Pratt Integrative Courses – Spring 2020
300S: GENERAL COURSES
PIC 300: Focus: Expand
Section 1: Alexandra Goldberg. MON 2-4:50
Section 2: Maria Baker. MON 5-7:50
Section 3: Chelsea Limbird. WED 2-4:50
310S: MYTHOGRAPHIES
PIC 310: Bestiary. Kimberly Sloane. TUE 2-4:50
PIC 315: Hidden City. Omar Walker. THURS 9-11:50
320S: MAKING CULTURE/CULTURE MAKING
PIC 321: Virtual Reality and the Battle for Truth. Basem Aly. THURS 5-7:50
PIC 323: Going Baroque. Suzanne Verderber and Ethan Spigland. WED 5-7:50
PIC 326: Archive Fever. Kimberly Bobier. WED, 5-7:50
330S: ALT-FUSE
PIC 330: The Art of Scent. Alexis Karl.
Section 1: FRI 10-12:50
Section 2: FRI 2-4:50
Section 3: THURS 2-4:50
340s: Around Creativity
PIC 341: Visionary Creativity. John Lobell. TUE 5-7:50
PIC 342: Corpse Will Drink. Michael Gac Levin. FRI 10-12:50
PIC 343: Conceptual Practices: Rapid Prototypes || Artists’ Texts. Birgit Rathsmann. THU 5-7:50
PIC 346: Unboxed: Subversion Strategies. Maria Baker. THURS 2-4:50
PIC 349: Buddhism and Creative Practices: Meditation, Direct Experience, and Art. Kristine Marx. FRI 2-4:50
350S: COMMUNITY: ORGANIZING, PRACTICE & REFORM
PIC 352: Creative Cultural Organizing. Max Freedman. WED 5-7:50
360S: FROM THREADS TO BOTS
PIC 361: Interwoven: Textiles and Culture. Freya Tamayo. TUE 9-11:50
PIC 362: Embodied Surfaces, Textures, and Membranes. Joseph Morris. TUE 2-4:50
PIC 363: Productive Collisions. Latoya Kamdang. THURS 5-7:50
390S: NEW WORLDS, NEW FUTURES
PIC 391: Another Earth. Virginia Wagner. TUES 5-7:50
PIC 394: The Gaming of Architecture. Michele Gorman. WED 2-4:50
PIC 395: After the Internet. Johnny Stanish and Loney Abrams.
Section 1: FRI 2-4:50
Section 2: FRI 10-12:50
SPRING 2020: PIC Course Descriptions
PIC 300: FOCUS: EXPAND
Section 1 – Alexandra Goldberg
Section 2 – Maria Baker
Section 3 – Chelsea Limbird
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 310: BESTIARY
Kimberly Sloane
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: HIDDEN CITY
Omar Walker
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 321: VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE BATTLE FOR TRUTH
Basem Aly
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: GOING BAROQUE
Suzanne Verderber and Ethan Spigland
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 326: ARCHIVE FEVER
Kimberly Bobier
Social Media. Libraries. Museums. Artistic repositories. They all collect, construct meaning, erase meaning, and generate archives! But how?! And to what end?! Archive Fever uses an interdisciplinary lens to explore individuals, groups, and institutions’ practices for making and mobilizing archives. Students will produce their own archives, visit various collections, investigate fervent accumulation (i.e., archive fever) and creatively respond to multiple archive forms.
PIC 330: THE ART OF SCENT
Alexis Karl
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 341: VISIONARY CREATIVITY
John Lobell
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
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
Birgit Rathsmann
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 346: UNBOXED: SUBVERSION STRATEGIES
Maria Baker
“Think outside the box!” We’ve all heard that before. Defying the box seems to be at the core of creativity and innovation. But what exactly is this box?! In this course, we’ll consider the box as the limits imposed by our ways of cataloging thoughts and perceptions—the binaries, hierarchies, and narratives we create to structure our world. We’ll consult examples from art and design, pop culture and philosophy (from TV’s Shark Tank to Derrida), and complete creative assignments based on strategies innovators employ to escape their boxes.
PIC 349: BUDDHISM AND CREATIVE PRACTICES: MEDITATION, DIRECT EXPERIENCE, AND ART
Kristine Marx
In this course, students explore ‘seeing for yourself’ or direct experience, in relation to Buddhism and creativity. Each class begins with a medication. We then investigate a Buddhist theme – such as mindfulness or impermanence – in relation to an artist, designer, writer, or composer. The course highlights artists from the mid-20th centry when Buddhism was first embraced by New York’s avant-garde and more recent figures, like Agnes Martin and Steve Jobs. Projects incorporated different visual media and/or writing.
PIC 352: CREATIVE CULTURAL ORGANIZING
Max Freedman
Why and how do marginalized communities organize to protect their rights and exert power? How can you put your creative skills to the service of tangible social change? Through collaborative projects, hands-on workshops, field trips, and guest speakers, you will explore a variety of practices at the intersection of arts and community organizing. Final projects will be created in partnership with a member-led grassroots organization in Bedford-Stuyvesant with active campaigns around police accountability, food justice, and tenants’ rights.
PIC 361: INTERWOVEN
Freya Tamayo
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
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 363 – PRODUCTIVE COLLISIONS
Latoya Kamdang
Productive Collisions embarks on a multidisciplinary approach to creating human centered spaces for transformation and social mobility for youth in marginalized communities. The systemic nature of the challenges presented requires the negotiation of multiple culturally complex factors and students will be asked to consider the role of creative disciplines to facilitate change. As economic forces continue to grow, we will interrogate how we, stewards of creative problem solving, can we find solutions to ameliorate the negative effects of gentrification. How might we consider moments of “productive collision” as conducive to imagining community cohesion and equitable outcomes?
PIC 391: ANOTHER EARTH
Virginia Wagner
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 394: THE GAMING OF ARCHITECTURE
Michele Gorman
Fictional cities emerge in response to restraints of a given place or movement and are often depicted in films and games as sites of radical representational transformation. Students will use the platform of gaming to speculate on fictional designs within NYC. The course begins through mapping (ex. food, economies) and results in a board game and 360 narrative to play out a number of potential outcomes of a city within a set of new rules.
PIC 395: AFTER THE INTERNET
Johnny Stanish and Loney Abrams
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.