An introduction to the concepts and techniques of two-dimensional art making with an emphasis on drawing. Lectures and studio classes will introduce skills and concepts of contemporary drawing practice in relation to a variety of genres such as illustration, comics, advertising, animation, and other forms of visualization. This course is offered only one time each year.
An introduction to art making utilizing the transaction between people, objects, situations, and media. Includes both critical reflection on relevant aspects of modern and contemporary art practices (Marina Abramovic, Allen Kaprow, Adrian Piper, James Luna, Stelarc, Ron Athey, conceptual art, performance art, new media art, etc.) and practical experience in a variety of artistic exercises. This course is offered only one time each year.
An introduction to art making that uses as its base the idea of the “conceptual.” The lecture exists as a bank of knowledge about various art world and nonart world conceptual plays. The studio section attempts to incorporate these ideas into individual and group projects using any “material.” This course is offered only one time each year.
We will look at works that present androids, cyborgs, and AI as an emergent “other” in media. Examining science fiction films and media, students look critically at how race and gender are represented. Through the lens of feminist and antiracist scholarship, the course presents critical understandings of android/AI stories and their cultural implications. Special emphasis throughout the course will be placed on how such stories remake troubling histories and anxieties about race and gender.
Looking at spectacle in motion pictures, the illusion of cinema, and visual effects in popular media. This class will introduce students to the history of special and visual effects in film and video, from the earliest cinematic experiments to experimental film and modern-day blockbusters. We will examine the integration of technology with image-making and storytelling and look at the exciting ways artists make the impossible come alive on screen.
This seminar introduces students, with an academic background in critical theories of race and ethnicity, to artistic production in the visual arts. It combines practice-based research with theoretical and historical readings of works by scholars, artists, and filmmakers of the African diaspora.
Prerequisites: AAS 10.
This course is a general study of the camera and photography utilizing digital technology. Emphasis is placed on developing fundamental manual control, understanding composition, and basic photographic techniques through lectures and field exercises.
Designed around presentations by visiting artists, critics, and scientists involved with contemporary issues related to computer arts and design. Lectures by the instructor and contextual readings provide background material for the visitor presentations. Program or materials fees may apply. Students may not receive credit for both VIS 10 and ICAM 110. This course is offered only one time each year.
This course examines the significant topics in art practice, theory, and history that are shaping contemporary art thinking. A wide range of media extending across studio art practice, digital media, performative practices, and public culture will be considered as interrelated components. This course is offered only one time each year during winter quarter.
This course examines the history of Western art and architecture through such defining issues as the respective roles of tradition and innovation in the production and appreciation of art; the relation of art to its broader intellectual and historical contexts; and the changing concepts of the monument, the artist, meaning, style, and “art” itself. Representative examples will be selected from different periods, ranging from antiquity to modern. Content will vary with the instructor.
Course offers a comparative and thematic approach to the artistic achievements of societies with widely divergent structures and political organizations from the ancient Americas to Africa and the Pacific Islands. Topics vary with the interests and expertise of instructor. Students may not receive credit for VIS 21 and VIS 21A.
Survey of the major artistic trends of India, China, and Japan, taking a topical approach to important developments in artistic style and subject matter to highlight the art of specific cultures and religions. Students may not receive credit for VIS 21 and VIS 21B.
Survey of the major artistic trends of Africa, taking a topical approach to important developments in artistic style and subject matter to highlight the art of specific cultures, nations, and religions.
A wide-ranging survey introducing the key aspects of global art and criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course will comparatively examine formations of modernism and modernity within and across a variety of aesthetic traditions in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and Oceania.
This course, a lower-division seminar for art history majors, covers the research tools and fundamental skills needed for advanced work in the field. Topics include descriptive and analytical writing; revision and peer review; compiling annotated bibliographies with traditional and online resources, indexes, and databases; evaluating source materials (including those found online); defining research programs; and preparing and delivering art history presentations.
Prerequisites: none. Art history majors only.
Note: Prerequisite for VIS 112 and highly recommended for all other seminars. Must be taken within a year of declaring major or transferring into the art history program.
Speculative design uses design methods to question and investigate material culture with critical creative purpose. This course provides a historical, theoretical, and methodological introduction to speculative design as a distinct program. Emphasis is tracing the integration of interdisciplinary intellectual and technical problems toward creative, unexpected propositions and prototypes.
Have you noticed that zombies are everywhere? In the lab, bank, your home, computer, and cell phone. The undead threaten identity and civilization. Who are they? What do they want? How do they “think”? What do they mean? Class will consider film, literature, graphic novels, video games, and fan culture, drawing from fields such as computing, anthropology, philosophy, sexuality studies, and ethnic studies to dig up undead media’s secret histories and map the global flows of its shambling hordes.
Neuroscience is a fast-growing biology field, with projects such as the White House BRAIN Initiative and the Allen Brain Atlas and new areas such as neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, and neuroaesthetics. This lecture course considers interactions between neuroscience and art, primarily focusing on studies of how art is represented in the brain. By considering perception, emotion, memory, and creativity, we approach scientific understandings of art and design.
This course provides a strong foundation in contemporary techniques of design communication, introduced in light of their significance to visual culture and the speculative design field. We cover digital image editing, typography, vector-based illustration and diagramming, and document layout. Also introduced are basic digital video editing tools and web production formats. Emphasis is on mastery of craft through iteration and presentation of multiple projects.
An in-depth exploration of the camera and image utilizing photographic digital technology. Emphasis is placed on developing fundamental control of the processes and materials through lectures, field, and lab experience. Basic discussion of image making included. Program or materials fees may apply.
Prerequisites: none. Open to visual arts majors and minors.
Operating as both a lecture and production course, this introductory class provides a technical foundation and theoretical context for all subsequent production-oriented film and video studies. In the laboratory, the student will learn the basic skills necessary to initiate video production. Completion of Visual Arts 70N is necessary to obtain a media card. Program or materials fees may apply.
Prerequisites: none. Open to visual arts majors and minors.
A practical introduction to the studio art major and a conceptual introduction to how diverse strategies of art making are produced, analyzed, and critiqued. Introduces historical and contemporary topics in painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance art and field-based practices. Required for all studio majors and minors including transfer students. Must be taken in residence at UC San Diego.
Course examines the broader history of photography. We will discuss various technological processes associated with the early dissemination of photography and explore the ways in which this new medium transformed existing social and cultural practices, primarily in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine photographic artists, as well as photographers working in a range of areas, from criminology and advertising to journalism and war photography.
A survey of the history and the art of the cinema. The course will cover a range of national and international cinemas from the origins of cinema and the contributions of the earliest filmmakers to film movements and styles of the late twentieth century. Program or materials fees may apply.
Analysis and interpretation of a film movement, style, genre, or set of conventions in light of aesthetic, philosophical, and/or theoretical frameworks. Specific films and emphases may vary by year and instructor. Examples include early twentieth-century avant-garde, Third Cinema, Neorealism, documentary cinema, the New Waves, essay films, science and cinema, cinematic landscapes, structuralist film. Program or materials fees may apply.
A survey of media history and theory across a range of national and international contexts. Offers historically situated analysis of print, audio, text-based, image-based, and time-based media art and design in narrative, avant-garde, and documentary forms across different movements, genres, and styles with attention to associated theories and conventions (such as mechanical, electronic, graphical, lens-based, video, digital, and mixed media). Program or materials fees may apply.
Analysis and interpretation of a specific media art or design movement, style, genre, or set of conventions in light of aesthetic, philosophical, and/or theoretical frameworks. Specific works and emphases may vary by year and instructor. Examples include video art of the 1970s and 80s, photographic strategies, media art and industry, media archaeology, and computational aesthetics. Program or materials fees may apply.
The First-year Seminar Program is designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small seminar setting. First-year Seminars can be offered in all campus departments and undergraduate colleges, and topics vary from quarter to quarter. Enrollment is limited to fifteen to twenty students with preference given to entering first-year students.
This course examines contemporary theories and concepts of public culture and social practice, including new spheres of public culture design research and practice that intervene across urban socioeconomic and political domains, environmental, spatial and community-based dynamics, architecture, information design, and visualization.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course will explore and develop designs and strategies that engage today’s shifting public domain structures and their various spatial and systematic manifestations. The problematic of “the public” and the politics of public sphere are situated as sites of investigation through which we imagine new interfaces between individuals, collectives, and institutions with the aim of coproducing more critical and inclusive forms of public space and culture.
Prerequisites: VIS 100.
This course introduces expanded meanings of the urban and the ecological into new conceptual zones for artistic practice and research. It introduces urbanization as a set of complex and transformative processes of interrelated cultural, socioeconomic, geopolitical, and environmental conditions whose material and informational flows generate the designs and meanings of cities as an ecological system.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course will explore and develop designs and strategies that use multi-scalar urban and ecological systems as materials for artistic intervention and design speculation on structures including shifting geopolitical boundaries, sociocultural territories, and urban infrastructures and landscapes. Through hands-on research and design projects, we explore the city and its multiple sites of investigation to develop new ecologies of social and cultural productions.
Prerequisites: VIS 101.
This course provides an introduction to the Tijuana-San Diego border, seeing it as a microcosm of global conflict from where to engage urban inequality and explore new approaches to democratize the city. The course zooms into the border flows that make the marginalized neighborhoods within this contested geography into sites of social-economic and cultural productivity, laboratories in which to rethink the gap between wealth and poverty.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
We can learn a lot from the spatial, aesthetic, and formal strategies of architects, as well as their critical stance on the shifting cultural, socio-political, and economic dynamics in the contemporary city. This is an introductory course to explore some of the most important, innovative contemporary architectural practices in the world, and their role in shaping new paradigms in design, material, urban, and environmental culture.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
The course examines the theories and practices of contemporary art in South Korea. Highlighting the work of representative artists, we consider the role of the arts in modernization, the emergence of alternative arts spaces that promote the decentralization of cultural programs, and how governmental and corporate sponsorship has supported the national and global presence of South Korean art. This course is part of the Korean studies minor program.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Covering the evolution of architecture and urban developments in South and North Korea since 1953, and focusing on their capital cities of Seoul and Pyongyang, this course considers how both states have shaped their political, economic, and cultural conditions. In particular, we will compare the differences in designs of apartment complexes, architecture of national identity, and political and corporate buildings between the two nations, and the hybridization of traditional and modern styles.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A cultural, cartographic, and geo-political overview of the dialects of the East and the West and the convergent civilizations in between, this course will examine the historical precedents and contemporary reconstructions of Europe and Asia as one continent. We will explore how the networks and territories; and the movements of materials, ideas, and people through the Silk Roads have shaped and will shape the morphology of Eurasia over its space and time, including religions, technologies, and trades.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course surveys the history of speculative design in a planetary context, introducing students to important and diverse projects and design practices. These may include experimental architecture, science fiction literature, speculative software design, critical object and installation, philosophy of technology, alternative futures, graphical and interaction design, and more. Emphasis will be on understanding projects and practices in historical, cultural, and political context.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A studio course in beginning drawing covering basic drawing and composition. These concepts will be introduced by the use of models, still life, landscapes, and conceptual projects.
Prerequisites: VIS 80.
A studio course in drawing, emphasizing individual creative problems. Class projects, discussions, and critiques will focus on issues related to intention, subject matter, and context.
Prerequisites: VIS 105B.
This course treats Chinese calligraphy as a multidimensional point of departure for aesthetic, cultural, and political concerns. This conceptually based course combines fundamental studio exercises with unconventional explorations. Students are exposed to both traditional and experimental forms of this unique art and encouraged to learn basic aesthetic grammars. There are no Chinese language requirements for this course.
Prerequisites: VIS 80.
This course concerns East–West aesthetic interactions. What are the conceptual possibilities when calligraphy, an ancient form of Chinese art, is combined with installation, a contemporary artistic Western practice? Emphasis is placed on such issues as cultural hybridity, globalization, multiculturalism, and commercialization.
Prerequisites: VIS 105D.
A studio course focusing on problems inherent in painting—transferring information and ideas onto a two-dimensional surface, color, composition, as well as manual and technical procedures. These concepts will be explored through the use of models, still life, and landscapes.
Prerequisites: VIS 80.
A studio course in painting emphasizing individual creative problems. Class projects, discussions, and critiques will focus on issues related to intention, subject matter, and context.
Prerequisites: VIS 106B.
A studio course focusing on the problems involved in transferring ideas and information into three-dimensions. Course will explore materials and construction as dictated by the intended object. Specific problems to be investigated will be determined by the individual professor.
Prerequisites: VIS 80.
A studio course in which the student will investigate a wider variety of technical and conceptual issues as well as materials involved in contemporary art practice related to sculpture.
Prerequisites: VIS 107A.
This is a studio art course for the advanced visual arts major. After guided assignments, emphasis is on self-directed projects and portfolio development. This interdisciplinary course may focus on painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film, video, photography, and new media. May be taken for credit three times.
Prerequisites: senior standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
This course for the advanced visual arts major examines topics in contemporary studio art practice. The course is divided among research, discussion, projects, field trips to galleries, and visiting artists, and will encourage student work to engage in a dialogue with the issues raised.
Prerequisites: senior standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
This class is for the advanced visual arts major who is interested in taking the next steps toward becoming a professional visual artist. Students will become familiar with artist’s residencies and graduate programs and what they offer. Of most importance will be developing the portfolio and the artist statement, as well as becoming more familiar with the contemporary art world. Two production-based limitation.
Prerequisites: senior standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
This is a course for the advanced visual arts major that explores the use of the maquette, or sketch, in the process of developing, proposing, and planning visual works in various media for public projects, site specific works, grants, exhibition proposals, etc. The student will work on synthesizing ideas and representing them in alternate forms that deal with conception, fabrication, and presentation.
Prerequisites: senior standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
This course for the advanced visual arts major explores the role of storytelling in art practice across a variety of disciplines including drawing, painting, sculpture, and performance.
Prerequisites: senior standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
This course for the advanced visual arts major takes painting, sculpture, and related media out of the studio/gallery and into the public sphere by examining the contemporary history of public artworks with traditional and nontraditional site-specific work, focusing on production, critical discussion, and writing. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: senior standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
This course for the advanced visual arts major expands the idea contained in a singular work, or object, into the use of multiple objects, images, and media that redefines the idea as well as the space for which it is intended. Examination of historic, modern, and contemporary works will influence discussion of student project development and execution. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: senior standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
This course for the advanced visual arts major explores the natural and altered environment as a basis for subject as well as placement of work pertaining to the environment. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: senior standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
This class is for the advanced visual arts major devoted to the study and practice of the multiple ways in which writing and other forms of visible language have been incorporated into contemporary and traditional artworks, including artists’ books, collaging and poster art, literature and poetry, typographical experiments, and calligraphies. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: senior standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
This is a studio art course for the advanced visual arts major that explores the relationship between performance and the camera. From the selfie, performance documentation, and directing actors, this course explores standing in front of, between, and behind the lens.
Prerequisites: senior standing.
This is a studio art course for the advanced visual arts major with a focus on the intersection of digital rendering and drawing, painting, sculpture, and performance. Structured as core lectures and labs, studio production, reading, and critical theory focused on contemporary art engaged with technology, as well as artists’ responses to its demands. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: senior standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
This is a course for the advanced studio major who is selected based on a proven record of engagement, productivity, and self-discipline as well as a clear trajectory of their work. The intent is to help refine and expand the student’s studio practice toward a unified portfolio and artist’s statement as well as develop experience in participation and organization of group and solo exhibitions.
Prerequisites: consent of the instructor, department stamp required.
The second advanced studio course in the Honors Program in Studio, the successful completion of which will lead toward an honors degree in the studio major. The course builds on the critical and technical issues raised in Studio Honors I.
Prerequisites: VIS 110M.
Introduction for art history majors to a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches to the image and to key methodologies of art history, including iconography, formalism, psychological theories of art, social art history, feminism, and de/postcolonialism. Emphasis will be on developments in the nineteenth–twenty-first centuries; students with research interests in early or premodern periods are encouraged to use the methodological resources we develop to address these areas and issues. Required for all art history and criticism majors.
Prerequisites: VIS 23.
