Media Arts and Design

A required course for 2nd or 3rd-year students, Foundations serves as an essential introduction to the Media Arts and Design (MADD) program. It cultivates community, introduces core program values, foregrounds portfolio development, and prepares students for advanced MADD coursework. Through lectures, discussions, and collaborative activities, students will engage with the history, theory, and practice of media arts and design. This course also offers a guided exploration of MADD’s specialized “clusters.” Students will build a shared vocabulary and practical framework to explore the intersections of media art, design, and culture, preparing them to engage critically and creatively with the field.

The Production course is the culmination of the Media Arts and Design program, offering students hands-on experience in bringing their creative concepts to life. In this course, students delve into practical project execution, guided by experienced instructors and equipped with state-of-the-art tools and technologies. From video game design to Internet art, this studio course provides the opportunity for students to apply their skills, refine their projects, and focus on craftsmanship and articulation, preparing students for the Capstone exhibition and beyond.

A studio class exploring techniques for creating realtime augmented performances, from VTubers to motion capture, mixed-reality to machinema. Students will explore the possibilities and opportunities of these emerging technologies, then create and perform their own virtual or augmented productions. No technical experience necessary, and perfect for writers, filmmakers, theater performers, choreographers, or musicians looking to elevate their practice.

Why do we work together? What does it mean to collaborate? How can we create digital environments and systems that encourage teamwork and working towards a common goal? This studio course centers on collaboration by asking the class to conceive, plan, and produce a single shared project from start to finish. Students map their individual skills and interests, then study models of teamwork and group decision-making. We compare traditional frameworks (like Agile and Scrum) with practices drawn from improv, community organizing, sustainable ecology, and arts collectives. These tools guide pitching, role assignment, critique, and feedback. Most weeks run as production sessions focused on updates, planning, and peer review. Technical workshops and visits from domain experts support development as needed. This course helps students practice core collaborative skills and functions as a practicum that mirrors real-world making, culminating in a finished, shareable work.

We generally accept that computers and the Internet evolved outside of fine art contexts, in fields like science and mathematics. That said, the history of these technologies is a history of creative individuals collaboratively shaping one of the most important narratives of our time, "the Internet is the great masterpiece of human civilization" (Heffernan). In this studio course, we'll learn what the Internet is, how it works, how it got here and how to engage with it as a creative medium. This means we'll be learning how to craft it from code, specifically HTML (hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets), but also studying its aesthetics, conventions and practices. We'll be drawing inspiration from various Internet art movements, from the net.art scene of the 1990s, to the digital folk art of GeoCities at the turn of the century, to the Web design and CSS art scenes of today. The goal of this course will be to cultivate our own piece of Internet art/design, informed by the research, discussions, exercises and experiments we'll make along the way.

In this class, students will learn how to create high resolution 3D model concepts for the production of video games. High resolution sculpting is an integral part of today’s 3D production pipelines. This course aims to focus on this stage of the production pipeline, and its role in creating high quality games. While this class will focus on creating assets for video games, digital sculpting skills can be applied to a variety of other industries, such as architecture, fashion and jewelry, to name a few.

A practical and theoretical introduction to the design of brand identity, from logos to copy to moving image. In addition to experimenting with practical applications of branding, students will also use history and theory to engage with anti-consumerist post-branding approaches championed by artists and designers such as Jason Grant, Oliver Vodeb, The Yes Men, Barbara Kruger, and Adbusters. Students will practice the process and strategies used to benchmark, research, and ideate effective brand systems through assembled logo, type, color, illustration, imagery, and graphic elements while negotiating the ethically complex histories of branding in practice.

This course surveys a particularly rich quarter-century of gaming history, in which the concept of “indie game” both gelled and evolved. As the 21st century brought an explosion in internet-based games distribution, small-scale game developers faced a definitional question: what does it mean to be “indie”? Does it describe a model of production? Or an aesthetic? (Or something in between?) From emergence of a distinct “independent style” in the late 2000s to the queer games avant-garde of the 2010s to the rise of boutique publishers such as Devolver Digital and Annapurna Interactive that dominate the scene today, this course maps the history of “independence” in games while drawing illustrative connections to earlier indie scenes in music and movies. Focal points range from individual games (Braid, Undertale, OneShot) to genres (walking simulators, cozy games) to platforms (Flash, Twine). To confront the turbulence of engaging with recent history, students will be expected to research and present on one or more games of their choosing outside the syllabus.

What is “creative computing”? Are artists doing computing creatively or is the computing itself being creative? In this seminar course, students will learn to discuss, analyze, and contextualize artworks covered by the blurry and interdisciplinary “meta-medium” that is creative computing, beginning in the 1960s and working forward to the present moment. Through lectures, hands-on exercises, and discussions of assigned readings, students will gain familiarity with core techniques and concepts that inform contemporary digital art practice and develop their own critical vocabulary and opinions.

Course topics include: What (if any) are the medium specific properties of creative computing? How dependent are digital works on screens and other systems of display? How does creative computing allow us to delaminate, interject into, or interfere with the streamlined technological world around us? How do generative machine learning models connect to this conversation and how are artists working with them today?

Design is one of the most pervasive and influential forms of human communication, shaping everything from ancient symbols carved in stone to the digital interfaces that define modern life. This course offers a survey of design’s history, examining design’s evolution across cultural, artistic, and technological revolutions. This course traces the ways in which design has functioned as a critical tool for information exchange, artistic expression, and ideological influence. Beginning with the origins of writing systems and illuminated manuscripts, we will progress through the development of typography and printing during the Renaissance, the industrialization of design in the 19th century, the radical experimentation of modernist movements, and the global impact of digital media in the 21st century. This course examines both the dominant cultural ideas embodied by design, as well as the counter-narratives it generates to express diverse cultural identities.