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.

An intermediate studio course to build upon basic skills, while exploring various methods and modes of drawing. Emphasis will be placed on individual projects and developing a body of work. This course considers drawing as both an immediate and mediated form, with distanced and nuanced potential. Exploring drawing as an expanded field, as process and installation, students can use various transfer techniques and incorporate found imagery--combining traditional skills and contemporary practice.

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, students will be introduced to the art movements and artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Using a variety of materials, students will create works on paper for critique that reflect these artists' beliefs and concerns.

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.

What role does a studio "foundation" play in a technologically and ideologically diverse moment? This will be a painting foundations course, with an emphasis on building skills and exposure to different materials and methods; yet, we also aim to question what the grounds for a painting practice could be, with consideration of conceptual and personal motivation, technical proficiency, and openness to process and experimentation.

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.

Titled after Phillip Guston, this course has two agendas: technical assignments that improve your ability to move paint around, and laying conceptual groundwork for personal projects. One task of an artist is to have a relationship with a world. We will discuss the social role of artists and the boundaries between interior and exterior discourse, with an emphasis on artists' writing, both critical and self-reflexive, treating self-expression as well as abnegation: auteurs, flaneurs, ventriloquists.

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.

An introductory course focused on color as a primary attribute of sculptural form. In parallel to working with a variety of sculptural materials and processes, we will consider the definitions and limits of chromatic experience ranging from virtual to ambient to autonomous. Particular emphasis will be placed on the development of sculpture "in-the-round". The course will include readings, slide lectures, and screenings in addition to technical demonstrations and workshops.

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.

An introductory sculpture course, Lost and Found will focus on sculptures made with found materials. Additionally, students will learn techniques related to the use of wood, plaster, and other "new" materials. In addition to studio work, the class will incorporate discussions about work and readings, watch films, listen to music, and explore other forms of expression to aid in- and out-of-the classroom art making.

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.

The pursuit of and response to the horizontal in art will be the focus of this studio class. To cite a few examples, abstract expressionist painting, cartography, earthworks, landscape photography, 19th century German Romantic landscape painting, and Rayograms will provide models of the horizontal that will be points of departure for studio projects, the forms of which will be determined by what the investigation provides. Students will shift medium from project to project.

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.

Introduction to still photography with an emphasis on the medium as a vehicle for expression and personal vision. Covers technical, historical, and aesthetic aspects of the medium. Class is organized around slide lectures, individual meetings, group critiques, and readings.

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.

Introductory exercises in live-action 16mm filmmaking culminating in the production of a nonfiction film as a group project in the spring term.

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

Following an introductory exercise, each student will spend the term making a single nonfiction video on a subject of his or her choosing.

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 hands-on class will investigate the cross-overs between science and animation. How can animation communicate abstract ideas? How can science inspire the artist? Students will acquire some fundamental animation skills, and will work on individual and group projects. This class will be suitable for students with an interest either in science or visual art, or both.

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

A course in narrative fiction film production, emphasizing experimental and conceptual forms, literary adaptation and artist-filmmakers. Students push the artistic boundaries of filmmaking, each student writes, directs and edits several exercises as well as creating a short film. We then throw out our scripts and work in improvisatory, associative modes. We look closely at structure, performance and genre--melodrama, sci-fi, western. Students learn techniques of camera, lighting, sound and editing. Student work is discussed extensively in class.

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.

An introductory course that focuses on the language of film and moving image media. It will provide the students with the analytical tools to respond both critically and creatively to moving image media, with an emphasis on close formal analysis. In the interest of exploring the vast possibilities of the moving image, we will watch a broad selection of narrative and non-narrative works from around the globe alongside canonical feature films.

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.

This course explores film history through the question of sound and considers the interplay between music, dialogue, and noise as a vital concept through which we can understand film. We will put special emphasis on the question of how filmmakers, composers, and sound designers have envisioned and discussed the way we think about film sound. Weekly topics will include early sound experiments, the transition to sound, post-war cinematic soundscapes, and sound design in contemporary cinema.

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.

Part 1 is a weekly studio session during which participants will create 3 projects in any medium or discipline during the term. Part 2 is a screening of the film "The Devil, Probably," 1977 by Robert Bresson for 10 consecutive weeks, interrupted by the 3 project class presentations. Different readings will accompany each screening. The final screening--+1--is "The Third Generation," 1979 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

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.

Art of the last fifty years, with an eye to issues facing artists working today. Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Installation, and New Media: in surveying these and other developments in recent art, lecture-based class will address such topics as modernism/postmodernism; changing models of artistic work and artists' identity; and globalization and the art world.

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 sophomore year must find a member of the faculty to advise the project and submit an application to the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

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.

All students wishing to undertake a VES 99 project must have permission of the project adviser before being considered. The Director of Undergraduate Studies must approve all VES 99 projects and all theses must be approved by the VES Honors Board in advance.

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.

North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping malls, highways, suburbs, and as depicted in fiction, poetry, cartography, television, cinema, and advertising and cybernetic simulation.

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.

An intermediate studio course building upon basic drawing skills, while exploring alternative methods of drawing. Focusing on drawing as process and means, rather than an end itself, we will explore historical and contemporary techniques and ways of using drawing as a "tool", including modes of architectural rendering, technical drawing, and other approaches to drawing in design and the written word. Emphasis is placed on individual projects and developing a personal focus or body of work.

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.

Using the silkscreen printing process, students will create paintings and objects that incorporate images and text found in popular culture. Through slides, videos and informal discussions, students will be introduced to the Pop artists of the 20th century as well as other contemporary artists.

"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 an intermediate painting class grounded in individual projects and group critique. Not limited to conventional forms, we will think broadly about the edge between inchoate material and inscribed meaning. Studio work will be coupled with abundant reading and discussion.

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.

This class is designed as a transition from Introduction to Still Photography to developing an independent work practice that is an extension of your own interests. Students will investigate concepts and strategies in order to create a meaningful body of work that is technically refined, well edited and sequenced. The class will be organized around class discussions, critiques and individual meetings with the instructor, in addition to slide presentations, readings, field trips and visiting artists.

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.

This intermediate level photography class will be structured around weekly photographic field trips giving students the opportunity to define and respond to a variety of sites ranging from natural to urban and built environments. Experimentation with photographic methods and approaches will be supported by slide lectures featuring artists' practices from this genre. Bring your sense of adventure.

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.

There has been a shift from the traditional notion of art work to the idea of art project. The art project could be understood as a concept structured in a constellation of different but independent elements, which the author is able to master not only the implicit creative aspects but also a certain social dimension. We will deal with the sequential steps of a photography project: creative conception, documentation, practical realization, and critical evaluation.

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.

This course is essentially the continuation of 150ar. Students will re-write, produce, and direct the scripts that were developed during the fall term. Emphasis will be given to directing actors, spatial reconnaissance of shooting locations, production design, sound design, and re-making/re-mapping through editing. Completed films (edited, mixed, color graded) are required by the end of the term. Collaboration between students, and crew rotation is a must. 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.

A workshop for students with experience in video to explore the capabilities of the medium. Students may work singly or together-to make either an extended project or a series of shorts-of their own design or from experimental prompts.

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.

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, alongside introductory level students who will learn some basic tools of animation. 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.

Students collaborate in the production of substantial work of ethnographically informed non-fiction media. Principal recording should have occurred before enrolling in the course.

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 produce audio-visual works that explore the body, desire, and sexuality, and their significance in human existence.

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.

Selected topics in the history of the North American coastal zone, including the seashore as wilderness, as industrial site, as area of recreation, and as artistic subject; the shape of coastal landscape for conflicting uses over time; and the perception of the seashore as marginal zone in literature, photography, film, television, and advertising.

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 critical and historical survey of the major questions, concepts, and trends in film theory since 1968. Weekly readings and discussion will examine how the study of film and spectatorship have been influenced by semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, postmodernism, feminism, and gay and lesbian criticism, as well as multiculturalism.

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.

A historical survey of the documentary from the silent era to the digital present, with an emphasis on documentary as art. The seminar will discuss the evolution of documentary in terms of cinematic engagements with the generative possibilities of the real, the confluence of documentary and experimental film, and the emergence of documentary as a mode of art making.

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.

Between 1968 and 1979, cinema turned upside down, radicalizing itself in all possible conducts, universally. This spontaneous, synchronized rebellion set new norms, paradigms, movements, and socio-political ethics that reshaped cinema as we know, make, and watch it today. We will survey, dissect, and admire the fury of this decade's ground-breaking movies from across the world, across all genres. Students will respond with scripts or/and visual essays.

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.

How do moving images transform the way we think? Introduction to film theory aimed at interpreting the visual world, and developing skills to analyze films and media images. Survey of classical and contemporary film theory goes from turn-of-the-century scientific motion studies to the virtual movements of today. Considers theories of space, time, and motion, including Eisenstein's theory of montage and architecture. Treats visual technology and sensate space, the cultural history of the cinematic apparatus, the body and physical existence, affect and gender, and screen theory. Different theoretical positions guide us in understanding and reading films.

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.

Studies development of auteur theory in French film and criticism. Readings include Cahiers du cinema, Bazin, Deleuze, Godard, and Foucault. Viewings include Renoir, American and Italian auteurs, and post-new wave cinemas.

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.

How do the visual arts engage the sensorium? What is the place of materiality in our virtual world? How do film and fashion communicate as objects of material culture? As powerful image makers, film and fashion share a role with architecture and contemporary art. We explore their common language in "fashioning" sensory experience and material visual expression. Readings in contemporary visual theory and diverse film screenings explore the haptic as part of our cultural "fabric". Extensive text(ur)al analysis of Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood For Love.

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.

This course will provide a historical and theoretical survey of the horror film. Beginning in the silent era and working up to recent entries, we will explore the nature of horror and the horrific in the cinema and the various approaches and perspectives that can be utilized to understand these films and their persistent global appeal.We will discuss major films in the genre as well as avant-garde outliers and cult films that push at the boundaries of the genre.

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.

Studies American westerns through appreciation of genre theory and history with emphasis on French reception. Includes films of Boetticher, Dwan, De Toth, Ford, Fuller, Hawks, Hellman, Lang, Mann, Ray, Vidor, Walsh, et al.

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.

This course studies the historical, cultural and philosophical ideas underlying the establishment of the modern motion picture archive in the mid-20th century and its development to the present day. Drawing closely from the collections and practices of the Harvard Film Archive, the film archive will be revealed as a dynamic optic through which to (re)explore notions of historiography, material specificity, visual culture and film studies.

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 new graduate course that surveys new developments in media theory and provides an overview of advanced approaches to the study of media. We will look at different schools and streams of thought that productively expand and transform the established corpus of media theory, ranging from cultural technologies, media archaeology, and object studies to non-representational theory, actor network theory, and process philosophy. Two research projects will further advance our critical survey of new media theory.

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.

Considers film history and the relations between film and history as well as pertinent theoretical approaches to historiography. Critical readings of exemplary film historical studies and careful scrutiny of films both in and as history.

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.

How do screens function as interface between us and the world? What is the role of the screen in contemporary visual arts and media culture? The art of projection has traveled from film exhibition to art installation. With the interdisciplinary approach of visual studies, we examine the history and archaeology of screen media, their cultural and aesthetic dimensions, from pre-cinematic exhibition to the post-medium condition. Considering the art of screening in the deep time of media, we explore the changing architecture of screen space, at the crossroads of science and art, museum and moving images.

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.

This seminar considers the Frankfurt School's deliberations on film, radio, television, and mass culture. We will devote the majority of the course to three seminal figures: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and T. W. Adorno. More generally, we will focus on the debates catalyzed by the emergence of modern mass media and an industrialized visual culture; we will also reflect on the pertinence of these debates for our own contemporary culture of media convergence.

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.

A graduate workshop for Film Study Center non-fiction film and video projects.

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.