Students in this class will learn to use a variety of ceramic production methods techniques including; molding, pressing, extruding, and giggering, to design and make small pottery editions. The focus is the design and perfection of the objects made and methods used. This class will also serve as a platform for inviting visiting artists to make small editions using our production facilities.

Major elective for Junior and Senior Ceramics students. Advanced non-majors may enroll pending seat availability. To request permission, email the Department Head and instructor jointly and include images of past work.

Major Requirement | BFA Ceramics

A seminar exploring ceramic method and expression from historical and contemporary perspectives. The focus is the connection between historical awareness, and aesthetic expression in the student's work. In-depth independent research required.

This course is a requirement for Graduate Ceramics students. Non-majors may enroll pending seat availability. Email the Department Head and instructor jointly to request permission.

Major Requirement | MFA Ceramics

This class helps you to develop the vocabulary of concepts relating your work to your sources. A number of exercises are undertaken culminating in a presentation of your ideas.

 
Elective

The second semester is a continuation of the senior degree project begun in the Fall. The work and ideas are further developed and refined for final presentation at the Woods-Gerry Gallery.

Major Requirement | BFA Ceramics

As Graduate Design students we will consider how ceramics processes could inform your design work. Through demonstrations, discussions, projects, critiques, and much hands-on work, you should arrive at a fundamental understanding of ceramic hand building as a means to make art. You'll begin to understand what clay can and cannot do in its various stages. Unlike wood or metal - ceramics does not have an inherent structure - it must be built into the form and be made to withhold the stress of shrinkage and crack-age during the drying and firing stages. Hand building is the first step to understanding ceramics and the tools, materials and equipment in ceramic production used by designers. Along with hand building students will be introduced to mold-making, digital ceramics, simple clay and glaze chemistry and the various firing processes.

Elective

In this studio elective, students will explore extended reality (XR) technologies and their implications for our shared spaces and collective futures, from surveillance and smart cities to interfaces and intimacy. Looking far beyond traditional tech canons — which skew heavily institutional, Western, white, and male — we will actively work to broaden and upend existing narratives about XR’s uses, users, and possibilities.This course is ideal for students looking to connect their own research interests with critical approaches to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) tools and concepts. Students can expect to leave the course with new technical skills, a body of self-initiated work, and a critical understanding of the promises and perils of extended realities past, present and future. We will focus on beginner-friendly, no- and low-code software, but students who know how to code are welcome to use more advanced techniques in their work. In the class’s first third, workshops and experimental exercises briefly introduce AR/VR tools, photogrammetry, and 3D modeling. Over the rest of the semester, students develop two individual projects. Regular feedback, shared during 1-on-1 meetings and group critiques, will help students define their own process, motivations, and criteria for success. Throughout, in lectures, readings, and discussions, we will analyze diverse work by artists, designers, technologists, and activists who are imagining alternatives to big tech’s constrained visions for our shared futures.

Estimated Cost of Materials : $100.00

Elective

In this course, students will play, critique and make artistic games. These can generally be characterized as simple, conceptually-based and personal interactive experiences. Unlike mainstream games, these games highlight individual narratives, emphasizing self expression, non-linear logic and creative inquiry. Using the free and widely supported Unity Engine, students will learn the basic programming, 3D modeling (using the built-in ProBuilder plugin) and environmental storytelling, with no prior experience required. This will give students the technical and conceptual framework necessary to build their own “world”, one where they set the rules for a change.

Final projects could address identity, agency and self-expression though are not limited to these themes.Every week a new tool will be introduced alongside a playable prototype (made by myself) that demonstrates how the tool can be used and misused (in a productive way). Students will receive a homework assignment based solely on the weekly topic, challenging them to craft an experience within a limited set of parameters that will slowly expand. Additionally, a curated selection of related games and relevant texts will be provided every week.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

In this course, students will play, critique and make artistic games. These can generally be characterized as simple, conceptually-based and personal interactive experiences. Unlike mainstream games, these games highlight individual narratives, emphasizing self expression, non-linear logic and creative inquiry.

Using the free and widely supported Unity Engine, students will learn the basic programming, 3D modeling (using the built-in ProBuilder plugin) and environmental storytelling, with no prior experience required. This will give students the technical and conceptual framework necessary to build their own “world”, one where they set the rules for a change.

Final projects could address identity, agency and self-expression though are not limited to these themes.

Each week, a new tool will be introduced alongside a playable prototype (made by myself) that demonstrates how the tool can be used and misused (in a productive way). Students will receive a homework assignment based solely on the weekly topic, challenging them to craft an experience within a limited set of parameters that will slowly expand. In addition, a curated selection of related games and relevant texts will be provided each week.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

Creative directors are often artists in disguise, with roles as fluid as myths. They could helm a magazine, a fashion house, or an art exhibition, devise strategies to link brands with people, or they could lead a media platform masquerading as a tech company, or vice versa. Bound by a scope of work, a creative director's work is a collective effort, not a standalone piece. They orchestrate behind the scenes, curating concepts and crafting communication strategies. Their role is essentially non-material—focused more on process than product—and is precise and covert, with the client seen as the 'author' of the work.

