Fundamental to meaning making in our world, sound can be harnessed and generated for an abundance of creative purposes. Focusing on the range of applications for audio and sound, this course is a critical exploration of sound in art, media and design disciplines, including immersive media, gaming and other digital platforms. Students will consider theories, concepts and contemporary practices of sound across popular culture, the fine arts, and technological platforms while engaging in applied sound making for narrative, linear and non-linear projects. Students will gain proficiency in sound production and engineering techniques through use of audio software and hardware tools as they undertake projects that cross art, media and design boundaries, building capacity for critical and interdisciplinary engagement with sound across diverse contexts.

Advanced Practice: Machine Vision - Performing For and Through The Lens explores the intersection between performance and lens-based media, focusing on how performance is created, mediated, and understood with, through and for the camera. How have the boundaries between performance, photography, and lens-based media shifted, as performance becomes known primarily through its documentation and image-making technologies continue to center the body in motion and stillness? Through a series of self-directed and collaborative projects, students will engage photography, video, and performance equally, investigating how each medium informs and transforms the others. The course supports the use of a wide range of image-capture technologies, from DSLRs, mobile devices, live-streaming, to experimental setups, while encouraging critical attention to the expanded field of exhibition strategies and audience reception.We will contextualize student work through discussions of artists such as Maya Deren, ASCO, Nile Harris, Malcolm Betts, JJJJJerome Ellis, Mayfield Brooks, Steffani Jemison, and Harun Farocki, among others. Throughout the semester, we will examine how performance functions within, against, and through the camera—probing its limits, its liveness, and the role of endurance, exhaustion, and repetition as both conceptual strategies and embodied practices. Students will complete four exercises and a final project that builds on the course’s key ideas. Classes will include reading discussions, and students are expected to come prepared to engage with the texts.