This course introduces the core themes of computational art and design, including interaction, networks, and simulation. Students will engage with these topics through modern digital production techniques, examining them from formal, material, historical, and social perspectives.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

This course investigates the impact of computation and media technologies on artistic production and the way artists have utilized new technologies like computers, electronics, the internet, mobile devices, AI, robotics, and other tech media to create works of art. Students will analyze the works of pioneering new media artists, study the impact of technological advancements on artistic practices, and discuss the social, ethical, political, and cultural contexts that have shaped the aesthetics of computational art practices. Through a combination of readings, discussions, case studies, and project-based work, students will engage with key debates, texts, and methodologies that address the histories and potential futures of this dynamic and rapidly evolving field.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation

This course investigates the impact of computation and media technologies on artistic production and the way artists have utilized new technologies like computers, electronics, the internet, mobile devices, AI, robotics, and other tech media to create works of art. Students will analyze the works of pioneering new media artists, study the impact of technological advancements on artistic practices, and discuss the social, ethical, political, and cultural contexts that have shaped the aesthetics of computational art practices. Through a combination of readings, discussions, case studies, and project-based work, students will engage with key debates, texts, and methodologies that address the histories and potential futures of this dynamic and rapidly evolving field.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation

This course builds on the themes covered in the prerequisite Core Studio 1, introducing more advanced digital production methods and themes. Students are encouraged to explore and develop personal working methods and interests through studio projects, fostering a self-directed practice that culminates in a final end-of-year critique.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

This course builds on the themes covered in the prerequisite Core Studio 1, introducing more advanced digital production methods and themes. Students are encouraged to explore and develop personal working methods and interests through studio projects, fostering a self-directed practice that culminates in a final end-of-year critique.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

The material qualities of textile design and fabrication refer to our relationship to all aspects of the physical and tangible world. While computation has long been responsible for pushing the traditional techniques of textiles to high levels of mechanical industrial expression, digital sensibility and know-how of digital technologies are now increasingly seen as means to push the frontier and very definition of fabric. Parallel advances in digital fabrication and the invention of smart materials now allow for added dimensionality and functionality in fabric, and computation is a key interface for material exploration. In this course, students will learn to modulate the performance and behavior of fabric through its geometry and other systems of continuous structural surface within a computational framework. This course will provide students with the opportunity to push the boundaries of fabric design across disciplines and studio practices.

Estimated Cost of Materials: varies by individual project.

Elective

Computation, Technology, and Culture Interdisciplinary Critique is an advanced course for juniors, seniors, and graduate students who have already demonstrated a high level of commitment to pursuing art/design work that involves computational platforms, software systems, and digital technologies, and which explores associated histories, theories, and practices. In this course, students work on an individual project that incorporates research and theoretical exploration of a topic of their choice, with the aim of producing a refined body of work or large scale piece that advances their understanding of and practice with computation and technology. Students regularly meet individually with faculty and receive feedback in recurring group critiques. Additionally, seminar discussions are held focused on pertinent readings, screenings, and lectures. Successful completion of any CTC course or equivalent coursework is preferred, but not required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 

Requirement | CTC Concentration

Computation, Technology, and Culture Interdisciplinary Critique is an advanced course for juniors, seniors, and graduate students who have already demonstrated a high level of commitment to pursuing art/design work that involves computational platforms, software systems, and digital technologies, and which explores associated histories, theories, and practices. In this course, students work on an individual project that incorporates research and theoretical exploration of a topic of their choice, with the aim of producing a refined body of work or large scale piece that advances their understanding of and practice with computation and technology. Students regularly meet individually with faculty and receive feedback in recurring group critiques. Additionally, seminar discussions are held focused on pertinent readings, screenings, and lectures. Successful completion of any CTC course or equivalent coursework is preferred, but not required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 

Requirement | CTC Concentration

Elective

In this studio course, we will create digital + physical based projects by investigating the body as a medium for communicating personal narratives and observing emotions. Through the analysis of contemporary performance artworks and the use of multimedia software programs, we will engage with sound installation, video, site-specific performance, and related media. Methods such as movement practice, object interaction, field recording, social experiment, and nature observation will guide our exploration of the body’s integration with its surroundings in a nonverbal way.