Using a wide range of nineteenth-century texts, this course will offer close discussions of romantic criticism and aesthetic philosophy (ideas of originality, genius, and nature); the conditions of “modern life”; realism and naturalism; science and photography; and questions of form, expression, symbolism, and history. This is a seminar course. Recommended preparation: two upper-division art history courses.
Prerequisites: VIS 112.
The principal theories of art and criticism from symbolism until 1945: formalism and modernism, abstraction, surrealism, Marxism, and social art histories, phenomenology, existentialism. Recommended preparation: VIS 112 or two upper-division courses in art history strongly recommended.
Recent approaches to the image in art history and visual culture: structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, postcolonialism, cultural studies. Recommended preparation: VIS 112 or two upper-division courses in art history strongly recommended.
This seminar treats landscape as site, image, symbol, and ideal through a historical examination of the major themes and issues in the forms and functions of landscape and its representation in the European and, to a certain extent, the American tradition from antiquity to the present day. These historical discussions will also form a framework for observations on and analyses of contemporary landscape, both as experienced and as an idea. This course presumes no prior knowledge of the field. This course fulfills the theory requirement and seminar requirement in the art history program. Recommended preparation: VIS 20.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This seminar focuses on the dynamic and at times contentious relationship between antiquity and the Middle Ages as it played out in various environments—physical, social, cultural, and intellectual—from Rome to Constantinople to Venice, Pisa, and Florence. After considering classic and contemporary formulations of the problem, it turns to in-depth examination of the architecture, images, objects, and techniques at sites in the history of art, where fragments were deployed and displayed. This course fulfills the theory requirement and seminar requirement in the art history program. Recommended preparation: VIS 20 or VIS 112.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course studies important developments in the arts of China in the context of contemporary cultural phenomena. The factors behind the making of art will be brought to bear on selected objects or monuments from China’s great artistic eras.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing or consent of instructor and department approval.
This seminar will address and critique various approaches to studying the art of non-Western societies with respect to their own aesthetic and cultural systems. Students are encouraged to explore comparative philosophies of art and test paradigms of Western aesthetic scholarship. Recommended preparation: VIS 21A or 21B or 112 or two upper-division courses in art history strongly recommended.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Examines the philosophical debates that locate the Americas in relation to the modern world.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This seminar will examine key moments in the interaction between the world of art and the world of ideas; the goal is to start students thinking about the entire theory-practice relation as it connects with their own projects and research.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course will examine the process of image making within specific ceremonies and/or rituals. Selected ceremonies from West Africa, Melanesia, Nepal, and the United States, including both Christian and non-Christian imagery, will be considered. Performance art and masquerade will be analyzed within a non-Western framework. Recommended preparation: VIS 21A. Students may not receive credit for both VIS 126F and VIS 117I.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Greek classical civilization was a turning point in the history of humanity. Within a new kind of society, the idea of the individual as free and responsible was forged, and with it the invention of history, philosophy, tragedy, and science. The arts that expressed this cultural explosion were no less revolutionary. The achievements of Greek art in architecture, sculpture, and painting will be examined from their beginnings in the archaic period, to their epoch-making fulfillment in the classical decades of the fifth century BC, to their diffusion over the entire ancient world in the age of Alexander and his successors. Recommended preparation: VIS 20.
Roman art was the “modern art” of antiquity. Out of their Italic tradition and the great inheritance of Greek classic and Hellenistic art, the Romans forged a new language of form to meet the needs of a vast empire, a complex and tumultuous society, and a sophisticated, intellectually diverse culture. An unprecedented architecture of shaped space used new materials and revolutionary engineering techniques in boldly functional ways for purposes of psychological control and symbolic assertion. Sculpture in the round and in relief was pictorialized to gain spatial effects and immediacy of presence, and an extraordinary art of portraiture investigated the psychology while asserting the status claims of the individual. Extreme shifts of style, from the classicism of the age of Augustus to the expressionism of the third century AD, are characteristic of this period. The new modes of architecture, sculpture, and painting, whether in the service of the rhetoric of state power or of the individual quest for meaning, were passed on to the medieval and ultimately to the modern West. Recommended preparation: VIS 20.
During the later centuries of the Roman Empire, the ancient world underwent a profound crisis. Beset by barbarian invasions, torn by internal conflict and drastic social change, inflamed with religious passion that was to lead to a transformed vision of the individual, the world, and the divine, this momentous age saw the conversion of the Roman world to Christianity, the transfer of power from Rome to Constantinople, and the creation of a new society and culture. Out of this ferment, during the centuries from Constantine to Justinian, there emerged new art forms fit to represent the new vision of an otherworldly reality: a vaulted architecture of diaphanous space, a new art of mosaic, which dissolved surfaces in light, a figural language both abstractly symbolic and urgently expressive. The great creative epoch transformed the heritage of classical Greco-Roman art and laid the foundations of the art of the Christian West and Muslim East for the next thousand years. Recommended preparation: VIS 20 or 120B.
This survey course follows the parallel tracks of the sacred and secular in art and architecture from Constantine to the Crusades. Highlights include the emergence of Christian art, visual culture of the courts, development of monasteries, fall and rise of towns and cities, and arts of ritual. The thematic juxtaposition of different media and medieval people speaking in their own voices yields a multidimensional image of society in which the medieval experience is made as concrete as possible. Recommended preparation: VIS 20.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course surveys the changes in art and architecture caused by the rise of new religions after the ancient world demise, a period of upheaval and contention often known as the “Clash of Gods.” How did Christianity come to dominate Europe with its churches and monasteries and then Islam with its mosques in the Middle East and North Africa? Studying the role of religion in the formation of artistic styles will show a dynamic interaction between the visual cultures of Christianity and Islam. Recommended preparation: VIS 20.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course will look at the many different ways the Bible was deployed in medieval visual culture from images to architecture and from narrative and symbolism to ritual. Our path will be charted by the major monuments of medieval art that take up our theme of the Bible, which will serve as exemplary guideposts in our trajectory through the Middle Ages.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This seminar explores movement and exchange between Mediterranean cities with diverse political, social, ethnic, and religious roots and the new modes of art, architecture, and intellectual discourse that this diversity fostered. In addition to medieval sources, readings include art historical and theoretical texts from a variety of periods and fields that frame the implications of multiculturalism for historical and contemporary categories of perception and for the analysis of visual culture. Recommended preparation: VIS 20 or VIS 112 recommended.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Italian artists and critics of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries were convinced that they were participating in a revival of the arts unparalleled since antiquity. Focusing primarily on Italy, this course traces the emergence in painting, sculpture and architecture, of an art based on natural philosophy, optical principles, and humanist values, which embodied the highest intellectual achievement and deepest spiritual beliefs of the age. Artists treated include Giotto, Donatello, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Jan van Eyck, Mantegna, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante, Durer, and Titian. Recommended preparation: VIS 20.
This course will explore the baroque, through the lens of the lives of artists and architects who made it great: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velasquez, Bernini, and Caravaggio, as well as the artists of the sixteenth century who served as a source of inspiration and point of departure for the great work of the baroque. The lives of these people interlocked on a number of different levels in order to create a visual culture that many regard as fundamental to the modern world.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
An in depth look at the art of Leonardo da Vinci with special emphasis on his training in Florence, interactions with Bramante, and the response to his work by Raphael.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course offers new approaches to understanding Michelangelo’s greatest creations. By considering how each work relates to the setting for which it was intended, by regarding critical literature and artistic borrowings as evidence about the works, and by studying the thought of the spiritual reformers who counseled Michelangelo, new interpretations emerge which show the artist to be a deeply religious man who invested his works with both public and private meanings.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing; or one of the following courses: VIS 20, 21, 22 or 23; or any upper-division course in art history and criticism or in European history.
(Cross-listed with HIEU 124GS.) Language and culture study in Italy. Course considers the social, political, economic, and religious aspects of civic life that gave rise to the unique civic art, the architecture of public buildings, and the design of the urban environment of such cities as Florence, Venice, or Rome. Course materials fees may be required. Students may not receive credit for both VIS 122E and VIS 122GS or both HIEU 124 and HIEU 124GS.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing or consent of instructor and department approval.
The art of the Early Renaissance in Northern Europe is marked by what appears to be striking conflict: on the one hand, a new love of nature and the pleasures of court society, and on the other, an intensified spirituality and focus on personal devotion. This course explores these provocative crosscurrents in works by master painters like Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch as well as in lesser known mass-produced objects of everyday use.
A survey of contemporary art practices of Africa and the African diaspora with a focus on intersectionality and critical and decolonial theory. Particular attention will be drawn to international perennial exhibitions, non-traditional media, mixed media installation and performance, and curatorial practice.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course examines artistic and media production of the United States with an emphasis on political and social history. It focuses on the complex interrelation of visual representation with respect to the politics of settler-colonialism; nationhood; capitalism and consumerism; and ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Eighteenth-century artists and critics were convinced that art could be a force to improve society. This course places Rococo and neoclassical artists such as Watteau, Fragonard, Tiepolo, Hogarth, Reynolds, Vigée Le Brun, Blake, and David, within the context of art academies, colonialism, the Grand Tour, Enlightenment conceptualizations of history and nature, and the American and French Revolutions. Recommended preparation: VIS 20 or 22 recommended.
A critical survey discussing the crisis of the Enlightenment, romanticism, realism and naturalism, academic art and history painting, representations of the New World, the Pre-Raphaelites, impressionism, international symbolism, postimpressionism, and the beginnings of modernism. Recommended preparation: VIS 20 or 22 recommended.
A cultural history of nineteenth-century Paris. Addresses how and why the cultural formations and developments of the period, and their inseparability from the city, have led so many to consider Paris the capital of modernity.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Considers nineteenth-century European painting and printmaking in relation to the construction of nature and the historically specific ways of seeing that emerge from it. Key artists, groups of artists, include John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, Camille Corot, the Barbizon School, J.-J. Grandville, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Impressionists.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A critical study of European painting, sculpture, and printmaking between 1789 and 1851. Of primary interest will be the highly charged encounter between art and politics during the period. In addition, the course addresses this art’s diverse, often contradictory dealings with class, gender, sexuality, race, and empire.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A critical study of mid- to late nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, and printmaking in Europe. Key artists, or groups of artists, include Gustave Courbet, the Pre-Raphaelites, Adolph Menzel, Edouard Manet, the Impressionists, the Neoimpressionists, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, the Nabis, Auguste Rodin, James Ensor, and others.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A critical survey outlining the major avant-gardes after 1900: fauvism, cubism, metaphysical painting, futurism, Dadaism, surrealism, neoplasticism, purism, the Soviet avant-garde, socialist realism, and American art before abstract expressionism. Recommended preparation: VIS 20 or 22 recommended.
Art after abstract expressionism: happenings, postpainterly abstraction, minimalism, performance, earth art, conceptual art, neo-expressionism, postconceptualism and development in the 1990s, including non-Western contexts. We also explore the relation of these tendencies to postmodernism, feminism, and ideas of postcoloniality. Recommended preparation: VIS 20 or 22 recommended.
What is the place of visual art in modern Western culture? This course will address visual art and radical politics in Courbet and the generation of 1848; Impressionism, Paris, and the cult of la vie moderne; Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the quest for “visionary” painting; Cezanne and the reformulation of painting in terms of pure sensation; the divergent paths of Matisse and Picasso in 1906. The twentieth century follows the emergence of different interpretations of modernity in the USSR, Germany, and France.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A critical examination of the work of one of the most radical twentieth-century artists. In Duchamp’s four-dimensional perspective, the ideas of art-object, artist, and art itself are deconstructed. The Large Glass and Etant Données are the twin foci of an oeuvre without boundaries in which many twentieth-century avant-garde devices such as chance techniques, conceptual art, and the fashioning of fictive identities, are invented.
Examines the social and political effects of represented faces in classical, medieval, Renaissance, modern, and some non-Western contexts. We will look at the face of God, facial grotesques, pseudosciences such as physiognomy, and faces in anthropology, criminology, eugenics, and insanity. Discusses the distortion and erasure of the face in avant-garde art from 1850 to 1950; the celluloid face; and renegotiations with the face in phenomenological/existential thinking and recent identity politics.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course will present an overview of socially engaged art in the modern era. We will explore the historical roots of these practices in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the new forms of activist art that emerged during the 1960s. We will also explore the growth of engaged art produced in conjunction with new movements for social and economic justice since the 1990s.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
An introduction to the cities and monuments of the ancient civilizations that flourished in Mexico and Central America before the Spanish Conquest. This course will cover the major cultures of Mesoamerica, including the Olmec, Aztec, and neighboring groups. Recommended preparation: VIS 21.
This course offers a history of Maya society from its formative stages to the eve of the Spanish Conquest through an investigation of its art and archeology. Special attention is given to its unique calendar and writing systems. Recommended preparation: VIS 21.
Topics of this seminar will address special problems or areas of research related to the major civilizations of ancient Mexico and Central America. Course offerings will vary to focus upon particular themes, subjects, or interpretive problems. Recommended preparation: VIS 21A. Students may not receive credit for both VIS 126B-C.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This seminar focuses upon the art, architecture, and inscriptions of the ancient Maya. Topics will vary within a range of problems that concern hieroglyphic writing, architecture, and visual symbols the Maya elite used to mediate their social, political, and spiritual words. Recommended preparation: VIS 21A.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course provides a critical revision to art history of the modern era in the Americas by bringing to the center, as an organizing principle, an expanded understanding and critique of the notion of indigenism. Presenting evidence that the constant iteration of the problem of representation of indigeneity and the indigenous is persistent across the region following a network of exchanges and contacts across art movements and political contexts.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Lectures, readings, and discussions will expand the definitions of indigenism and Indianism toward many neo-avantgarde and contemporary strategies of art making that posit the Amerindian as inscription and imaginary—as key localizations from which new languages and art systems emerge. Examples of (neo) indigenisms from Peru, Mexico, the United States, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, and Brazil will be presented and reviewed.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Explores the art and expressive culture of American Indians of far western United States, including California and Pacific Northwest. Social and cultural contexts of artistic traditions and their relations to the lifeways, ceremonialism, beliefs, and creative visions of their makers. Recommended preparation: VIS 21A. Students may not receive credit for both VIS 126CN and VIS 126HN.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Examines the history, art, and architecture of Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and other Native American communities of New Mexico and Arizona; the origins of their civilization; and how their arts survived, adapted, and changed in response to Euro-American influences. Recommended preparation: VIS 21A. Students may not receive credit for both VIS 126D and VIS 126I.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
The dynamic, expressive arts of selected West African societies and their subsequent survival and transformation in the New World will be studied. Emphasis will be placed on Afro-American modes of art and ceremony in the United States, Haiti, Brazil, and Suriname.
An examination of the relation of art to ritual life, mythology, and social organization in the native Polynesian and Melanesian cultures of Hawaii, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Australia. Recommended preparation: VIS 21A. Students may not receive credit for both VIS 126E and VIS 126K.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A survey of major figures and movements in Latin American art from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A survey of major figures and movements in Latin American art from the mid-twentieth century to the present.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Course will survey major trends in the arts of China from a thematic point of view, explore factors behind the making of works of art, including political and religious meanings, and examine contexts for art in contemporary cultural phenomena. Recommended preparation: VIS 21B.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Course will explore Chinese art of the twentieth century. By examining artworks in different media, we will investigate the most compelling of the multiple realities that Chinese artists have constructed for themselves. Recommended preparation: VIS 21B.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Explore representations of figures and landscapes from the dawn of Chinese painting through the Yuan dynasty, with stress on developments in style and subject matter and relationships to contemporary issues in philosophy, religion, government, society, and culture.
Explores major schools and artists of the Ming and Qing periods, including issues surrounding court patronage of professional painters, revitalization of art through reviving ancient styles, commercialization’s challenges to scholar-amateur art, and the influences of the West.
Explore the development of Buddhist art and architecture in Japan. Focus on the role of art in Buddhist practice and philosophy and the function of syncretic elements in Japanese Buddhist art.
This course investigates the multiple realities of art and visual culture in twentieth-century China and explores the ways in which Chinese artists have defined modernity and their tradition against the complex background of China’s history.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing or consent of instructor and department approval.
Surveys the key works and developments in the modern art and visual culture of Japan from Edo and Meiji to the present and of China from the early-twentieth century to contemporary video, performance, and installation art. Recommended preparation: VIS 21B.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Course is a survey of the visual arts of Japan, considering how the arts developed in the context of Japan’s history and discussing how art and architecture were used for philosophical, religious, and material ends. Recommended preparation: VIS 21B.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Explore major trends in Japanese pictorial art from the seventh century to the nineteenth century, with focus on function, style, and subject matter, and with particular emphasis on the relationship between Japanese art and that of continental Asia.
These lecture courses are on topics of special interest to visiting and permanent faculty. Topics vary from term to term and with instructor and many will not be repeated. These courses fulfill upper-division distribution requirements. As the courses under this heading will be offered less frequently than those of the regular curriculum, students are urged to check with the visual arts department academic advising office for availability and descriptions of these supplementary courses. Like the courses listed under VIS 129, below, the letters following the course number designate the general area in which the courses fall. Students may take courses with the same number but of different content, for a total of three times for credit. Recommended preparation: courses in art history (VIS 113AN–129F).
A lecture course on a topic of special interest in ancient or medieval art. Recommended preparation: courses in art history (VIS 113AN–129F).
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A lecture course on a topic of special interest in renaissance or baroque art. May be taken three times for credit. Recommended preparation: courses in art history (VIS 113AN–129F).
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A lecture course on a topic of special interest on modern or contemporary art. May be taken three times for credit. Recommended preparation: courses in art history (VIS 113AN–129F).
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A lecture course on the topic of special interest in the art of Latin America, the Ancient Americas, or Africa and the Pacific Islands. Students may not receive credit for VIS 128D and VIS 128DN. Recommended preparation: courses in art history (VIS 113AN–129F). May be taken for credit three times.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
A lecture course on the topic of special interest in India, China, and Japan. Recommended preparation: courses in art history (VIS 113AN–129F).
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
These seminar courses provide the opportunity for in-depth study of a particular work, artist, subject, period, or issue. Courses offered under this heading may reflect the current research interests of the instructor or treat a controversial theme in the field of art history and criticism. Active student research and classroom participation are expected. Enrollment is limited and preference will be given to majors. The letters following 129 in the course number designate the particular area of art history or theory concerned. Students may take courses with the same number but of different content more than once for credit, with consent of the instructor and/or the program adviser. May be taken three times for credit.
Prerequisites: VIS 112 or two upper-division courses in art history.
A seminar on an advanced topic of special interest in the Ancient Americas to Africa and the Pacific Islands. May be taken three times for credit. Student may not receive credit for VIS 129D and VIS 129DN. Recommended preparation: courses in art history (VIS 113AN–129F) are recommended. VIS 112 is strongly recommended for art history majors.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Specific content will vary each quarter. Areas will cover expertise of visiting faculty. May be taken for credit two times. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: senior standing or consent of instructor required. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors only.
Specific content will vary each quarter. Areas will cover expertise of visiting faculty. May be taken for credit two times. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: senior standing or consent of instructor required. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors only.
Through discussions and readings, the class will examine the issues and aesthetics of installation art making. Using media familiar to them, students will produce several projects. May be taken for credit two times. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: senior standing or consent of instructor required. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors only.
A lecture course that examines a topic of special interest in speculative design that is not addressed in the regular curriculum. Students will read and write critically about the topic.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors and speculative design minors.
A seminar that examines a topic of special interest in speculative design that is not addressed in the regular curriculum. Students will read, write, and produce work through projects.
Prerequisites: VIS 30 or VIS 41. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors and speculative design minors.
This course teaches foundational skills in 3-D modeling, rendering, and animation to prepare students for specialized courses in architectural and urban design, virtual reality and augmented reality, virtual environments, computer gaming, character design, industrial design, and other applications. Emphasis is on a general understanding of widely used software and development of projects in an artistic and design context.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
This course introduces students to studio-based project methodologies, including qualitative and quantitative design research, data visualization, production and exhibition methodologies, and complex collaborative project management.
Prerequisites: VIS 30 and 41.
This course approaches writing as a research-based design of a text. We research, design, and write futuristic and historical texts that draw on fiction but also take other forms. To inform the writing, we read, view, and analyze works of speculative fiction and fantasy, graphic novels, supernatural fiction, alternative history, science fiction, counterfactual history, and systems novels, a form dedicated to interpreting a world increasingly structured through information systems and technology.
Prerequisites: VIS 30. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors and speculative design minors.
Introduces external APIs currently of interest in the arts, extending a common programming language such as C, C++, Python, or Java, and the basics of TCP/IP networking. Students gain API fluency through planning and coding software or software mediated art projects. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 142 and CSE 11 or CSE 8B. Open to ICAM and speculative design majors and computing and the arts and speculative design minors.
Students extend their programming capabilities to include the creation of reusable software libraries, packages, database APIs, tools, utilities, and applications intended to be publishable and useful to other practicing artists, or as preparatory work for the student’s senior thesis sequence. Two production-course limitation. Program or materials fees may apply.
Prerequisites: VIS 141A. Open to ICAM and speculative design majors and minors only.
A survey of the conceptual uses and historical precedents for the use of computers in art and design. Preparation for further study in the computing in the arts area by providing an introduction to ideation strategies and critique-based evaluation, and an overview of theoretical issues related to the use of computers by artists and designers. Introduces the students to the program’s computing and production facilities, and basic computer programming skills. Two production-course limitation. Program or materials fees may apply.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Students develop artworks and performances in current virtual environments. Projects may be done individually or in groups in multiplayer games, immersive life platforms, or mixed reality projects and performances. Exploration of theoretical issues involved will underlie acquisition of techniques utilized in the construction of virtual environments. Materials fees required.
Prerequisites: VIS 142; CSE 11 recommended. Open to visual arts majors and ICAM minors only. Two production-course limitation.
Introduces time- and process-based digital media art making. Contemporary and historical works across time- and process-based media will be studied, and projects produced. Topics may include software art, software and hardware interfacing, interaction, and installation in an art context. Recommended preparation: CSE 5A or equivalent programming experience. Materials fees required. May not receive credit for both VIS 145A and ICAM 102. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 142. Open to ICAM and speculative design majors and computing and the arts and speculative design minors.
Students will implement time- and process-based projects under direction of faculty. Projects such as software and hardware interfacing, computer mediated performance, software art, installation, interactive environments, data visualization and sonification will be produced as advanced study and portfolio project. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 145A or ICAM 102. Open to ICAM and speculative design majors and computing and the arts and speculative design minors.
Develop artworks and installations that utilize digital electronics. Techniques in digital electronic construction and computer interfacing for interactive control of sound, lighting, and electromechanics. Construction of devices that responsively adapt artworks to conditions involving viewer participation, space activation, machine intelligence. Recommended preparation: CSE 8A strongly recommended. Program or materials fees may apply. Purchase of components kit required. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 41 or VIS 70N or VIS 80. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors and computing and the arts and speculative design minors.
Continuation of the electronics curriculum. Design of programmable microcontroller systems for creating artworks that are able to respond to complex sets of input conditions, perform algorithmic and procedural processing, and generate real time output. Program or materials fees may apply. Purchase of components kit required. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 147A. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors.
Artistic practice is a site of critical intervention. Through individual “Practice Diagrams,” students will visualize the issues, motivations, positions, and procedures that inspire and problematize their work, seeking to discover and mobilize new tools, spaces of research, and media experimentation.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Topics relevant to computer-based art and music making, such as computer methods for making art/music, design of interactive systems, spatialization of visual/musical elements, critical studies. Topics will vary. May be taken for credit three times. Recommended preparation: VIS 145A or MUS 171. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors and ICAM and speculative design minors.
A survey course on the most significant works of world cinema. Styles, genres, and national cinemas will be examined in comparative relation. Emphasis will be placed on collective film viewing, in-class discussion, and formal and/or narrative analysis.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Research seminar in film history, theory, and/or criticism. Potential topics: film aesthetics, film criticism, film sound, and film in the digital era, with a focus on a specific period, theme, or context. Class will be devoted to discussion of readings in connection with a film or related art, fiction, or other media. Students will gain advanced knowledge of a specialized aspect of film history, theory, or criticism in a setting that promotes research, reports, and writing. Program or materials fees may apply.
An inquiry into a specialized alternative history of film, consisting of experimental works made outside the conventions of the movie industry that are closer in their style and nature to experimental work in painting, poetry, the sciences, etc., than to the mainstream theatrical cinema. Materials fees required.
Prerequisites: VIS 22 or VIS 83 or VIS 84 or VIS 85A or VIS 159.
Research seminar in media history, theory, and/or criticism. Potential topics: digital media aesthetics, television or radio, new media, theory of photography and/or other image forms in digital era. Focus on a specific period, theme, or context. Class devoted to discussion of readings in connection with viewing of media and related forms. Students will gain advanced knowledge of a specialized aspect of media history, theory, or criticism in a setting that promotes research, reports, and writing.
Prerequisites: VIS 22 or VIS 83 or VIS 84 or VIS 85A or VIS 159.
This collection of courses gathers photography or films that are strongly marked by period, geography, and the culture within which they received their dominating local quality. These courses pay particular attention to the stamp of place—climate, dress, habitation, language, music, politics—as well as the formal and conceptual moves that helped shape such works. The series takes in these works in relation to current thought. Specific topics to be covered will vary by instructor. May be taken up to two times for credit. Program or materials fees may apply.
Transnational Cinemas examine how US identities and film cultures have been forged through stories of exile, diaspora, and racial and sexual discrimination as well as cultural conflicts that have resonated here and abroad in the global film and media culture of the last century. Program or materials fees may apply.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Examines the work of a single creative individual, team, or group working in any area of media. May focus on a director, an editor, a photographer, a cameraperson, a set designer, a sound producer, or other category, considering the aesthetic, social, political, and/or historical aspects of the body of work and, if relevant, a broader sphere of creative production. Topics to be covered will vary by instructor. May be taken up to two times for credit. Materials fees required.
This course introduces students to the developing history of cinema in the Latin American region. It explores the multiple authors and film movements that engage cinema as an art form in relation to issues of modernization, development, and political and social crisis. It will regard the history of cinema in the subcontinent as a force generating important cultural transformations within the complex, conflictual processes of modernization. Students may not receive credit for both VIS 156 and VIS 125F.
Prerequisites: VIS 84.
With attention to the ecology of Southern California and selected sites beyond, this course addresses historical and contemporary debates on environmental politics from the critical perspective of aesthetic practitioners, activists, and scholars from the 1960s to today. Art and media historical approaches will be offset by hands-on assignments, excursions, and the development of site-specific and creative works in all media. Program or materials fee may apply.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Examination of the role of art and media in the civil rights movement in the U.S. Course explores the work of artists, filmmakers, and activists who critically intervened in social and political history in the postwar period. Examines mass media and telecommunication’s representation of political dissent—cross-cultural and ethnic exchange—across narrative cinema, televisual reportage, and exhibitionary practice. Attention on aesthetic and political documents, imagery, and methods which persist to present day.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Current topics of debate in art and documentary photography will be explored through the study of contemporary exhibitions, artist books, publications, and theory. We may also focus on the practice of a select few contemporary photographers to consider the aesthetic/political/social aspects of their work and their impacts on the field of cultural production. The class will include visits to local museums and art spaces when photo exhibitions are on view.
A survey course on the history of photography from 1960 until the present. Students will examine the political and aesthetic stakes of the medium—its conceptual trends and postwar globalization—in the wake of World War II and independence movements in the Global South. Special emphasis will be placed on theoretical and cultural positions which address photography as a medium of multitudes, appropriation, criticality, and identity.
This course will examine the history of social documentary photography and film with a primary focus on North America and Europe. We will explore the initial emergence of a social documentary impulse in conjunction with social and political movements during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the expansion of social documentary during the 1930s and its resurgence again during the 1960s and 70s, as well as more contemporary manifestations.
Thematic course asks how modernity’s concept of blackness might be bound to the emergence of photographic technologies and the trajectory and futures of Black peoples. Explores blackness as a fundamental element of photographic viewing—Black subjects as constituted within systems of political power and Black and queer subjectivities as places to locate contemporary critique. Investigations of these ideas will cover historical and contemporary photo media including art documentary and vernacular imagery.
Aims to provide historical context for computer arts by examining the interaction between the arts, media technologies, and sciences in different historical periods. Topics vary (e.g., Renaissance perspective, futurism and technology, and computer art of the 1950s and 1960s). Materials fees required.
Prerequisites: upper-division standing.
Students pursue projects of their own design over two quarters with support from faculty in a seminar environment. Project proposals are developed, informed by project development guidelines from real-world examples. Two production-course limitation. Renumbered from ICAM 160A. Students may receive credit for only one of the following: VIS 160A, MUS 160A, or ICAM 160A.
Prerequisites: VIS 145A and one course from VIS 141B or VIS 145B or VIS 147B or MUS 172. Open to ICAM majors only. Department stamp required.
Continuation of VIS 160A or MUS 160A. Completion and presentation of independent projects along with documentation. Two production-course limitation. Renumbered from ICAM 160B. Students may receive credit for only one of the following: VIS 160B, MUS 160B, or ICAM 160B.
Prerequisites: VIS 160A or MUS 160A. Open to ICAM majors only.
This course introduces students to the study and design of complex systems and networks at diverse scales, from the nanometric to the planetary (and perhaps beyond). Systems and networks are understood as both physical and conceptual organizations of tangible and intangible actors. These include architectural and urban systems, information and interactive systems, diagrammatic and performative systems, and political and geopolitical systems.
Prerequisites: VIS 135.
The course seeks to introduce ways of thinking about and working across the scientific laboratory and the artist's and designer's studio. It explores intersections of research in art/design and science/technology. The course may focus on a specific laboratory method, innovation, or a longer-term enduring challenge. At the discretion of the professor, course may be conducted in direct collaborations with other campus laboratories and research units.
Prerequisites: VIS 135.
Course examines critical topics in design theory, epistemology, research, and criticism. Students develop original critical and theoretical discourse. Topics may be drawn from design theory and criticism, philosophy of technology, architectural theory and design, speculative fiction, bioethics, the human and nonhuman body, urbanism, environmentalism, critical geography studies, political philosophy of materialism, artificial intelligence, robotics, and critical engineering studies.
Course guides students in the discovery of the possibilities for making new work within specific photographic restrictions. Photography is approached through experimentation, failure, breakthroughs, and inspiration. We will explore ways of thinking and producing, cultivating a rigorous process for students to develop a meaningful way of making their work. The construction of sequences, series, and the art of editing will be an important part of this critique-based course. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 60. Open to art history and criticism, media, studio, and ICAM majors and photography minors.
This course will introduce the students to the history of chemical and ocular processes since the late nineteenth century and their impact on image making. Students will learn basic black-and-white darkroom techniques, processing film, proofing, and printing. Course will conclude with a primer in the new photographic hybridity, bringing analog into the digital terrain. Students will be required to create a portfolio of work. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 60. Open to art history and criticism, media, studio, and ICAM majors and photography minors.
This course continues the student’s work of photographic printing with digital technology, with regard to the potentials of various print media and the way in which printing, editing, and sequence contribute to making meaning. Through demonstrations and workshops, lessons will include inkjet printing, alternative materials, scanning, and digital output of film. Students will be required to create a portfolio of prints. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 60. Open to art history and criticism, media, studio, and ICAM majors and photography minors.
This course introduces students to the techniques and equipment for studio and/or composed photography utilizing natural lighting on location and strobe and hot lighting in the studio. Genres within studio photography like portraiture and still life will be covered through lectures, demonstrations, workshops, and assignment prompts. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 60. Open to art history and criticism, media, studio, and ICAM majors and photography minors.
This course will explore the use of photography as a tool to both understand and represent the social world. Students will look critically at the historical claims of photography as evidence and as a tool of empirical knowledge and engage with the ethics of care and responsibility bound to visual representation. Students will develop a photo-based project that engages the social in a creative and critical way. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 164 or VIS 165. Open to media, studio, and ICAM majors and photography minors.
This course will explore photography as art and its long and complicated relationship with painting. Students will learn and be encouraged to experiment with the medium formally and conceptually. From studio and lighting techniques to collage, montage, constructed realities, installations, and projections. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 164 or VIS 165. Open to media, studio, and ICAM majors and photography minors.
Focus on the preparation of photography for exhibition, including artist books, portfolios, or experimental and hybrid forms. How does exhibition and publishing contribute to the meaning and reception of photo-based work? Class includes workshops on file finishing and printing, framing, zine and artist bookmaking, and more. Students will visit exhibits in the San Diego-Los Angeles area. Students should have work-in-progress to examine. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 165 or VIS 165A or VIS 165B. Open to media, studio, and ICAM majors and photography and digital film production minors.
This course explores both material and conceptual analog photography practices and advanced darkroom techniques. Students are encouraged to pursue experimental chemical and optical photographic processes including cyanotypes and chemigrams, multiple exposure, medium and large format, and hybrid photo media. Students will be required to create a portfolio of work. Program or materials fees may apply. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 165 or VIS 165A or VIS 165B. Open to media, studio, and ICAM majors and photography and digital film production minors.
A digital image is not a film image, and this reality and its technological and conceptual implications are what this course will attempt to map out, exploring its possibilities and the massive overhaul of media aesthetics it implies. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174. Open to media majors and film production minors only.
Artists and filmmakers have been visualizing the impossible since the inception of motion pictures and photography. Motion design and visual effects allow artists to interrupt reality, instead presenting ingenious illusions that propel and inspire our imaginations. Students will learn foundational motion graphics and visual effects strategies and theories, including image compositing, matte design, and fundamentals of 3D modeling and animation. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174. Open to media majors and film production minors only.
Video medium used both as production technology and as device to explore the fundamental character of filmmaking and time-based computer art practices. Students perform all aspects of production with attention to developing ideas and building analytical/critical skills. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 70N. Open to media, studio, ICAM, and speculative design majors; and film production and speculative design minors.
The evolving aims and grammars of editing practice in film and digital media will be examined. These histories will create a context for exploring contemporary editing strategies. The production projects will be centered on digital editing practice. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174. Open to media majors and film production minors.
A technical foundation and creative theoretical context for film production will be provided. Students will produce a short film with post-synchronized sounds and final mixed-track. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174. Open to media majors and film production minors.
Script writing, reading, and analysis of traditional and experimental media productions. The emphasis will be on the structural character of the scripting process and its language. Students will write several short scripts along with analytical papers. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174. Open to media majors and film production minors.
Sound design is an essential component of media production and has opened up new structural possibilities for creative strategies in media arts. Students will encounter a critical and historical review of sound art, design, and production methodology. Critical papers and sound work for short projects will be required. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174. Open to media and speculative design majors and film production minors.
Topic based production course for media students with topics relevant to photography, video, film, and sound. Specific content will vary each quarter. May be taken for credit two times. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174. Open to media and speculative design majors and film production minors.
Documentary may be the most maligned form, yet the most compelling filmic way, that we know about the world. This is a senior production course where students will create a short form documentary. It will include the exploration of concepts in representational artworks by critically examining “found” vs. “made” recorded material. Advanced film/video, photography, computing work. Issues of narrative and structure; attention to formal aspects of media work emphasized. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174 and two from VIS 164, 165, 165A, 165B, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179. Open to media majors only.
Course that theoretically and technically parses out how we create meaning through storytelling. How is history implicated in our experience of watching fiction? How does this affect the way that we create as artists? Students will examine the connection between the contrived and the real and language’s place in this cycle. There are both group-based and individual projects produced in this class around these issues. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174 and two from VIS 164, 165, 165A, 165B, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179. Open to media majors only.
Advanced course to gain sophisticated control of lighting and sound recording techniques with understanding of theoretical implications and interrelation between production values and subject matter. Interactions between sound and image in various works in film, video, or installation. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174 and two from VIS 164, 165, 165A, 165B, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179. Open to media majors only.
Film/video editing and problems of editing from theoretical and practical points-of-view. Films and tapes analyzed on a frame-by-frame, shot-by-shot basis. Edit stock material and generate own materials for editing final project. Aesthetic and technical similarities/differences of film/video. Recommended preparation: VIS 175 Editing-Theory and Production strongly recommended. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174 and two from VIS 164, 165, 165A, 165B, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179. Open to media majors only.
Approaching digital editing from a theoretical perspective. How does manipulation work with and against claims of truth in photography? How have artists used image manipulation toward conceptual means? Students will learn advanced editing techniques in Photoshop while learning about the political, social, and personal implications of the altered image landscape. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174 and two from VIS 164, 165, 165A, 165B, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179. Open to media majors only.
Looks at the way that self-identity is reflected and produced through various media practices. Focus is on rhetorical strategies of biography and autobiography in media, comparing and contrasting these strategies with those drawn from related cultural forms. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174 and two from VIS 164, 165, 165A, 165B, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179. Open to media majors only.
An advanced production course which emphasizes how artists and filmmakers approach “otherness” and “difference” as it is constructed in various media practices. Course will examine a wide range of forms and genres such as ethnography, science fiction, crime narratives, documentary film, and animated shorts. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174 and two from VIS 164, 165, 165A, 165B, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179. Open to media majors only.
Film/video production will be framed through the script writing process, focusing on the problems of longer duration, density, and adaptation from other media. Students will both read and analyze both historical and contemporary scripts and produce a thirty- to sixty-minute script. Recommended preparation: VIS 177 Scripting Strategies. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174 and two from VIS 164, 165, 165A, 165B, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179. Open to media majors only.
Through instruction and discussion, the class will focus on guiding students through advanced production on a senior project. Students will be expected to initiate and complete production on at least one portfolio-level project. May be taken for credit two times. Two production-course limitation.
Prerequisites: VIS 174 and two from VIS 164, 165, 165A, 165B, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179. Open to media majors with senior standing only.
This advanced course provides students with a unique immersive learning experience, based on design studio/atelier methods. This course develops students’ skills in the ideation, planning, and execution of complex individual and collaborative projects, including historical and contextual research, project ideation, planning and management, coordination of skills and responsibilities, iterative execution, and effective presentation.
Prerequisites: senior standing, VIS 135, and two from VIS 100A, VIS 101A, VIS 133A, VIS 136A, VIS 161, VIS 162.
This course will explore the path of the deliberately “unreal” in movies. Fantasy in film will be considered in terms of its cultural and creative appearance in motion pictures, looking at imaginary worlds and stories in such genres as science fiction, horror, and musical films. Offered in Summer Session only. Program or materials fees may apply. May be taken for credit three times.
Prerequisites: VIS 84.
This is the first of a two-quarter advanced-level sequence. This sequence coordinates two consecutive independent research courses to culminate in a completed thesis of study in art history. After the thesis completion, the faculty involved in the project will determine whether the student will graduate with departmental honors.
Prerequisites: junior or senior standing with faculty consent.
This is the final of a two-quarter advanced-level sequence. This sequence coordinates two consecutive independent research courses to culminate in a completed thesis of study in art history. After the thesis completion, the faculty involved in the project will determine whether the student will graduate with departmental honors.
Prerequisites: VIS 196A.
This advanced-level sequence coordinates three consecutive independent research courses to culminate in a completed thesis project in the third quarter of study. After the project’s public presentation, the faculty involved in the project will determine whether the student will graduate with departmental honors.
Prerequisites: consent of instructor. Note: Requires a written proposal, 3.5 GPA in the major, prior consent from all involved, and approvals by the department chair and provost.
Directed group study on a topic or in a group field not included in regular department curriculum, by special arrangement with a faculty member.
Prerequisites: consent of instructor. Note: Open only to upper-division students. Requires instructor’s, department chair’s, and provost’s approval. Pass/Not Pass grades only.
Independent reading, research, or creative work under direction of a faculty member.
Prerequisites: consent of instructor. Note: Open only to upper-division students. Requires instructor’s, department chair’s, and provost’s approval. Pass/Not Pass grades only.
An interdisciplinary survey of key twentieth- and twenty-first-century methodological approaches to the history, theory, and criticism of the visual arts. Course engages with methodologies found in the fields of philosophy, linguistics, science and technology studies, sociology, and anthropology, among others. Students develop individualized approaches to specific objects of study, which may range from art, media, performance, design, and material culture to theory. (Required, PhD)
An exploration of a range of issues important on the contemporary critical scene through readings and writing assignments. Topics will vary from year to year. (Required, MFA)
A workshop/seminar devoted to a particular materials practice (e.g., media, painting, digital media, etc.) that engages with critical questions arising within that discipline. Content will vary from quarter to quarter. May be taken for credit two times. (Required, MFA)
Workshop in which students engage in an extensive evaluation of one another’s ongoing work in preparation for either the First Year Review or MFA Review. Offered every winter. May be taken for credit two times (Required, MFA)
Critical evaluation of the historical formation and methods, practices, and disciplinary commitments of art history, encompassing both earlier aesthetic paradigms and new directions in art history and visual culture, with attention to key developments such as iconology, formalism, the social history of art, and global art histories. (Required, PhD)
This seminar introduces art practice students to the graduate program in a workshop environment. Emphasis is on the production of new work and on situating that work in relation to a larger art context. (Required, MFA) Offered every fall and required of all first-year MFA students.
Seminar examines the interrelationship between theory and practice and the nature of artistic production as a form of research.
Prerequisites: none. (Required for PhD in art practice concentration.)
Workshop for PhD in Art Practice concentration students cotaught by PhD and MFA faculty offering extensive evaluation and critique of work. Intended to explore issues associated with artistic practice as a form of research in a university setting. Course is only applicable to VA76 and VA77 PhD programs. PhD students with a concentration in Art Practice my take VIS 207 each year until they qualify for candidacy.
Each student will be asked to explore a broad range of strategies for publicly presenting their work beyond the studio. This course includes research and planning for the required thesis exhibition for MFA candidates in visual arts. A detailed proposal of the MFA thesis exhibition is required to complete this course. (Required, MFA)
This course includes research and discussion of the required thesis for MFA candidates in visual arts. Advancement to candidacy required. A draft of the MFA thesis paper is required to complete this course. (Required, MFA).
This seminar addresses the space between narrative work generated from a factual base and that generated from a fictional one. Special attention will be given to discussing work that confounds the assumed gap between the two.
This seminar will engage the space between personal and larger histories. How is one’s own past both intertwined with and determined by larger social histories?
An exploration of what public space is and how it operates, with a view toward an expanded context for considering how public artwork can operate within it. Included are areas such as mass media, activism, community action, computer networks, ecology, and alternative forums.
A practice seminar for developing performance-oriented artistic strategies and elements of sound, rhythm, and atmosphere. Open to all approaches to performing. The class is organized as a test site, oriented toward experimentation. Each student will create or refine an existing work, presenting in class, focusing on the crafting of stage presence, character, and voice, and exploring styles of delivery and forms of address. Histories of performance art and theories of performativity are studied.
Examines human interface as it informs or transforms how we read and participate in culture at large. Concepts such as subject/author/object relationships, abstraction, metaphor, analogy, visualization, and complexity are discussed to establish context.
An investigation of the world of artifacts (“works of art” and others) and how they function as agents of communication and modifiers of consciousness. Contemporary perspectives drawn from the fields of art theory, anthropology, contemporary art, and semiotics will be utilized.
A critical examination of the practices of self-defined communities (e.g., Bauhaus, Shaker, surrealists), which have attempted to change the social and spiritual quality of life by aesthetic means and of communities and subcultures defined by other means.
Explores various strategies exhibited in a wide range of contemporary art practices engaging in the representation of personality, spirituality, and the physical self.
Examines a topic of special interest to permanent and visiting faculty that is not addressed in the regular curriculum. As in other Art Practice/Theory seminars, students will both produce work and read and write critically about the topic. Topics will vary.
This course is designed to facilitate the completion of our PhD program and the successful transition into an academic career. The seminar is divided into four areas of concentration. The first area focuses on facilitating the student’s timely completion of the PhD program. The second section of the course will concentrate on publishing. The third section of the seminar will focus on the process of applying for jobs and fellowships, and the fourth section will address teaching.
Critical and historical analysis of the institutions, social networks, and communicative media through which art is presented to its audiences. May also address theories of vision and visuality, spectatorship, public space, originality and reproduction, and public space.
Critical study of the ways in which media (film, video, photography) and new media have been theorized. May be taught from a historical or comparative perspective or focus on a single topic or theorist.
Study of the philosophical concepts of the function of art and visual culture and the criteria for its evaluation in diverse epochs and cultures. May be taught as a historical overview or comparative study or focus a single topic or theorist.
Investigations of one or more artist-theorists or movements, contemporary or historical, that put in issue the interface between theory and practice. May also focus on a topic such as perspective, color, or narrative, or genre such as film or new media.
European art from late antiquity through the fourteenth century and the historical processes by which “medieval” art has been constructed as a category. Topics may include devotional vision and the sacred image; medieval comic genres; neo-medievalism, fifteenth century to today. May be taken for credit three times.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
Concentrates on the art of the Renaissance in Italy and the North through a changing series of topics, e.g., Vision and Composition in Perspective; The Sistine Chapel; Envisioning Jan Van Eyck; Renaissance Print Making; Leonardo da Vinci’s La Gioconda. May be taken three times for credit.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
European and American Art, ca. 1850 to 1960. Questions in Impressionism and Postimpressionism; The Cubist Revolution: Marcel Duchamp and the Anti-Formalist Tradition; American Modernism; Reckoning with Abstract Art; Issues of Dada and Surrealism; Soviet Avant-Gardes. May be taken three times for credit.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
Thematic and critical discussions of recent US and international art, 1960s to the present. Art/Text; Mixed Media Practices; Conceptual Art; Art After Appropriation; Global Art at the Millennium; New Genres of Public Art; Mike Kelly and the Conceptual Vernacular: Art and Activism. May be taken three times for credit.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
Topics in media (photography, film, video) and new media, contemporary or historical. Coverage may be broad or addressed to a particular topic such as Film Remakes; Silent Cinema; Photography and Social Movements; The Language of New Media.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
Topics relating to the art and civilizations of Pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America, either specifically art historical (such as iconographic, formal, and stylistic analysis) or encompassing a spectrum of interdisciplinary and cultural/historical problems. May be taken three times for credit.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
Advanced studies in the secular and religious art traditions of China. From year to year, the seminar may focus on early China (Neolithic to the end of the T’ang dynasty), on later dynasties (Sung, Yuan, Ming) or on art of the People’s Republic. May be taken three times for credit.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
Historical and theoretical problems in the art of Mexico, Central, and South America art from the colonial period to today, as well as from the Hispanic traditions of the American Southwest. May be taken three times for credit.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
Topics for this seminar concern Native American art history from ancient to contemporary times. Seminars may focus on archaeological and art historical approaches, philosophy and aesthetics, archaeoastronomy, and cultural contexts. Issues of globalization and transculturation may be examined as well. May be taken up to three times for credit.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
This course will sketch the lineaments of material culture studies, a field in the arena of visual studies that engages the issue, broadly framed, of how people and things interact. We will approach the topic on two levels: with a critical reading of the work of major thinkers, and with case studies based on the interests and expertise of the course leader.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
This seminar will map the agendas of speculative design, understood as the experimental prototyping of alternatives for complex sociotechnical systems. It will draw from speculative philosophy to problematize those alternatives, and formulate original concepts in turn. Foci may include architecture and urbanism, anthropology and economics, anthropogenic ecosystems, energy and geopolitics, synthetic biology, cognitive science, astronomy, computer science.
Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.
Practice in writing about art (both one’s own and others) accompanied by analysis of selected contemporary critical writings.
Methodological investigation of and training in the practices of art museums, galleries, film and digital environments, public arts organizations, and the like. Instruction by museum and gallery curators and opportunities for participation in ongoing programs at local art institutions.
Individual research with the student’s individual faculty adviser in preparation for their comprehensive exhibitions for the MFA degree or qualifying exam for the PhD. These units are intended to be with the chair of the student’s review committee. For the MFA degree, these units can only be taken after completing the First Year Review. (Required, MFA, PhD)
Directed group study on specific topics not covered at present in the normal curriculum. Used as an experimental testing of courses that may be given regular course numbers if proved successful. Special arrangement with faculty member.
Prerequisites: consent of department.
Graduate-level research under the direct guidance of a faculty member.
Prerequisites: consent of instructor.
Apprentice teaching in undergraduate courses given by the Department of Visual Arts. Graduate students are required to teach a minimum of one quarter (four units) within the department to fulfill degree requirements.
Training in teaching methods in the field of visual arts. This course examines theoretical and practical communication and teaching techniques particularly appropriate to studio and production-style courses. Open to VA75, VA76, and VA77 major codes.