Throughout the past century, electronically generated sound has challenged the aesthetic and conceptual boundaries of art and music. In this intensive studio course, students will focus on the creation of experimental sound works utilizing hybrid analog / digital systems. We will investigate synthesis techniques using the SuperCollider programming language / environment in conjunction with the Serge modular synthesizer. Students will leverage the strengths of these tools towards uniquely personal production platforms that are more than the sum of their parts, and utilize them in the creation of fixed media, generative compositions, and improvised performances. The course will include discussion of historical works / texts, hands-on demonstrations, in-class projects, and critical engagement with new works by class members, culminating in a final project that incorporates knowledge gained throughout the semester. Students will need a laptop computer running a recent OS: Mac or Windows. Previous programming experience is recommended, but not required. 

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 

Elective

This hands-on studio is an introduction to the fundamental language of weaving —the warp and the weft—and the implications of weave structures as they relate to image, pattern, materiality, language, spaces and the body. This course will introduce students to equipment, weave structures, and materials in conversation with multiple weaving practices and histories across time and space. The range of equipment used will encourage students to explore the cultural narratives, socio-economic motivations and the histories of peoples and places embedded in the act of weaving. A variety of techniques including hand-manipulated tapestry and loom controlled patterns are taught and explored as a vehicle for the translation of ideas in this medium. The emphasis is on invention and developing a personal approach.

Readings, lectures and discussions will address the textile industry’s complicity in slavery and the environmental crisis as well as how past and present weavers, artists and designers embed stories, histories, and legacies of knowledge-making into their woven textiles.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for Sophomore Textiles Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Textiles

This hands-on studio is an introduction to the fundamental language of weaving —the warp and the weft—and the implications of weave structures as they relate to image, pattern, materiality, language, spaces and the body. This course will introduce students to equipment, weave structures, and materials in conversation with multiple weaving practices and histories across time and space. The range of equipment used will encourage students to explore the cultural narratives, socio-economic motivations and the histories of peoples and places embedded in the act of weaving. A variety of techniques including hand-manipulated tapestry and loom controlled patterns are taught and explored as a vehicle for the translation of ideas in this medium. The emphasis is on invention and developing a personal approach.

Readings, lectures and discussions will address the textile industry’s complicity in slavery and the environmental crisis as well as how past and present weavers, artists and designers embed stories, histories, and legacies of knowledge-making into their woven textiles.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for Sophomore Textiles Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Textiles

The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

The first of three graduate core studios focus on iterative making and critical discourse to challenge disciplinary conventions and learn how to make self-authored design decisions in service of abstract spatial ideas. The agency of architecture lies in its capacity to be enactive. It is occupied, experienced and materialized; it constructs, organizes and extends relations among the many. Its forms, spatial orders, materials, and systems result from the designed consideration of physical and spatial interdependencies with the practices, habits and aspirations of its subjects. Providing a precise and specific set of tools and armatures, this first of three core studios introduces the art of architecture as a design process and language that activates, mediates and politicizes the built environment and its subjects.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $500.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MArch (2yr) and (3yr): Architecture

This required studio continues the explorations you began in Graduate Studio One. Again, you are challenged through a series of projects to purposefully locate your personal position within contemporary industrial design practice. The projects will introduce you to a variety of issues, application methodologies and audiences associated with the industrial design process that will equip you with a critical understanding of the field that can direct a practical means of applying your ideas. At the end of the semester, your deliverable is an exhibition piece resulting from a final self-directed project. This concluding project is a personal, insightful and original synthesis of your semester's activities and clearly communicates your maturity in problem solving design approaches. Graduate Studio Two is offered as part of the Graduate Industrial Design core curriculum in conjunction the required Graduate Shop Orientation and Graduate Communications courses.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

This required studio continues the explorations you began in Graduate Studio One. Again, you are challenged through a series of projects to purposefully locate your personal position within contemporary industrial design practice. The projects will introduce you to a variety of issues, application methodologies and audiences associated with the industrial design process that will equip you with a critical understanding of the field that can direct a practical means of applying your ideas. At the end of the semester, your deliverable is an exhibition piece resulting from a final self-directed project. This concluding project is a personal, insightful and original synthesis of your semester's activities and clearly communicates your maturity in problem solving design approaches. Graduate Studio Two is offered as part of the Graduate Industrial Design core curriculum in conjunction the required Graduate Shop Orientation and Graduate Communications courses.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID Industrial Design