Do you remember the unspeakable inner trigger that emerges when you begin creating something? What is it? In an era dominated by algorithms, the body exposed to data, reaches the edge of sensation, and often collapses unconsciously. As social hierarchies shift the modern art system into an invisible ‘factory,’ (Hito Steyerl) visual dominance pushes us into the world of ‘hot medium.’ This course challenges us to re-position ourselves as an artist, a doer, a viewer. Between eternity and ephemeral organic reactions, lies a gap that calls for recognition. We will create a supportive space to let the natural body lead, redefining vulnerability as a form of resistance. Engaging with existing works, including Bruce Nauman, Francis Alÿs, Yvonne Rainer, David Tudor, and Aki Sasamoto, we will reinterpret them beyond conventional critique, developing a sensitivity to presence and transforming perception into embodied practice. The course unfolds in three phases: decompose, recompose, and decompose again.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

This course introduces the fundamentals of game design and development through lectures and hands-on workshops, exploring various game engines and tools such as p5.js and Unity. Students will select the most suitable tools based on their technical background and creative needs. The course also encourages students to move beyond traditional input methods like keyboards, mice, and game controllers by experimenting with unconventional control techniques, expanding the possibilities of gameplay experiences.

Through the exploration of game theory and technological history, combined with case studies of classic games and works by artists, students will develop a foundational understanding of game structures and player experiences, cultivate critical thinking, and learn how to analyze and refine game interactions as an effective medium for artistic and interdisciplinary expression. Each week will also include in-class workshops that allow students to gain hands-on experience with game development tools. By modifying existing game project files, students will quickly learn to understand and implement core game mechanics. Open to all students. No prior coding experience required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

This course explores the relationships between new media languages and physical space. Building from the history and aesthetics of installation art and relational theater and based on conceptualizations such as "Relational Architecture" by Lozano-Hemmer and the "Poetics of Augmented Space" by Lev Manovich, we will learn to leverage interactive and audiovisual elements in order to design spatial experiences that are media-rich, relational, and responsive. We will use software, video-projectors, sensors and VR equipment, and explore emergent techniques including video-mapping, computer vision and augmented reality. We will learn to deploy not only vision, but also hearing and haptics to create immersive and multi-sensory environments. Class is comprised of lectures, hands-on workshops and individual projects. Students will gain a deep understanding of topics of spatial thinking and user-generated experiences related to space, as well as a theoretical and critical understanding of the history of installation and interactive arts. Although not a prerequisite, basic coding or scripting knowledge (Processing, javascript, or MAX, Touch Designer, etc.) is recommended.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $250.00

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 is either plagiarism or revolution" - Paul Gauguin. This studio course explores how AI’s rapid progress is challenging artists today. As we work with these exciting, terrifying new tools, we’ll discuss how artists have responded to transformative media of the past like the camera, the television, and the internet. How can we comment on the ethical concerns of AI technology? Should we change how we think about creativity? And who will the machines replace? 

Students will experiment with new tools as they are released throughout the semester, as well as interview machine learning researchers and digital artists. Authors include: Walter Benjamin, Ray Kurzweil, Harold Cohen, N. Katherine Hayles, and Ted Chiang. No coding experience is required. 

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

‘Camouflage as Praxis: Now You See Me Now You’ 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: $100.00

Elective

In this graduate-level interdisciplinary research studio, we will explore notions of sympoiesis (“worlding-with, in company") and entanglement 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 interrelation and entanglement (“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

Sonic Practices is a research intensive course focused on acoustic, electronic, and/or computer-based means of sound production and reception. Participants explore audio culture and technology while developing experimental approaches to composition, performance, recording, and/or listening. Areas of investigation include, but are not limited to: audio programming languages, embedded/mobile computing for sound and music, spatial audio, sound synthesis, audio electronics, sonification and auditory display, electroacoustic music composition and improvisation, field recording and soundscape studies, sound installation and performance, and sonic interaction design. Each semester, course content changes in response to a new unifying theme upon which students base individual and team-based research projects. Meetings consist of discussions, workshops, critiques, and collaborations that support students' individual inquiries, the exchange of ideas, and the exploration of research methodologies.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 - $200.00

Elective

Sonic Practices is a research intensive course focused on acoustic, electronic, and/or computer-based means of sound production and reception. Participants explore audio culture and technology while developing experimental approaches to composition, performance, recording, and/or listening. Areas of investigation include, but are not limited to: audio programming languages, embedded/mobile computing for sound and music, spatial audio, sound synthesis, audio electronics, sonification and auditory display, electroacoustic music composition and improvisation, field recording and soundscape studies, sound installation and performance, and sonic interaction design. Each semester, course content changes in response to a new unifying theme upon which students base individual and team-based research projects. Meetings consist of discussions, workshops, critiques, and collaborations that support students' individual inquiries, the exchange of ideas, and the exploration of research methodologies.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 - $200.00

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