Faculty of Arts & Sciences

A studio course to build the skills of drawing incrementally and expand students' visual vocabulary. Drawings will be made from life, photographs and invention. Emphasis will be placed on enhancing our observational sensibilities, focusing on all aspects of technical development, particularly the importance of line. Assignments will delve into the development of abstract and conceptual principles, and introduce specialized systems of rendering and notation. The aim is to expand drawing skills with intention and purpose.

For the student who is interested in the manipulation of found and original imagery. Students will create monotypes on paper and other surfaces utilizing the silkscreen process. Through slide presentations, the class will be introduced to the work of artists such as Rauschenberg and Warhol, as well as others who use the silkscreen process.

Through image presentations and readings, students will be introduced to the art movements from the 1960s to the present - POP, OP, Capitalist Realism, Neo Expressionism, New Image Painting, Figuration Libre, Junge Wilde, Transavantegarde, Neo Geo, Neo Pop, etc. Students will create paintings for critique that reflect these artists' beliefs and concerns.

Model, Person, Subject, Self, Cipher, Being, Effigy, Corpse, Anatomy, Portrait, Body. This painting course will delve into many ways of approaching the human figure. Working first from life, we will also consider the body in media, the body in history, the body in ideas. Note: Open to beginners, while also appropriate for more advanced students.

How can film, architecture, and the 2-dimensional image influence the sculptural process? This is a sculpture foundations course, with an emphasis on construction and the utilization of a broad range of materials and methods. Projects will consider concepts of social and personal space, memory and the psychological effects of the built environment and in addition we will look at cinema, minimalism, site specific artworks, and photography as possible points of departure.

A course in which we will investigate the 3-dimensionality of sculpture, asking questions about the space it consumes. We will look at the environment around us and talk about the ways in which the work we make impacts our surroundings. We will think about hills, valleys, caves, stalactites, stalagmites, highrelief, bas-relief and protrusions. We will think about mass that is kinetic, static, hanging, sitting, balanced and imbalanced.

Using a variety of materials and methods, students will build and create artworks that reflect their ideas, with an emphasis and understanding of the language of images, materials, forms, actions, and presentation. Through images, videos, and informal discussions, students will be introduced to the concerns of conceptual artists of the 20th Century to the present.

Introduction to still photography through individual and group exercises, with an emphasis on the medium as a vehicle for expression, documentation, and personal vision. Covers necessary technical, historical, and aesthetic aspects of the medium.

Class emphasis will be on developing visual ideas for a self-directed photographic project. Class will be structured around regular critiques, individual meetings, readings, class discussions and museum visits. Students will create a group of photographs for a final project that are the result of a sustained, self-directed creative process.

A series of nonfiction projects, both individual and collaborative, designed to introduce and explore the range of expressive possibilities in digital video.

An introduction to the possibilities of animation. Using a mixture of traditional and 2D digital tools, students will complete practical exercises which will familiarize them with basic skills and techniques. Screenings and discussions will help develop the specialized thinking needed to understand the discipline.

This course will offer an introduction to 3D computer animation, and explore hybrid forms of animation and the new thinking they enable.

In this introduction to fiction filmmaking, we will explore the technical, structural, sensorial, and ontological language of cinema in all its idiomatic, hybrid expressions, from associative assemblages to naturalism. Emphasis will be given to the synesthetic processes of meaning construction, from the seed of an idea to its screen embodiments shot by shot, as well as the relation between sound and image. Projects will be collaborative as well as individual. Occasional in-class workshops by film professionals and artists.

This course will survey the development of the film medium from its beginnings in the 1890s to an astonishing artistic flowering in the 1920s in the US, France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. This course will focus on the shifts in cinematic language- especially camerawork and editing - and on the contemporaneous theoretical discourse about the cinema from filmmakers, critics, and philosophers attempting to define a young, constantly-expanding medium.

You will hang out in the vicinity of culture and make things in response to it. This class is not thematic or linked to any particular discipline.

Open to a limited number of students who wish to carry out a special project under supervision. Students wishing to enroll in VES 91r must find a member of the faculty to advise the project and submit an application to the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

This course is intended for students who have developed the beginnings of a practice they are prepared to pursue. The motive is to assemble a group of disparate artists who come together to exchange thoughts across disciplines: painting next to photography next to writing next to filmmaking, and so on.

Individual instruction in subjects of special interest that cannot be studied in regular courses. Concentrators wishing to take a tutorial in their junior year must find a member of the faculty to advise the project and submit an application to the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

This course examines the recent proliferation of artists whose work employs typography. If we have been accustomed to the predominance of language in art at least since the rise of Conceptual practices in the early 1970s, the current turn represents something different: it takes up language's material realization and the particular histories carried within its forms. We'll examine the range of such practices, trace their genealogies, and assess their approaches toward contemporary communication.

Much recent art stages slippages between the fictive and factual. False personas, invented histories and museums of unnatural history are some such creative deceptions - so are Punk'd, Borat, and Fear Factor. With a focus on installation art, photography, video, and performance but an eye to popular culture and political scandal, this seminar will trace artistic precedents for treating our sense of reality as a plastic material, and explore the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications.

Painting's productive association with the technologies of reproduction. We will think both pre- and post-20th century, considering the analogue (intaglio printing, especially etching and aquatint; also block, book and commercial printing) and digital as worthy collaborators. Workshops in technique will support independent projects in any media.

"Surface" considered as formal quality and useful tool. Whether taken to mean literal materials, the chain of ideas cohering a body of work, or painting's Teflon-like durability as cultural tradition, we'll pursue strategies to engage surface: seriality, alternative supports, facture/blur; mechanical tools, casualness and formality. Of particular interest are the challenges posed by seamlessness both in photographic sources and in conversations surrounding abstraction. Emphasis on painting, but other disciplines are welcome.

This is a sculpture course concerned with the difficulty of defining entities. For example, what separates an object from the informational and physical conditions surrounding it? And, if every object is in a state of continuous change, can it ever arrive as a complete "thing"? Each week we will read a text, watch something (film, video, slide lecture), and discuss. Students will present their work for group critique approximately three times during the semester.

Explores the way in which some photographic practitioners have questioned accepted photographic conventions and are rejecting the historical orthodoxy in favor of a more subjective statement. Each student is expected to complete a major photographic project that reveals his or her own personal photographic style and preoccupations while still retaining a direct and discernible relationship to the subject.

An examination of the practical, sociological, historical, and aesthetic issues surrounding portrait photography in parallel with the active participation of each student in his/her own photographic project.

In this intermediate production course, we will explore systems, syntaxes, and voices of cinematic fictions across national cinemas in the 20th and 21st century. We will investigate all aspects of the mise-en-scene through exercises in screenwriting, directing professional and amateur actors, storyboarding, lighting, sound design, art direction, and digital editing. Students will also research and develop short scripts to be produced during the spring term. Occasional in-class workshops by film professionals and artists.

Working from a proposal approved in advance by the instructor, each student plans, shoots, and edits a documentary video of his or her design. Shooting should take place over the summer and editing during the fall term. Readings and screenings augment individual work.

This course offers returning animators a chance to extend and deepen skills and understanding of animation and to make a more substantial piece of work. Additional exercises encourage students to challenge themselves and explore a range of creative possibilities.

Students use video, sound, and/or hypermedia to produce short works about embodied experience, culture, and nature, and are introduced to current issues in aesthetics and ethnography.

Modernization of the US visual environment as directed by a nobility creating new images and perceptions of such themes as wilderness, flight, privacy, clothing, photography, feminism, status symbolism, and futurist manipulation as illustrated in print-media and other advertising enterprise.

Students work with both video and sound composition to explore the mutual dependence of the two media. Water in its many manifestations provides the source material and playground for a series of assignments. The final project will be an art work for presentation in various venues: concert hall, gallery and outdoor spaces.

Visual constituents of high adventure since the late Victorian era, emphasizing wandering woods, rogues, tomboys, women adventurers, faerie antecedents, halflings, crypto-cartography, Third-Path turning, martial arts, and post-1937 fantasy writing as integrated into contemporary photography, advertising, video, computer-generated simulation, and designed life forms.

A new course that explores the history of visual music throughout the 20th century and across different media. Our topics will range from early avant-garde films and Disney ani-mations to post-war art scenes and pioneers of electronic music to a survey of jukebox films and music videos. By bridging the gap between experimental and popular approaches to visual music, this course will provide a multi-layered history of the inter-relations between film, video, animation, and music.

This class will survey recent developments and contemporary tendencies in nonfiction film, in particular those that have led to a redefinition and reconsideration of the form. Topics include the role of digital technology, the status of the moving image in contemporary art, and the proliferation of documentary-fiction hybrid films.

Cinema has changed the way we see and think. Modern visual culture develops with the art of film. Course considers this major 20th century shift in visual perception. We look at "motion" pictures as a product of modernity, born of scientific motion studies, aesthetic and cultural mobility. We relate film to the moving experience of urban space. Key writings and films engage sites of modern movement: home(land) and city, voyage and transport, gender and body.

What is our experience of architecture in cinema? Considering the relation of these two arts of space, we look at how film and architecture are linked in history on the "screen" of the modern age. Highlighting the interaction of modernity, urban culture and cinema, we explore the architecture of film in relation to the architectures of transit and the culture of travel. Emphasis on readings and case study analysis to pursue research projects and conduct presentations.

How do visual representation and narrative figuration contribute to construct urban identity? Explores the urban imagination in different art forms: architecture, cinema, literature, photography, and painting. Topics to be mapped out include: cities and modernity, metrophilia and metrophobia, the museum and cultural archaeology, the ruin and construction site, interior space and public sphere, technology and virtual cities. We will focus on the European city, as we travel through Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Naples and Rome.

This seminar will explore the subtle relations between media to their surroundings, the way in which they develop a reciprocal influence, the capacity of the media to become environments in themselves, the transitions from a space to another, and the effects of these dynamics on the symbolic economy and on the exercise of power.

Focuses on relations of cinema to French culture from the silent era to the age of video. Explores film in dialogue with cultural and historical events, development of a national style and signature, a history of criticism. Correlates study of cinema to cultural analysis. Takes up Renoir and poetic realism, unrest in 1930s, France and other filmic idioms (Italy, Hollywood, Russia), new wave directors, feminist and minoritarian cinema after 1980.

This lecture offers a critical survey of American film noir, the cycle of dark, fatalistic crime films that flourished in Hollywood during the period between 1940 and 1960 and remains deeply influential today. Focusing on the close study of key films, the course will explore the dominant iconography, tropes and patterns within them in the specific socio-cultural contexts of post-war America and deeper changes at work within the Hollywood studio system and American popular culture.

For research and independent projects in the archives, collections, and exhibitions of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Harvard Film Archive, or the Harvard Museums and other campus arts institutions. Open only by petition to the Department; petitions should be presented during the term preceding enrollment, and must be signed by the instructor or staff member with whom the project is to be done.

A course to pursue creative production within a rigorous studio art/film context, this artist's colloquium explores retreating boundaries between the fixity of film and the live-ness of performance. We will consider where early cinema touches performance art meets dance connects with broadcast television relates to live streaming consorts with sculpture associates to theatrical sets. The course focus is the creation of new work. Special attention is given to the development of individual artistic processes.

An advanced survey of current debates on the place of the moving image in contemporary visual culture and art practice with respect to concepts of space, time, movement, and affect.

This course addresses the role of modern media in the formation of local and global identities. In that endeavor we will consider exemplary films from a number of nations as well as pertinent historical and theoretical texts.

The 1960s are typically seen as a decade when French film flourished, renewed by the youthful energies of the Nouvelle Vague, but for experimental filmmakers and theorists like Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, or Jean Rouch, it was a period of radical questioning and critique of the medium. This seminar traces an alternate history of postwar French film, focusing on issues of experimental documentary, militant film, and radical theorizations of film and media.

This course serves as an introduction to teaching in Visual and Environmental Studies, as well as a forum for designing instruction. There will be an emphasis on discussions of hybrid methodologies between research and practice.

This course is for graduate students pursuing the PhD Secondary Field in Critical Media Practice, as well as for other students creating artistic or interpretive media projects that are complementary to their scholarship.