Art-making in the Global North has long been shaped by ideas of value (what counts as important, marketable, or worthy): a logic that continues to be reinforced by technology and its underlying ideologies. In this course, we will introduce, discuss, question and expand upon the work of Latin American artists who have and continue to actively challenge and rethink these expectations. Rather than simply participating in established art markets and institutions, they provide us with tools to question, resist, and reimagine what art can do and whom it serves. In this discussion-based and hands-on 5-week course, students will engage with readings, activities, and collaborations as they respond to their own social and material contexts and experiment in dialogue with artists both inside and outside the classroom.

Through roundtables, skill-sharing sessions, presentations, and collaborative activities, we will practice careful listening—to each other and to our eco-social environments—while asking how art can create productive tensions that challenge conventional ideas of value. Students will take an active role in the course by developing material and conceptual projects that question binary ways of thinking (such as good vs. bad, useful vs. useless, or worthy vs. worthless). Together, we will explore alternatives to dominant ideas of progress and functionality in art. This includes not only working with discarded, found, outdated, or overlooked materials and techniques, but entangled in one another and our contexts as we consider how these practices open up alternative ways of understanding culture and artistic production.

We will look at the work of Cecilia Vicuna, Coco Fusco, Letty Rosenfield, Yoshua Okon, Colectivo TRES, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Tania Burguera, Helio Oiticica, Francis Alys, Ana Mandieta, and RISD faculty Mariela Yeregui and Adela Goldbard. Each week during the 5-week course, we will look at a text in conversation with these very specific art-historical instantiations.

In class, we will discuss and enact as we employ guerilla, self-constructive, hack, and collective strategies at the Build Space. Students will learn basic skills in electronics as they repurpose and remix obsolete technology into time-based media works that articulate simple (yet conceptually strong) reflections, interventions and actions that propose emergence where a regime of value sees waste.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $20.00

Elective

Are you a student looking to use technology in your creative process? Sensors, Media, Matter prioritizes process over product: through engagement of knowledge from low-tech, open source and DIY practices combined with process-sharing and group reflection, this course positions experimental research and making as an active, critical and community-based practice. Students will be asked to bring a question or curiosity: what is something that interests you in your creative practice? This can be a question about lived experience, a social or cultural condition, or environmental processes. Throughout the course, we will continue to ask these questions amongst ourselves and hone our lines of inquiry, reporting back to the group about our discoveries. Each week, the course will introduce a set of tools and methods for exploring these questions, enabling students to choose approaches that best align with their interests and practices. This will include workshops on electronic sensors, 3D scanning and 3D printing with an introduction to software such as Rhino and Blender, sound recording and video processing, and web-based platform building. Technical sophistication is not required, but students will be asked to bring their curiosity for making and a willingness to share perspectives. In parallel, students will be introduced to relevant digital platforms and open-access services connected to field-based observation, such as environmental monitoring websites, atmospheric or astronomical databases, and spatial mapping tools. Through case studies, readings, field trips and class discussions, students will question assumptions about scale, agency, and interdisciplinary. At the conclusion of the course, students will prepare a final presentation to share their work, and discuss their findings and consider how they may incorporate newfound practices into their future work. No prior coding experience required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $100.00

This course is open to all students.

Elective

This course will explore the technical and conceptual fundamentals of computer programming in the broader context of a sustained studio practice. In addition to teaching basic software coding skills from the ground up, the course will focus on the social and historical backgrounds of these technologies and how they shape the growth of media, identity, politics and the everyday. Related works from the contemporary art and design fields will be examined, ranging from visual, performance and sound art to architecture, product design and beyond. Students will be expected to engage with computer coding and related technologies conceptually or technically in their studio work. The course will consist of introductory exercises in computer programming, discussions of articles related to contemporary digital media, frequent critiques, and an intensive final project that pushes the boundaries of computer coding as a creative tool. Mistakes, pitfalls and frustrations will be expected and encouraged as students navigate this quickly changing medium. No prior programming experience is necessary. Open to non-majors pending seat availability and permission of the department.

