Pratt Integrative Courses — Fall 2018
300S: GENERAL COURSES
PIC 300: The PIC: Integrating and Advancing Your Work
Section 1: Chelsea Limbird [fall and spring]. FRI, 10-12:50
Section 2: Maria Baker [fall and spring]. MON, 5-7:50
PIC 301A: One: The Tempest. Tracie Morris [fall]. FRI, 10-12:50
PIC 301B: One: Cabinet. Pirco Wolframm [fall]. WED, 5-7:50
310S: MYTHOGRAPHIES
PIC 310: Bestiary. Virginia Wagner (and Foundation department). [fall and spring]. TUE, 5-7:50
PIC 315: Myth and the Collective City: Reading In & Out through Time and Space. Omar Walker. [fall and spring] FRI, 10-12:50
320S: MAKING CULTURE/CULTURE MAKING
PIC 320: Big Impact: Artists & Designers Working in a Globalized Age. Dina Weiss. [fall and spring]. WED 10-12:50
PIC 321: Virtual Reality & The Battle for Truth. Basem Aly. [fall]. THU, 5-7:50
PIC 323: The Baroque. Suzanne Verderber & Ethan Spigland. [fall and spring]. WED, 5-7:50
PIC 324: Spiritual Optics. Sofi Thanhauser. [fall and spring]. MON, 5-7:50
330S: ALT-FUSE
PIC 330: Art of Scent. Alexis Karl. [fall and spring], Section 1: FRI, 10-12:50, Section 2: FRI, 2-4:50
PIC 331: Sounding Architectures. Anthony Caradonna. [fall]. THU 10-12:50
340S: AROUND CREATIVITY
PIC 341: Visionary Creativity. John Lobell. [fall and spring]. TUE, 5-7:50
PIC 342: Corpse Will Drink. Michael Gac Levin. [fall and spring]. FRI, 10-12:50
PIC 343: Conceptual Practices. Birgit Rathsmann & Rachel Levitsky. [fall and spring]. THU, 5-7:50
PIC 345: Games, Glitches & Creativity. Luke Degnan. [fall and spring]. FRI, 2-4:50
PIC 346: Subversions/Strategies (Rethinking Thinking). Maria Baker. [fall and spring].
Section 1: TUE, 5-7:50
Section 2: WED 5-7:50
350S: COMMUNITY: ORGANIZING, PRACTICE, & REFORM
PIC 352: Creative Cultural Organizing. Max Freedman. [fall and spring]. MON 5-7:50
360S: FROM THREADS TO BOTS
PIC 360: Blind Home. Chelsea Limbird. [fall and spring]. FRI, 2-4:50
PIC 361: Interwoven: Textiles, Culture, and Technology. TUE, 9–11:50
PIC 362: Embodied Surfaces, Textures and Membranes. Joseph Morris. [fall and spring]. TUE, 2-4:50
PIC 369: A Line, A Robot. Cole Matthew Belmont. [fall and spring]. THU, 5-7:50
390S: NEW WORLDS, NEW FUTURES
PIC 391: Another Earth. Virginia Wagner. [fall and spring]. Section 1: MON, 1-3:50, Section 2: MON, 5-7:50
PIC 395: After the Internet: The Artist, the Designer, and the Public. Johnny Stanish and Loney Abrams. [fall and spring]. FRI 2-4:50
Course Descriptions
PIC 300:
THE PIC: INTEGRATING AND ADVANCING YOUR WORK
SECTION 1, CHELSEA LIMBIRD, FRIDAYS, 10 AM-12:50 PM
SECTION 2, MARIA BAKER, MONDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
This course focuses on the development of integrative capacities through students’ own prior work, personal experiences, and future interests. Through exercises, activities, the examination of case studies, and projects that engage students in collaborative work and individualized and directed learning, students revisit their own aesthetics and connect their life experiences to academic work. They also examine connections across disciplines while engaging in extended reflection on their own learning.
PIC 301-A
ONE: THE TEMPEST (BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE)
TRACIE MORRIS
FRIDAYS, 10 AM–12:50 PM
“ONE” invites students to examine in depth one work, one ensemble of works or one major project that integrates multiple disciplines and ‘languages’ of creative practice. This in-depth investigation will be concurrent with students remaking one of their earlier pieces as well as creating an entirely new project.
This section of ONE invites students to examine a monumental creative writing work: The Tempest by William Shakespeare. This is hands-on “playing” with his text to explore art making, including: sound art, spoken text, “found art,” spell casting, filmmaking, magical realism, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, map-making, ethno-mathematics, monsters, architecture, design, and acting. Shakespeare has it all! We will see what happens, together, when we make his art our own.
PIC 301-B
ONE: CABINET (BY TUOMAS MAKUNPOIKA)
PIRCO WOLFRAMM
WEDNESDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
“ONE” invites students to examine in depth one work, one ensemble of works or one major project that integrates multiple disciplines and ‘languages’ of creative practice. This in-depth investigation will be concurrent with students remaking one of their earlier pieces as well as creating an entirely new project.