The Advanced Poetry Workshop is an intensive project-based poetry workshop for students with previous workshop experience and a portfolio of revised work on which to build. The course centers on workshop: peer critique by students with previous practice in poetry writing, and the shared goal of completing a semester-long publication/performance project. Students are expected to have a strong commitment to active participation in contemporary poetry as readers, writers, curators, performers, and audience. Teaching and learning methodologies include close reading of exemplary texts, experimentation with forms, revision, online/print publication, and performance. Texts will include poetry collections published in 2019 and 2020, as selected by students and instructor. The workshop welcomes work in any language and from any tradition of poetry. To the greatest extent possible, the work should speak for itself. But mediation, translation, contextualization also play a vital role.

Prerequisite: LAS E411 - Beginning Poetry Writing Workshop.

Elective

This THAD lab course will challenge you to enact methodologies that entwine visual culture with the natural sciences and Indigenous values. As a contemporary art movement, sci-art has two objectives:

1) to increase the communicative capacity of science through artistic media, and

2) to explore new dimensions of the human capacity for learning and teaching about our shared world.

This course’s active approach to sci-art history is Land-based, in which practitioners are guided by an awareness of the obligations we have to all things. To bridge sci-art methods and Land-based learning, we practice Two-Eyed Seeing, which engages locality, visuality, and textuality through observation, collection, ceremony, and craft. Register for this class if you are open to a paradigm shift that breaks from commonly learned assumptions about relationships between yourself and every other thing around you.

Elective

This course helps prepare graduate students to be effective educators while fostering a community of shared ideas while teaching at RISD. Designed to support graduate students while they are teaching in RISD's Wintersession, the course is a practicum in which participants discuss practical and theoretical concerns related to collegiate teaching and learning.

As a forum, the course provides a space for group reflection on teaching experiences and challenges in addition to developing effective learning and assessment strategies. Through structured feedback from faculty, students evaluate their teaching effectiveness and document their development as teacher- scholars through refining, expanding and updating the teaching portfolio. In an immersive teaching and learning experience, graduate students will have an opportunity to share and apply knowledge of diverse learning styles and methods, and an awareness of how social identities produce systemic hierarchies in the classroom to their own discipline-focused art and design instruction.

Each participant is required to be teaching or co-teaching a Wintersession course. Partial requirement for Certificate in Collegiate Teaching in Art + Design Conferred with Teaching Experience.

Elective

This 3-credit class is an introduction to computer-controlled machining. You will learn each aspect of the model-to-machine workflow and at the end of the course be able to design for CNC machining, and operate and mill parts using the CNC machines in the ID Metal Shop. Time spent in class will be technical and process oriented, focusing on proper machine setup, operation, and troubleshooting of toolpaths created in CAM software.

Initial assignments will focus on the use of the built-in facing wizards, engraving metal, and using CAM software to create GCODE files for both 2D and 3D parts. Later course assignments will transition to being projects of your own design. We will be learning in the context of machining metals, but working with other mediums like plastics, wood, and waxes will be possible for individual projects. You will need to draw on some basic CAD knowledge and some machining skills; specifically the interpretation of control drawings, and the selection of appropriate tooling and workholding techniques.

ID 2452 - Metals II is a prerequisite/corequisite for this class.

Elective

What role does poetry play in times of war? Why might we turn to poetry when our collective grief seems most inexpressible? Through an engagement with contemporary poetry, we will learn how formal experiments in language intervene in our capacity to witness, confront, and endure painful encounters with war and loss. What knowledge can poetry produce and bear which would otherwise remain unknowable to us? What ideals and beliefs might we have to suspend, give up, and transform to truly perceive the insights of a poem? Each week, we will read a book of poetry that can hold the impossible contradictions and tensions that emerge in the wake of deep violations of the mind, body, and spirit. Readings may include work by Ilya Kaminsky, Solmaz Sharif, Yusef Komunyakaa, Don Mee Choi, Divya Victor, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Bhanu Kapil, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Nazim Hikmet, and Tarfia Faizullah. Students can expect to experiment with writing poetry alongside weekly reflection posts and a final analytical essay.

