Forensic Reconstruction is an intermediate-to-advanced studio in 3D computation, paired with the history of the human rights image: photographs, maps, models, and other visual evidence. The course examines how computational imagery can reveal and distort. Rather than assume that new image-capture tools automatically produce empathy or understanding, students confront what computation can and cannot show, and who has used it to what end.

Over the semester, each student builds a forensic reconstruction of a subject of their choosing, grounded in evidence that can be measured and tested. The subject can be as intangible as collective memory, documented through interviews and cross-referenced testimony, or as concrete as the classroom itself. Students may work across disciplines, and final presentations of the reconstructions may take any form.

Technical instruction develops 3D fluency across spatial software – Blender, Rhino, QGIS – with priority given to free and widely available tools, so that students are able to take a project from raw data to finished reconstruction. Readings and screenings trace the human rights image from its first photographic use in the Congo Free State to the Arab Spring, when cell phone footage created an unprecedented volume of data. Drawing on this history, students learn to evaluate their reconstructions through journalistic, legal, and advocacy lenses, and to understand their own role within the images they produce. Students will need access to a computer capable of running 3D software.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $300.00

Elective

Description: TouchDesigner is a powerful node-based visual programming platform for creating interactive and generative multimedia experiences in real-time. This course introduces students to the fundamental concepts and workflows of TouchDesigner, emphasizing hands-on creation of dynamic visual systems, interactive installations, and live performance tools. Through a series of progressive assignments and a final project, students will produce a portfolio of multimedia artworks that may include interactive installations, visual instruments for live performance, data visualizations, or generative art systems. Emphasis is placed on developing both technical skills and conceptual approaches to real-time media. This studio combines lectures, demonstrations, and extensive hands-on studio time with individual critiques and group discussions.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $300.00

Elective

This course deepens the exploration of computational art and design, pushing students to experiment with more complex methods. Emphasizing independent inquiry, students will refine their creative process and technical skills, developing a cohesive body of work. The course encourages critical engagement with emerging technologies and their social, cultural, and artistic implications. This course also provides guidance for students to articulate and present their body of work, engage in discussions about the field, and explore various directions to position their practice.

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

This course deepens the exploration of computational art and design, pushing students to experiment with more complex methods. Emphasizing independent inquiry, students will refine their creative process and technical skills, developing a cohesive body of work. The course encourages critical engagement with emerging technologies and their social, cultural, and artistic implications. This course also provides guidance for students to articulate and present their body of work, engage in discussions about the field, and explore various directions to position their practice.

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

This course introduces students to the power and politics of technologies and offers an in-depth exploration of the critical issues surrounding technological practices and discourses and its impact on society, culture and the environment. It examines how technological advancements—ranging from artificial intelligence and digital platforms to biotechnology and data systems—shape and are shaped by social, economic, and political forces. Through readings, lectures, case analysis  and class assignments, students will engage with key theoretical perspectives from science and technology studies, cultural studies, queer, feminist and critical race theory to analyze topics related to algorithmic bias, surveillance, digital labor, ethical considerations in AI, digital colonialism, data geopolitics, bioethics, and the environmental implications of technological innovation.

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation

Building on prior knowledge, emphasis will be placed on self-guided, rigorous, research and experimentation. The class will provide structured opportunities for encouraging iterative development and refining ideas through prototypes and drafts, and developing project management/research skills over long-term projects. The course culminates in a public presentation of individual projects, fostering professional development and critical discourse.
 

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

Building on prior knowledge, emphasis will be placed on self-guided, rigorous, research and experimentation. The class will provide structured opportunities for encouraging iterative development and refining ideas through prototypes and drafts, and developing project management/research skills over long-term projects. The course culminates in a public presentation of individual projects, fostering professional development and critical discourse.
 

Major Requirement | BFA Art + Computation, BFA Sound

The Independent Study Project (ISP) allows students to supplement the established curriculum by completing a faculty supervised project for credit in a specific area of interest. Its purpose is to meet individual student needs by providing an alternative to regularly offered courses. Permission of Instructor and GPA of 3.0 or higher is required. Register by completing the Independent Study Application available on the Registrar's website; the course is not available via web registration.

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 is a studio–seminar hybrid centered on interdisciplinary creative production and is co-taught by instructors from the Sculpture Department and Digital + Media Department. Students engage in hands-on experimentation workshops, readings, discussions, and project-based assignments that translate everyday food experiences into contemporary art practices. Working across sculpture, installation, sound art, performance, moving image, and socially engaged and interactive art, students develop original works supported by critical research and reflective documentation. The course introduces sculptural and digital tools through workshops in mold-making, 3D scanning, video, sound, and multimedia software. The learning of these tools aims to support experimentation and independent exploration rather than technical mastery of a single medium.

The course takes food of personal significance as its conceptual point of departure, examining food not merely as a means of basic human sustenance but as a cultural experience, physical medium, and conceptual carrier shaped by time, environment, and social relations. Students investigate how food operates as image, material, action, relationship, and event, and how it transforms across contexts. Through critical reflection and studio practice, students explore food’s material instability, addressing topics such as cooking and transformation, eating as performance and social structure, spoilage and decay, tensions between chance and control, and food’s capacity to produce intimacy, power relations, and collective experience. The course also examines institutional boundaries that traditionally exclude food from art spaces, encouraging students to rethink preservation, participation, and value. Emphasis is placed on balancing conceptual rigor with material experimentation and reflective documentation throughout the semester. Open to students of all majors and levels, the course emphasizes process-based inquiry, collaboration, and iterative making.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $300.00

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

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 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