This section of ONE uses Cabinet, by Tuomas Makunpoika, to start explorations into students’ personal work and into collaborative work. What is there is as fertile as what is no longer present: the steel ring arrangement, formerly wrapped around a wooden cabinet set on fire, serves as an analogy for the inherent experience of loss. Cabinet allows for investigation of memory, memorialization, nostalgia, health, aging, temporality, and personal history, among other topics.
PIC 310
BESTIARY
VIRGINIA WAGNER
FRIDAYS, 10 AM-12:50 PM
This course will explore the relationship between humankind and animals through words, images, and the combination of the two. Since the dawn of time, images, and eventually words and images describing and depicting animals have been used to explore, investigate, and mediate the complex dynamic of animals as both agents of nature and symbols of culture. The human/animal bond continues to have relevance, even as we destroy habitat and endanger more and more species. The concept of the Medieval Bestiary will serve as an area of research and a schema for the creation of a novel compendium of words and images reinforcing and complementing each other to tell new stories.
PIC 315
MYTH AND THE COLLECTIVE CITY: READING IN & OUT THROUGH TIME AND SPACE
OMAR WALKER
FRIDAYS: 10 AM–12:50 PM
This course will examine the city as a collective text focusing on New York, Ancient/Renaissance Rome, and Henart’s Paris using the architecture of these cities as our primary analytic lens. We will explore how a city can be broken down into its primary components like a column or wall similar to an alphabet within a text. This will be explored through lectures, discussions, field trips, and drawings.
PIC 320
BIG IMPACT: ARTISTS & DESIGNERS WORKING IN A GLOBALIZED AGE
DINA WEISS
WEDNESDAYS, 10 AM–12:50 PM
This course will provide an opportunity to examine the impact artists and designers have in shaping the world. It will be an exploration of the interdisciplinary exchange between art and design that is focused on globalization. The course will provide historical context for culture and delve into the socio-political landscape of today by examining the ways artists and designers contribute to the greater good.
PIC 321
VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE BATTLE FOR TRUTH
BASEM ALY
THURSDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
Virtual and augmented reality are at the forefront of technology and culture today. This course is an exploration of the technical possibilities of VR/AR and simulations as well as a critical appreciation of the scope and limits of quantitative models. Students will learn how to create and critique VR/ AR simulations. We will explore the ongoing battle over truth in a time of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” developing crucial critical thinking skills in an age of contesting realities.
PIC 323
THE BAROQUE
SUZANNE VERDERBER AND ETHAN SPIGLAND
WEDNESDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
The term “baroque” denotes excessive ornamentation, curls, folds, and twisting surfaces, as well as a historical period known for its extravagant style. We will examine both the historical period designated “the Baroque” through literature, art, architecture, philosophy, and history, alongside the “baroque” considered as a style that persists throughout history, associated especially with postmodernism and its embrace of multiplicity. Baroque texts will be transformed through creative assignments into new forms across a range of media.
PIC 324
SPIRITUAL OPTICS
SOFI THANHAUSER
MONDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
New York may have a reputation for cold blooded materialism, but a spectacular wealth of spiritual history and contemporary ritual life pulsate inches behind thousands of architectural facades: some likely and some surprising. We will delve into New York City’s ritual life past and present, exploring relationships between revelation and revolution, the divinatory and the didactic. For the culminating project, students will design an image system to complement a cosmology, ethical system, or ritual practice.
PIC 330
ART OF SCENT
ALEXIS KARL
SECTION 1: FRIDAYS, 10 AM–12:50 PM
SECTION 2: FRIDAYS, 2–4:50 PM
Art and scent are linked together in time and space, speaking of memory, emotion, and the spirit of artistic invention. This class explores fragrance as an artistic medium, using notes like dragon’s blood, ambergris, rare flowers, and 35-million-year-old amber. Joined with fine and performing arts, scent will be an immersive means of communication, challenging artistic-olfactory perceptions, translating memory into art and experience, and storytelling through multidisciplinary installation.
PIC 331
SOUNDING ARCHITECTURES
ANTHONY CARADONNA
THURSDAYS, 10 AM–12:50 PM
Sound is a pan-disciplinary medium that surrounds us all. The ‘Sounding Architectures’ integrated course introduces students to sound and the way in which it is married to architectural space. We will explore sound making methods that allow students to create site specific sound works in response to specific physical places, spaces, architectures. Students will gain an introduction to sound techniques as well as conceptual ways artists utilize sound as an art form and as a component of other hybrid art forms.
PIC 341
VISIONARY CREATIVITY
JOHN LOBELL
TUESDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
Creativity is defining to Pratt’s mission, but what exactly do we mean by creativity? After distinguishing between mastery, innovation, and ordinary creativity, this course looks at Visionary Creativity. Visionary Creativity comes about in the context of its culture and at the same time changes its culture. This course helps each student think about their own creativity in the context of their field and in relationship to the larger culture.