Elective

This seminar focuses on exploring technological textile practices to challenge and disrupt the hegemonic conceptions on art and technology, specifically on e-textile field. This seminar seeks to question the hegemonic technological tools, and the paradigms they involve, in order to create e-textile projects from a radical, critical, situated, and anticolonial perspective. Articulating textile techniques (embroidery, patchwork and sewing in general) with simple and low tech analogical electronic mechanisms (LED lights, motors, DIY loudspeakers, etc.), each student will create a e-textile piece. Electronics then will become part of the tissue: threads that conductive threads, batteries, LEDs, motors and speakers will invade the fabrics like a thread, a buttonhole or a button. The interactive and haptic aspect of the textiles, based on tactile stimuli, sonic devices, and light, will make visible political thoughts, actions and feelings. Going beyond the dominant and non-neutral narratives implies seeking into other forms of art practices to question the epistemological foundation itself. The goal of this seminar is to work from scratch in order to develop DIY, e-textile poetics, activism, techno-feminism, craftivism and social practices rooted in the territories themselves, interweaving with their own traditions, cultures and idiosyncrasies, in order to nurture resistant forms of conceiving digital and e-textile projects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

Art/Archives/AI examines AI not as a neutral tool but as a system shaped by labor and histories of extraction. In this studio-seminar hybrid, students move from archives to “handmade datasets,” investigating how collections are assembled and classified and how counter-archives respond to erasure. Through hands-on experimentation with models, they approach archival gaps as sites of speculation and intervention, asking what has been lost, what tales are incomputable, and what narratives might be reconstituted or refigured.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

This course is open to non-major Senior or Graduate Students. Please contact the instructor for permission to register.

Elective

‘Camouflage as a Praxis: Now You See Me Now You Don’t’ is a course exploring the forms, uses, and potentials of camouflage (or invisibility) as a strategy deployed by marginalized communities in the face of dominant hegemonies that seek to detect and disempower us. Grappling with the nuanced politics of representation and carefully unpacking the potential pitfalls and advantages of visibility, this course asks students to confront their own relationships with being in/visible, and create work from this place of definition/obscurity. 

The course considers various figures such as the undercommons (Fred Moten & Stefano Harney), Ditto (the formless pokémon), Banksy (the anonymous artist), and cuttlefish (camouflaging cephalopods), among others, to uncover what it means to cover and make visible what it means to be invisible. Readings include excerpts from Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, For Opacity by Edouard Glissant, and Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. While course content will focus on film/video, animation, photography, and installation works, this course is interdisciplinary, and invites creative practitioners and scholars from all backgrounds and disciplines to consider how concepts of il/legibility apply to their chosen disciplines.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100

Elective

In this graduate-level interdisciplinary research studio, we will explore notions of sympoiesis (“worlding-with, in company") through theory, research and creative practice across media. Guided by critical texts, creative prompts, and visits from artists and collectives, we will consider mycelial webs, hydrocommons, queer ecologies, quantum physics, ecomedia, mutual aid networks, etc. Participants will then follow their own lines of critical inquiry to support creative work, sharing findings with the class and teaching one another. Final projects will be research-based artistic engagements with course themes (“research” casts a wide net here, referring to an array of embodied, scientific, theoretical and communal practices) and can be in participants’ media of choice. Thinking and making will happen independently, collaboratively and interstitially throughout the semester

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

This course invites us to imagine new worlds, with their own languages, logics, and lores. Instead of creating artwork determined by the conditions of this world, what might it mean to create new worlds with conditions our artwork demands? What can we say about the real world by creating fictional ones? What worlds would we imagine if they weren’t built in response to oppression and trauma, but rather centered in joy? Rooted in the works of multidisciplinary artists like Rashaad Newsome, Walid Raad, and Jacolby Satterwhite, and of queer speculative fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Rivers Solomon, and Ursula LeGuin, this interdisciplinary course opens up space for us to imagine, write, animate, film, code, perform, paint, sculpt, and bring into existence these new liberatory worlds.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

This combined studio and seminar forum for Digital + Media first year students supports the exploration of theoretical, social, material, technical and contextual research and concerns in new media arts practices during the first semester of the D+M MFA program at RISD. Students are introduced to a core set of methodologies and technologies from basic electronics, programming and interaction design to installation, and are encouraged to break comfort zones through experimentation. Students conceptualize and discuss their work and ongoing practice. The course is a mix of group discussions, individual meetings, required lecture and workshop series, and group critiques. The technical workshops are opportunities for students to experiment and test out aspects of their research in order to develop a sound practice. Guest lecturers and visiting critics may join during other portions of the class time on occasion.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 - $300.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Digital + Media Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Digital + Media

This combined studio and seminar forum supports Digital + Media first-year graduate students during their second semester as they research and develop the theoretical, social, material, technical, and contextual aspects of their emergent arts practices. Students are encouraged to break comfort zones and practice through experimentation. Students pursue and refine individual interests, as well as collaborative projects within the department. Students conceptualize and discuss their work and their ongoing practice. Readings in critical cultural theory, media art theory, philosophy, semiotics and other areas further support the contextualization and grounding of the innovative practical and conceptual approaches of students. Each student is responsible to select readings and works important as references in individual research and to co-lead a discussion on a set of self-chosen readings and artists' works during the semester. The course is a mix of group discussions, group critiques, and individual meetings. Guest lecturers and visiting critics may also become involved with this class in terms of critical/research aspects. Each student will practice articulating their art process and work towards their thesis, and will contribute to the dialogue concerning the research and work of their classmates.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 - $300.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Digital + Media Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Digital + Media

In this historical survey, we analyze the aesthetic conventions, narratives, and formats of works in new media. We examine the impact digital technologies and new media have had on existing media, as well as the ways in which new media function as a unique system of communication. While investigating the aesthetic conventions, economic conditions and infrastructures that affect the production of new media, we address the social and political contexts in which new media are disseminated, interpreted and privileged. We make connections across decades by focusing on the recurring themes of language, futurism, simulation, hyper-reality, transnationality and information.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Digital + Media Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Digital + Media

The course supports the exploration of theoretical, social, material, technical, and contextual research and concerns in new media arts practice during the final semester of the DM MFA program. It is a combined studio and seminar forum for Digital + Media second-year students. (Students conceptualize and discuss their work and their ongoing practice and thesis process). The course is a mix of individual meetings, group discussions and group critiques. Guest lecturers and visiting critics will also become involved with this class in terms of critical/research aspects. Each student will practice articulating their art process and work towards their thesis and will contribute to the dialogue concerning the research and work of their classmates.

Estimated Materials Cost: $100.00 - $300.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Digital + Media Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Digital + Media

This course supports the practical, conceptual, theoretical and historical development of the M.F.A. thesis (exhibition and written document). Students are required to work independently and in individual consultation with their thesis committee to develop and finalize the thesis exhibition and written document for presentation at the end of the year. The exhibition and written thesis should articulate one's personal studio art / design practice in an historically and theoretically informed context. Formal group critiques are required at the midterm and end of the semester. A major final critique with visiting critics is held in the context of the final MFA Exhibition. The accompanying written thesis is expected to be of publishable quality and is also placed within the public sphere through electronic publication and filing with the RISD Library. Final submissions for this course include the presentation of a final exhibition, submission of the final written thesis, and timely completion of work for preliminary deadlines throughout the semester (draft theses, exhibition plans and press materials). Please see Digital + Media Thesis Timeline for a clear sequence of required deadlines. Please refer to the DM Thesis Guidelines and Policies for clarification of the goals and expectations of the RISD DM MFA.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 - $300.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Digital + Media Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Digital + Media

This seminar course analyzes the aesthetic conventions, narratives, and formats of works in new media. As a group, we will examine the impact digital technologies and new media have had on existing media, as well as the ways in which new media function as a unique system of communication. While investigating the aesthetic conventions, economic conditions and infrastructures that affect the production of new media, we will address the social and political contexts in which new media are disseminated, interpreted and privileged. Within this course, students will be expected to identify, analyze, and critique readings that critically inform and underwrite the foundations of their written thesis and studio practice. Students will contribute to the focus of the course through discussions and writings that contextualize their own work as it relates to critical theory. Class time will be mainly used for discussion of readings and concepts, critique of work and to introduce methods and theory.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Digital + Media Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Digital + Media