways in which to record and portray the world around us. In this class, we will analyze classic and contemporary strategies for making a documentary film, and see if we can invent some new ones of our own. It's important to know what came before, and as important to learn about the present by being a part of creating it. The emphasis is on making. A wide range of films will be screened, but the course is mainly dedicated to having each student shoot and edit a medium length (20-30 minute) documentary, or a series of shorter films.
- VIS 411: Advanced Questions in PhotographyAdvanced Questions in Photography will examine ways in which lens-based media can interrogate representation, class, gender and race. The class will look artists of the 1960's through 1990's such as Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, Douglas Huebler, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, Carrie Mae Weems, Felix Gonzales Torres, Lyle Ashton Harris and more recent artists Trevor Paglen, Hank Willis Thomas, Jason Lazarus, Walead Beshty and Hito Steyerl. With staff support from the 185 Nassau Street digital lab, students are expected to produce a focused body of work culminating in a digital, (HP Indigo press or similar) book and a web presentation.
- VIS 415: Advanced Graphic DesignThis studio course builds on the skills and concepts of the 200-level Graphic Design classes. VIS 415 is structured around one semester-length assignment which connects graphic design to the design of software interfaces. The single project allows an individual in-depth investigation of a broader class assignment and will leverage the online setting with students working together to refine their individual projects through a mix of critique and user testing. Studio work is supplemented by guests, readings, and lectures. The course will explore information design and visual problem solving specifically for electronic media.
- VIS 419: Spring Film SeminarThis class concentrates on the editing process. Students will re-edit samples from narrative and documentary films and analyze the results. We will also critique ongoing edits of your own thesis films. Guest speakers will come to talk about rough-and fine-cut editing, sound design, and sound mixing. Editing is about shaping the story through image, dialogue, additional sound and music. No matter how well (or badly) a film is directed and shot, its final result depends profoundly on the artfulness of its editing. This course will give you a better understanding of how many ways there are to approach and solve the puzzle of editing a film.
- VIS 421: Sculpture IIThis sculpture class will engage contemporary approaches to the figure with an emphasis on the figure as body. With the advent of postmodernism, the singular forms of classical and modern sculpture have fractured into composite, disjointed figures-even cyborgs-in keeping with the era of the "post human." Students will take a multivalent approach to the historical precedents from which current representations have emerged and explore the limits of what constitutes the body and figuration in contemporary sculpture through the process of class discussions and making sculpture.
- VIS 424/ART 479: Radical CompositionThis seminar examines the radical possibilities of collaboration as fundamentally a process of radical composition through which collaborators bridge different modalities of creative expression - textual composition, artistic composition, speculative composition, among others - that span multiple media, forms and practices. By modeling and exploring collaboration as radical composition, this course seeks to reframe it as more that a dynamic of participation and coordination, and to recognize it as a generative methodology for producing critical scholarly and creative work.
- VIS 440: Other Lives of TimeThis class is equal parts screening, filmmaking, discussion, and artistic critique. We will watch, discuss, and dissect works by artists and filmmakers from across the globe that use personal form and distinct techniques to communicate idiosyncratically. Readings will explore contemporary notions of time and cinema while screenings prioritize nonfiction and fiction works (as well as art pieces) that have mainstream audience potential. Students will use video cameras to complete assignments that will expand their filmic language as they work over the semester toward the completion of a short film that employs a singular structure.