PIC 342
CORPSE WILL DRINK
MICHAEL GAC LEVIN
FRIDAYS, 10 AM–12:50 PM
Can the Freudian slip be a design principle? Can an architectural diagram double as a Rorschach test? Can a scribble tell a secret? In Corpse Will Drink, we will explore instinct, intuition, fear and desire as we search for ways to conjure the creative possibility of the unconscious mind.
PIC 343
CONCEPTUAL PRACTICES: RAPID PROTOTYPES||ARTISTS’ TEXTS
RACHEL LEVITSKY AND BIRGIT RATHSMANN
THURSDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
Improve your approach to creating image-text art!
Learn how to use improvisation and recuperative strategies!
Make better multi-genre art—and have more fun in the process!
PIC 345
GAMES, GLITCHES, AND CREATIVITY
LUKE DEGNAN
FRIDAYS, 2–4:50 PM
How can technology impact creativity? How can we gamify our creative practice? What happens when we amplify our mistakes or magnify our missteps? In this course we will examine different technologies and how they affect creativity in practice, through games, visual art, writing, and other processes. Students will create work that is disrupted, enhanced, glitched, flipped, or obfuscated by technology and explore concepts and tools such as augmented realities, chatbots, electronic literature, non-linear narrative, and writing for video games.
PIC 346
SUBVERSIONS/STRATEGIES (RETHINKING THINKING)
MARIA BAKER
SECTION 1: TUESDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
SECTION 2: WEDNESDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
This course integrates materials from intersections of applied arts, philosophy, pop culture and literature. Students will examine works of art from all disciplines as well as cultural artifacts, investigate how they reflect dominant modes of thought—such as our compulsive creation of binaries, the need for cohesive narratives and chronological organization—and look at how the chosen works interrogate and subvert them. Students then create (or revise existing) works inspired by/reflecting the discussed strategies.
PIC 352
CREATIVE CULTURAL ORGANIZING
MAX FREEDMAN
MONDAYS, 5-7:50 PM
In this course, students will explore and contribute to a dynamic body of work at the intersection of arts, culture and activism. Students will learn about a range of contemporary practices, through readings, guest speakers, and hands-on workshops. Each student will draw from their own cultural context to design a cultural organizing project, then collaborate with a member-led organizing hub in Central Brooklyn. Throughout, students will examine why and how communities organize to protect their rights and exert power; and how arts and culture can be integrated into this work.
PIC 360
BLIND HOME
CHELSEA LIMBIRD
FRIDAYS, 2–4:50 PM
Follow your senses home. Question your understanding of new and remembered stories. Study perception, recognition and creation beyond the visual. Work across media and communication from collage to performance, interview to costume, stage set to psychogeographic realities. Play games and act in plays. Remember things past, experience the present, imagine the future. Find a sense of home.
PIC 361
INTERWOVEN: TEXTILES, CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY
FREYA TAMAYO
TUESDAYS, 9–11:50 AM
Textiles are an incredible medium. They bridge cultures, cross disciplines, and embody the future. This class will examine the use and application of textiles while exploring their depth and versatility. From research and historical context to craft and innovation, we will examine the use and application of textiles while making, writing, crafting and imagining.
PIC 362
EMBODIED SURFACES, TEXTURES AND MEMBRANES
JOE MORRIS
TUESDAYS, 2–4:50 PM
Embodied Surfaces, Textures, and Membranes is a course that explores the phenomenological, experiential, and sensorial potentials of interactive environments from New Media Art to Responsive Architecture. Students will use electronic and digital media to create custom coded environments at full body scale that are novel and inventive, with the capability to sense, emote, and augment human experience.
PIC 369
A LINE, A ROBOT
COLE MATTHEW BELMONT AND THE ROBOTICS LAB
THURSDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
This course will give students the opportunity to physically and intellectually engage industrial robotics through the design and execution of projects tailored to their academic backgrounds. The course will focus on hands-on applications of robotics to movement, gesture, mark making, dance, film and photography. Students will work at the Consortium for Research & Robotics in the Brooklyn Navy Yard with an industrial robotic arm where they will explore automation, robotics, motion and design.
PIC 391
ANOTHER EARTH
VIRGINIA WAGNER
SECTION 1: MONDAYS, 1–3:50 PM
SECTION 2: MONDAYS, 5–7:50 PM
Another Earth will explore the design of imaginary worlds. We will study examples of worlds built in literature, graphic novels, and visual art and our studio work will combine these mediums. Each student will create written and visual art to flesh out a setting of their own design. Our goal will be to develop an imaginary place that feels substantive and reflects our real world in ways that help us both understand and escape from it.
PIC 395
AFTER THE INTERNET: THE ARTIST, THE DESIGNER, AND THE PUBLIC
JOHNNY STANISH AND LONEY ABRAMS
FRIDAYS, 2–4:50 PM
You probably get a lot of feedback inside the studio. But how do you get your work out of the studio and into the world? In this course students will make artworks and creative projects that leverage the power of social media and online networks (informed by media theory and post-internet discourse) to reach new audiences and make connections outside of Pratt. This will culminate in an online and IRL exhibition open to the public.