Core Studio 2: Topics in 4D
Parsons School of Design: School of Art, Media, and Tech
CRN: 1959
Credits: 3
How do artists engage with time, movement, and impermanence as material conditions? How do gestures, sites, and ephemeral traces function as artistic mediums? This course challenges students to expand beyond traditional 2D and 3D practices into 4D artmaking, where time, process, and interaction shape the work as much as form and material. Through a series of interconnected projects, students will explore duration, change, performative gesture, site-responsiveness, and collaboration as fundamental aspects of their practice. Working with video, performance, installation, and site-responsive work, students will investigate the intersections of memory, migration, ritual, and utterance. They will examine how decay, accumulation, erosion, and bodily interaction generate meaning over time, considering utterance as a mode of presence, invocation, and resistance. Through iterative material experimentation, performative actions, and collaborative installations, students will develop works that challenge traditional modes of storytelling and engage with questions of presence, absence, and the unseen. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Okwui Okpokwasili, Ralph Lemon, Torkwase Dyson, Mingwei Lee, Eva Hesse, Doris Salcedo, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, students will analyze how contemporary artists use process-based and time-driven approaches to create work that resists fixity. Readings from Christina Sharpe, Édouard Glissant, Fred Moten, and Trinh T. Minh-ha will provide theoretical frameworks on time, movement, and embodied presence. The semester culminates in a final project responding to the prompt "Material Witness," where students synthesize their explorations into a time-based work that archives, transforms, or resists disappearance. This course invites students to reimagine their artistic practices through expanded, durational, and process-oriented methodologies, engaging time, material instability, and spatial movement as essential components of 4D practice.
College: Parsons School of Design (PS)
Department: School of Art, Media, and Tech (AMT)
Campus: New York City (GV)
Course Format: Studio (S)
Modality: In-Person
Max Enrollment: 12
Repeat Limit: 8
Add/Drop Deadline: September 9, 2025 (Tuesday)
Online Withdrawal Deadline: November 17, 2025 (Monday)
Seats Available: Yes
Status: Open*
* Status information is updated every few minutes. The status of this course may have changed since the last update. Open seats may have restrictions that will prevent some students from registering. Updated: 6:52am EDT 3/12/2025