This studio course operates at the intersection of creative direction and artificial intelligence, investigating the evolving relationship between AI systems and creative practice. As AI systems evolve from tools into collaborators and potential competitors,  we must reconsider how human creative direction can evolve alongside—or in resistance to—artificial intelligence.

Through hands-on workshops, students will design and train AI models for creative tasks. Weekly projects focus on implementing machine learning models for specific creative direction tasks.  We will explore the possibility of training personalized AI agents that embody and extend individual creative methodologies. Students will develop their own AI creative director agent while critically examining the implications of delegating creative decisions to artificial systems. The course combines applied studio work with critical discussions about the future of creative direction and the ethical implications of automated creativity.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

Creative directors are often artists in disguise, with roles as fluid as myths. They could helm a magazine, a fashion house, or an art exhibition, devise strategies to link brands with people, or they could lead a media platform masquerading as a tech company, or vice versa. Bound by a scope of work, a creative director's work is a collective effort, not a standalone piece. They orchestrate behind the scenes, curating concepts and crafting communication strategies. Their role is essentially non-material—focused more on process than product—and is precise and covert, with the client seen as the 'author' of the work.

This studio course operates at the intersection of creative direction and artificial intelligence, investigating the evolving relationship between AI systems and creative practice. As AI systems evolve from tools into collaborators and potential competitors,  we must reconsider how human creative direction can evolve alongside—or in resistance to—artificial intelligence.

Through hands-on workshops, students will design and train AI models for creative tasks. Weekly projects focus on implementing machine learning models for specific creative direction tasks.  We will explore the possibility of training personalized AI agents that embody and extend individual creative methodologies. Students will develop their own AI creative director agent while critically examining the implications of delegating creative decisions to artificial systems. The course combines applied studio work with critical discussions about the future of creative direction and the ethical implications of automated creativity.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

This studio elective focuses on creating digital image-based artworks. Students will be introduced to a wide variety of contemporary artists working between digital imaging, photography, and digital painting — and a range of technical possibilities for making and producing “painterly” digital artworks. Through several short assignments and one final project, students will experiment and then hone in on image-making processes that suit and expand their practices. These projects are complemented by readings and discussions which provide context for contemporary digital art-making: an exciting and ever-changing space for creative work.

Elective

Robots (re)Imagined inaugurates the first formal collaboration between the Rhode Island School of Design, the Brown Arts Institute and Brown School of Engineering —a groundbreaking laboratory where artists, designers, computer scientists, and engineers work side by side to invent new vocabularies for robotics and art.

Robots have long mirrored our collective hopes and anxieties: they clean our homes, assemble our products, patrol our borders, and populate our dreams of the future. We are told they will replace us, liberate us, or destroy us. But what if robots could do something entirely different—something poetic, unpredictable, even transformative? What if they could teach us new ways of being together, of making and thinking across disciplines, of reimagining intelligence itself?

This course is both a studio and an experimental research lab where students will design and program robots that perform beyond utility—machines that move, sense, and communicate in ways that unsettle the boundaries between the technical and the aesthetic. Through readings, discussions, and collaborative projects, students will engage the cultural imaginaries of robotics—its histories, fictions, and futures—while building hands-on systems that test what a robot can be.

Combining the rigor of engineering with the speculative freedom of art and design, Robots (re)Imagined challenges students to make, code, and choreograph robots as expressive, responsive, and collective beings. The semester culminates in a public presentation of interdisciplinary projects that expand the social, ethical, and imaginative possibilities of robotics in the twenty-first century.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Lectures: Tues & Thurs 10:30am to 12pm / Lindemann Performing Arts Center, BAI Performance Lab

Labs: Tues (or) Thurs: 6:40 to 9:30pm / ERC 347, ACT Lab

Elective

Introduction to Computation focuses on computational techniques, methods, and ideas in the context of art and design. Studio projects first center on the design of algorithms then shift to involve computer programming and scripting. Critical attention is given to code as a body of crafted text with significant aesthetic, philosophical, and social dimensions, as well as the tension, conflict, and potential possible when computation generates, informs, or interacts with drawings, materials, forms, and spaces. Historical and contemporary works of computational art and design will be presented and assigned for analysis. This course is open to students of all majors and is designed for those with little or no experience in programming. In order to conduct work in this course, students will need a laptop computer. This course fulfills one of two core studio requirements for the CTC Concentration.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation

Introduction to Computation focuses on computational techniques, methods, and ideas in the context of art and design. Studio projects first center on the design of algorithms then shift to involve computer programming and scripting. Critical attention is given to code as a body of crafted text with significant aesthetic, philosophical, and social dimensions, as well as the tension, conflict, and potential possible when computation generates, informs, or interacts with drawings, materials, forms, and spaces. Historical and contemporary works of computational art and design will be presented and assigned for analysis. This course is open to students of all majors and is designed for those with little or no experience in programming. In order to conduct work in this course, students will need a laptop computer. This course fulfills one of two core studio requirements for the CTC Concentration.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation

Introduction to Computation focuses on computational techniques, methods, and ideas in the context of art and design. Studio projects first center on the design of algorithms then shift to involve computer programming and scripting. Critical attention is given to code as a body of crafted text with significant aesthetic, philosophical, and social dimensions, as well as the tension, conflict, and potential possible when computation generates, informs, or interacts with drawings, materials, forms, and spaces. Historical and contemporary works of computational art and design will be presented and assigned for analysis. This course is open to students of all majors and is designed for those with little or no experience in programming. In order to conduct work in this course, students will need a laptop computer. This course fulfills one of two core studio requirements for the CTC Concentration.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation

Introduction to Computation focuses on computational techniques, methods, and ideas in the context of art and design. Studio projects first center on the design of algorithms then shift to involve computer programming and scripting. Critical attention is given to code as a body of crafted text with significant aesthetic, philosophical, and social dimensions, as well as the tension, conflict, and potential possible when computation generates, informs, or interacts with drawings, materials, forms, and spaces. Historical and contemporary works of computational art and design will be presented and assigned for analysis. This course is open to students of all majors and is designed for those with little or no experience in programming. In order to conduct work in this course, students will need a laptop computer. This course fulfills one of two core studio requirements for the CTC Concentration.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation

This course is a practical and conceptual exploration into electronic sensors, processors and actuators in the context of interactive art and design. Students will turn everyday objects into ambient interfaces or "responsive systems" that respond to the conditions of the human body, data networks, and the environment. Contemporary works of art and design - from kinetic sculpture and sound art to installation, architecture and product design - will be examined through readings and presentations. Open source hardware (Arduino) and software (Processing) will be taught along with the fundamentals of electronic circuitry. Emphasis is given to the development of creative projects (individual or collaborative), followed by an iterative implementation process (planning, prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining). The course is structured around a series of tutorials and exercises, culminating in a final project. Students also present work-in-progress and prototypes during class reviews to receive qualitative feedback from the class and the instructor. Participants will engage with physical computing conceptually and technically in their studio work and are encouraged to leverage their individual backgrounds to excel in the respective context. Prior experience with electronics and programming is recommended but not required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $200.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

This course is a practical and conceptual exploration into electronic sensors, processors and actuators in the context of interactive art and design. Students will turn everyday objects into ambient interfaces or "responsive systems" that respond to the conditions of the human body, data networks, and the environment. Contemporary works of art and design - from kinetic sculpture and sound art to installation, architecture and product design - will be examined through readings and presentations. Open source hardware (Arduino) and software (Processing) will be taught along with the fundamentals of electronic circuitry. Emphasis is given to the development of creative projects (individual or collaborative), followed by an iterative implementation process (planning, prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining). The course is structured around a series of tutorials and exercises, culminating in a final project. Students also present work-in-progress and prototypes during class reviews to receive qualitative feedback from the class and the instructor. Participants will engage with physical computing conceptually and technically in their studio work and are encouraged to leverage their individual backgrounds to excel in the respective context. Prior experience with electronics and programming is recommended but not required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $200.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

This studio course reimagines game engine software as a critical tool for contemporary art and design practice. Moving beyond traditional gaming applications, we will use Epic Games Unreal Engine to invent unconventional approaches to digital art-making including: emergent design, speculative world building, as well as AI and physics-based processes (Note: traditional gameplay systems, player controller mechanics, and character animation will not be covered in the course). 

The course emphasizes conceptual development alongside technical experimentation. Students will focus on the fundamentals of Blueprints visual scripting, the Niagara particle system, and AI Behavior Trees. In addition, we will discuss historical, experimental film, animation, music, architecture and process-based art movements such as Situationism, Gutai, and Neoconcretismo. Students from every fine art and design department are encouraged to join. Students will learn to bring their current art and design work into Unreal as 2D, 3D and motion assets. The semester culminates in self-directed projects that align with individual creative practices.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Elective

What does it mean to create art and design in a moment when technological systems are rapidly reshaping culture and society? Transformative systems such as artificial intelligence are reconfiguring how information is produced, circulated, and consumed, sometimes creating destabilizing forces such as deepfakes that threaten our shared realities while also offering novel materials for experimentation. In parallel, approaches such as speculative design and critical making allow artists and designers to probe these systems, imagine alternative technological futures, and test possibilities that extend beyond existing paradigms. How artists respond to this cultural inflection point will be decisive in shaping our technological future.

This course will unfold in two parts each week: a seminar-style discussion followed by a conversation with a visiting artist, designer, or technologist. In the first session, students will engage with readings and case studies related to the upcoming guest, situating their work in broader cultural, technological, and historical contexts. In the second session, students will meet the guest lecturer, who will provide a unique perspective on how artists and designers are actively producing work that both critiques current conditions and proposes new directions for rethinking the relationship between culture and technology. Our cultural reality is increasingly constructed through the technological interfaces we inhabit, so how will the artists of today and the students of this course choose to shape it?

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective