Fungi Arts  - Mycelium As Mode is a graduate-level collaborative studio for learning and making in conversation with fungi. Research will happen through local field trips, place-based observation, hands-on experiments, readings, conversations with artists and mycologists, and participant-driven inquiry and artistic practice. We will encounter work by artists who engage with fungi, decomposition and interconnectivity across moving image, sound, text, performance, visual and digital arts. Together, we will attune to local ecosystems through identifying mushrooms in a variety of habitats and observing mycelial growth. Periodic workshops will take place at the RISD Nature Lab, and participants will have the opportunity for extended lab-based work. We will ground ourselves in creative, theoretical, cultural and activist discourses, considering texts by the likes of Anna Tsing, John Cage, Guiliana Furci, Bayo Akomolafe, Merlin Sheldrake, and Macarena Gómez-Barris. Participants will follow their own lines of experiential and critical inquiry to support creative work, sharing findings with the class and teaching one another. Final projects can be in participants’ media of choice. Individual and collaborative work is welcome throughout the semester.

Open to Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

Our explorations in this interdisciplinary workshop will center around the interplay of image and text, particularly in film and video. We will tend to the space between words, between images, the movements from one to another, what’s alive in the cracks. How might poetic devices translate to film? How might film theory inspire our writing? What are the myriad ways text, voice and image can layer and entwine?

This workshop is for students interested in practices that live and migrate between moving images and language art. Together we will consider essay films, cinepoetry, video art, installation and live performance. Class time will include screenings, discussions of texts by artists, poets and film theorists, and open-ended prompts for individual and collaborative experiments. No prior experience is necessary, only a desire to engage deeply with films and writing, experiment with new forms and media, and create in thoughtful community.

Elective