UG: 4.s30  G: 4.s35

An introduction to the tools and concepts of capturing and transitioning forms between the human scale and nanoscale. The generation of simulation-based art projects reflects these explorations and the ways they can be used in the context of art, culture, and technology. What dialogs can engage with society when operating on sub-visible scales or taking forms from the nano into the human macro scale, creating artistic simulations, motion from form, or form from motion?

Students will collaborate with MIT Nano on final projects intended for public exhibition in a gallery setting.

4.341 UG | 4.342 G

Introduces history and contemporary practices in artistic photography through projects, lectures, artist visits, group discussions, readings, and field trips. Fosters visual literacy and aesthetic appreciation of photography/digital imaging, as well as critical awareness of how images in our culture are produced and constructed. Provides instruction in the fundamentals of different camera formats, film exposure and development, lighting, black and white darkroom printing, and digital imaging. Assignments allow for incorporation of a range of traditional and experimental techniques, development of technical skills, and personal exploration. Throughout the term, present and discuss projects in a critical forum. 

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version. Lab fee required. Limited to 20.

Focused on the practices of varied practitioners — film directors, artists, musicians, composers, architects, designers — whose writings relay a process of thinking and feeling integral to their forms of material production. Testing various ways aesthetic forms and their shifts — historic and contemporary — have relations to still emerging contemporary subjectivities (felt emotion in a human body), the class studies productions created by participants and case studies of varied producers, and generates new work individually and/or collaboratively via diverse media explorations. Includes reading, writing, drawing, and publishing, as well as photographic, cinematic, spatial, and audio operations and productions. Activities include screenings, listening assignments, and guest visits, in addition to readings, discussions, and presentations.

1/24/25 - Schedule change from TR 2-5 to TW 2-5

4.352 UG | 4.353 G

Advanced video production, installation, and exhibition design introduces advanced image and sound design strategies from both a technical and conceptual perspective. Storytelling is the linchpin that unites these seemingly disparate forms. Visual semiotics and media analysis, alongside installation and exhibition design, offer a perspective from which to consider how meaning is constructed when you engage across different forms of art production such as within individual artworks, media installations, and the design of exhibitions. Each of these forms implies a different spatial configuration and it is the relationship between the artwork and the space where it is displayed that determines how the work is understood by a viewer.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version. 

4.341 U / 4.342 G

Introduces history and contemporary practices in artistic photography through projects, lectures, artist visits, group discussions, readings, and field trips. Fosters visual literacy and aesthetic appreciation of photography/digital imaging, as well as critical awareness of how images in our culture are produced and constructed. Provides instruction in the fundamentals of different camera formats, film exposure and development, lighting, black and white darkroom printing, and digital imaging. Assignments allow for incorporation of a range of traditional and experimental techniques, development of technical skills, and personal exploration. Throughout the term, present and discuss projects in a critical forum. Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.

UG: 4.310, G: 4.311

This hands on studio class will expose students to the technical skills needed for successful screen printing. Students will produce single and multicolor prints on paper and fabric using a variety of methods. Classes will cover an introduction to preparing and reclaiming screens, creating handmade and digital cut stencils, use of screen positives and photo emulsion, mono prints and editions, registration, and more.  Lab fee required.

4.322 UG | 4.323 G

Explores three-dimensional artwork, including sculpture, installation, and fashion from concept to finished piece. Addresses design, fabrication, process, context, and relationships between objects, the body, and material culture. Lectures, screenings, field trips, readings, and class discussions supplement studio practice. Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.

4.361: UG | 4.632 G

Explores performance centered on the body as a space of resistance/action, the collective body and its powers, and performative acts that blur boundaries between art and everyday life. By acknowledging embodied experience as a container -and generator- of knowledge, students trace gestures of care and reciprocity by enacting scores and poetry, conceptually altering screens/walls that divide and separate us, reclaiming time, and undoing categories that alienate our bodies from life itself. Activities include improvisation, movement vocabulary, theater strategies, walking, reading, writing, listening, observation, screening, and discussing theoretical, historical, and contemporary examples of performance art, social art practice, procession, and artistic collaborations. Several small performance-based projects, both collective and individual, assigned throughout the semester. Additional work required of students taking graduate version.

This studio will bring together students and faculty from Architecture, Aeronautics & Astronautics and the Media Lab to imagine, design and create the future of habitats beyond the Earth - starting this semester with a prototype for Low Earth Orbit. This studio will be taught as a collaboration between three groups including shared lectures, assignments, group projects and presentations. The aim of the collaboration is to bring together students across the institute as well as faculty, and invited guest experts, to help conceptualize and materialize a future of human experience, architecture and construction. This semester’s collaborative studio will prompt students to imagine, design, model, prototype and test their unique proposals. Projects may focus on novel approaches to: construction/assembly, deployability, transportation/logistics, human experience, In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), material performance, or the many components of living and exploring in space.