Elective

As the scope and objectives of the design disciplines expand and diversify, the ability to implement effective research methodologies has become increasingly critical to position designers to generate and validate new knowledge. This course will survey research methods relevant to the design disciplines that have emerged from the sciences, the social sciences and the arts with special focus on those utilized by landscape architects. Methods we will examine include case studies, descriptive strategies, classification schemes, interpretive strategies, evaluation and diagnosis, engaged action research, projective design and arts-based practices. Students will work individually and in teams to analyze and compare different research strategies, understand their procedures and sequences, the types of data required, projected outcomes, and value by examining a set of projects of diverse scales. Visiting lecturers will present research based design projects. The goal of the course is to provide students with a framework of research methodologies with which they can begin to build their own research based practices.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

This seminar will utilize the content, topic, and conceit of measure as a pinhole through which to see the world of Directed Design Research. Directed Design Research is an alternative to Thesis, which lays out a specific territory of inquiry and encourages students to identify the topic and scope of their work, emanating from this specific point of departure. The seminar will lay out a series of methods, techniques, and exercises related to the exploration of measure, asking each student to then define a territory of inquiry within this delimited field. The deliverables for the Scope Seminar include a thoughtfully delimited and actionable statement of the intended design research, the documentation of a minimum of three methodologies or approaches to be utilized in the design research, and a well-wrought syllabus that includes: a weekly breakdown of tasks and deliverables, relevant references and precedents properly cited, and a concise text (3 pages maximum) describing the research activities to be undertaken.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Fifth-year Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | BArch: Architecture (Directed Research Track)

The aim of the course is to open a window on the complex and multifaceted present design environment. A preliminary overview about the major historic design movements will be followed by an extensive description of the design's state of the art together with a spot on the latest trends. Students will be invited to think and tinker, learning how to approach a design project, how to formulate proper research questions and how to use analog and digital prototyping to experiment, validate and communicate their own ideas. They will also initiate a dialogue with forms, functions, and interactions, defining the borders of the design activity and the actual role of designers. The main goal of the course is to get students familiar with the design vocabulary and with the basic tools involved in design processes. Areas covered: Ideas and concepts creation, quantitative and qualitative research, sketch models making, digital fabrication, physical computing, project's narrative and storytelling.
 

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | MID (2.5yr): Industrial Design

The ability to play is a complex activity that is at the core of human learning. Games are a structured form of play that allow us to explore social interactions, take risks, set goals, develop skills and expand our imaginations while entertaining us without serious consequences. What makes a game fun? Or memorable? In this class, we will explore the intersections of learning, experimentation, and play. In our constructed projects, we will search for innovative ways to expand or reinvent game traditions. Through individual and collaborative projects, we will examine how game mechanics (rules/systems) thoughtfully combined with game aesthetics (visuals/story) can be used to craft engaging, memorable and informative user/player experiences. Our goal is to develop primarily non-digital games that are conceptually innovative responses to various questions you pose related to play. Quality assurance and usability concerns will be explored through group play tests.

This course fulfills the Computer Literacy elective requirement for Illustration Students.

Elective

The prevalence and rapid evolution of digital fabrication technology is due in large part to open source communities of users who actively develop and contribute to new software, hardware, and publishing platforms. In this hands-on studio we will explore both the history and potential of the open source movement as it relates to art, design, and its production. Specifically, we will build upon, modify, hack, and create new open source tools, workflows, and platforms that aid in the production of original artworks. The semester will begin with a series of projects in which students gain familiarity with the norms and practices of open source collaboration, development, and publishing. From there, students will have the opportunity to devise and use an example of open hardware in the creation of an original body of work. Topics include: bootstrapping, hacking, intellectual property, licensure and attribution, speculative fiction, Cyberpunk aesthetics, Afrofuturism, Shanzhai, additive and subtractive fabrication, physical computing, motion control systems, experimental materials, digital distribution, and dissemination.

Elective

Spatial Audio focuses on the creation of immersive 3-D sound experiences. In this course, students analyze and explore how the sensation of space is activated in the listener by making works using spatial audio techniques. These methods include high order ambisonics, vector-based amplitude panning, multichannel surround, and binaural audio, among others. Throughout the semester, a series of exercises addressing technical and theoretical issues provide students with the necessary experience to produce midterm and final projects. Coursework involves computational approaches to sound design and composition with instruction in the audio programming language Max and digital audio workstation Reaper. Students have recurring access to a 25-channel loudspeaker array for the development of works. Readings from psychology, philosophy, the arts, and sound studies support class discussions and critiques. Students will need a laptop computer (Mac or Windows). Previous experience with digital audio software recommended.
Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective