Integrative Studio 2 builds on the exploratory skills introduced in Integrative Studio 1. This time a greater emphasis is placed on research as the tool for forming connections between studio and seminar. In the first half of the semester you will be given quick assignments to introduce a variety of studio based methods for generating questions, integrating research, and documenting discoveries in your art and design work. We focus on embracing failure and trial and error as core elements of the creative process. In the second half of the semester you will define and pursue your own research based project connected to seminar. This section will be framed through the inflection: Visual Culture Visual culture refers to images that surround us. Meaning is embedded in the endless images, spaces, and artifacts that make up our visual culture. How can we learn to unearth the ideas being communicated through a broad range of forms – art, advertisements, products, fashion, photography, illustration, architecture, performance, technology etc. What new and unexpected forms demand our scrutiny? Once again, studio and seminar will come together through a series of bridge projects that highlight the components of the research process: inquiry, context, investigation, interpretation, argument, connections and reflection. Bridge projects are the basis of the collaborative relationship of ideas between the two courses. They ask you to engage with making as a form of thinking, and writing as a form of making, in order to explicitly and productively blur the boundaries between studio and seminar.