This section will explore and engage with the many ways in which illustration, animation, and music can be transformed into performative media. The relationships and interactions between visual and auditory media are relevant to diverse performative forms including live storytelling, action-painting, performative lectures, projection mapping, puppetry, drag, performance art, live web performance, installation, dance, theater, and opera. This class may also explore illustration as ephemera and performance/music as a generative practice for creating experimental illustration. Students should choose this section if: They are interested in combining their illustration or animation practice with performance They are interested in using music and performance as prisms through which they might organize or contemplate 2D work.

This section will focus on telling stories about real life by exploring forms such as documentary work, visual journalism, graphic memoir, interviews and investigation. Students will work on developing sophisticated form and content as they move through exercises and assignments investigating modes of visual reporting on realities of the world, living or non-living subjects, the lives of others, or one’s own life. Animated documentary tends to resist the idea of a single perspective or clear relationship with reality, instead creating a space where artists can embrace abstraction, combine nonfiction with fiction, and explore highly individualistic points of view. Graphic journalism can allow for the exploration of subjects in ways not available to more conventional forms of journalism. Notions of ‘truth’ will be investigated through the examination of the broad swathe of animated documentary and graphic journalism, with subjects ranging from family histories to nature, animals, war sexuality, city, or play.

This section will be a space for students to explore the aesthetic and political possibilities of utopias and dystopias. It will consider the way in which sci-fi and fantasy are used to comment on contemporary life or to propose alternative ways of living. Issues to discuss include the feminist implications of the cyborg and the play space of digital games, as well as changing visions of dystopia/utopia and how to draw utopian practice into everyday life. Utopian design will be considered (fonts of the Bauhaus), as will the movement of dystopian imagery (the red cloaks from Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale) into contemporary protest.

This section will look at how we tell stories about mental health and how illustration can be used to nurture human connection and the human condition. We will consider the difficulties of communication around mental health that illustrators are uniquely positioned to solve and examine how we might go about telling other people’s mental health stories and our own paying attention to the political and social conditions that impact mental health and the way that it is discussed. How might we make work that either fosters or explores ideas of community and the human psyche? What does it mean to be a storyteller within a community? We will examine the unique opportunities offered to visual practitioners to create connections between people through working in the fields of illustration, graphic fiction and nonfiction, visual journalism, animation, collaborative practice and other visual forms

This section will explore the juxtaposition and inter-relation of cute, kitsch, and horror in the service of storytelling through lectures, readings, exercises, and individual projects. It will consider the origins of cute--including cultural, biological, and psychological understandings of cuteness--and look at the history of Kawaii and its increasing global dominance. In contrast, we will also lift the veil to expose “horror,” the shadow of cute, or the underlying tragedy that engenders the vulnerabilities that evoke “cuteness.” Students will be encouraged to think about their visual guilty pleasures and to examine the value of kitsch and its relationship to folk art and may discuss camp and the re-use of aesthetic in non-normative gender roles. We will also look at sentimentality and notions of worth and value associated with particular images. Students should take this section if: They want to explore the origins and contemporary meaning(s) of what is cute or what is absolutely not, they want to make work exploring appeal and the affect of objects or characters.