Professor: Ross Adams

Architecture narrates worlds. It tells its stories not with words, but with its walls, floors, surfaces and sites. To understand architecture as narrative is to acknowledge architecture as an instrument crucial to the maintenance of social relations, a medium that re-presents how we understand nature, and a technology of capital. Yet the capacity of architecture to narrate is largely ignored by its practitioners—overlooked and unrecognized, allowing certain narratives to be reproduced across the built environment. This course will center architecture’s narrative capacity as a transformative power for design to narrate otherwise: architecture as counternarrative. Taking architecture-as-narrative as an analytical and productive framework, this studio-based course introduces students to architectural tools of communication while presenting architecture as a field that is expansive—a field that engages not only with technical knowledge, but also with the making of public imaginaries and the engagement with contested ideas. In this way, the course is simultaneously an introduction to architecture’s media, as it is an opportunity to explore how architecture mediates. Students will learn and practice techniques of contemporary digital drawing, diagramming, mapping, 3D modeling and compositional image-making. While the focus will be on an array of forms of architectural drawing, these techniques will be carefully positioned against a survey of paradigmatic moments in the history of architecture and related visual cultures that will help to situate our practice today. Our design work will be supplemented by readings and periodic research work, and we will situate this against regular lectures that will introduce you to the broader culture of architecture. No prerequisites.

Professor: Farah Alkoury

In times of war, what architectures are subject to erasure, and why? How are war ecologies concealed, transformed, or repurposed? And to what extent does the toxic legacy of war spread? This course explores the proliferation of toxicity across territories like Puerto Rico and Iraq as a lens to understand the architecture of toxic flows and forms of control that render multiple territories as contingency sites. Students will research sites, buildings, and critical infrastructures subject to erasure through occupation, militarization, colonialism, and toxic contamination. Through drawing, analysis, and mapping at multiple scales and temporalities, students will investigate spatial subjects, focusing on the architectures in which occupation and violence are enacted, and examining how altered environments are experienced by those most vulnerable to climate change. Architecture and design will be understood as tools for decolonial practice and design activism. Through design transitions, we will seek to render legible the entanglements of militarism and ecologies, marked by the proliferation of toxicity, environmental diplomacy, and the residues of violence. Methodologies include 3D modeling, data mining, cartographic representation, geolocation, mapping, renderings, and visual and audio compositions. The course culminates in the creation of a video essay that synthesizes these explorations, employing architectural representation as means for advocacy and public dissemination. This course fulfills the Environmental Studies Practicum requirement. Prerequisite: ARCH 211

Professor: Beka Goedde

This short course is during the growing season, and will have weekly meetings for 7 weeks, in 3-1/2-hour weekly sessions, from March 28 until May 9. This class will work together with the Bard Farm and Community Garden to seed, support, identify, maintain, harvest and process colorants derived from plants and natural material for use as inks and dyes in Studio Arts department facilities, and for their own studio practice work. The spring semester of this 2-credit course begins with planting seeds at the Montgomery Place greenhouse. Students will be guided in cultivating and transplanting the dye plants at the Bard Farm Community Garden. We will experiment together with extraction methods for natural dye for fabric and ink for paper. Students will make a contribution to a group-chosen object of study (such as Madder, Goldenrod, Marigold, Chamomile, Yarrow, Turmeric, Indigo, Weld, and Dyer’s Coreopsis) from dried plant matter harvested during the fall 2024 season. We will work with the Jude Lab on campus swatch making and testing with the microbe which produces violet pigment violacein. We will build an online archive of natural pigment swatches collected from Bard’s Annandale campus, and will build toward publishing a foraging map of campus. Students will take materials they gather and extract for their own practices, and present an art project for critique, informed by critical consideration of the value of impermanent color and material in temporary exhibitions. Expect tools and materials in this course to total $50, including paper, fabric, tincture containers, clippers and gloves. Prerequisite: Prior experience in a Studio Arts level I course, or permission of the instructor.

Professor: Katherine Boivin

Although scholarship on medieval art has often been separated by medium, Gothic church programs were actually multi-media spaces with meaning transcending the individual work of art. This class, therefore, explores a wide range of artistic media, including stained glass, painting, sculpture, architecture, textiles, and metalwork, as they contributed to the dynamic space of the Gothic church. In addition, it considers modern technologies for representing these complex programs, drawing parallels between the explosion of images in the Gothic era and the role of media today. Structured around the investigation of case-study churches throughout western Europe—with a particular focus on France and Germany from the 13th through 15th centuries—this class will cover topics including architectural structuring of space, image placement, dramatic performances of the liturgy, the “economy of salvation,” and cultural notions of decorum. Coursework includes weekly writing assignments, active in-class discussion, and a final 15-page research paper. AHVC distributions: Pre 1500, Europe.

Professor: Krista Caballero

Vultures and hummingbirds often elicit immediate and opposite associations; yet each play a crucial ecological role, with vultures considered a keystone species that purify our environments and hummingbirds serving as vital pollinators. In some cultures, both species are believed to mediate between life and death and, by doing so, share critical messages for rebirth and renewal. These archetypal species will provide an entry for us to study the relationships between people and birds through artmaking. Major themes will include: agency and loss; data and kinship; species loneliness and belonging. While students will work primarily in the media of their choosing, emphasis will be placed on developing artistic approaches that push boundaries between physical and digital media. Three major interdisciplinary projects will include the use of apps such as e-bird and Merlin to gather data that will then be transformed and used to experiment across media. Developing a practice of birding as well as site visits to the bird collection at Bard’s Field Station will be an integral part of our creative inquiry. We will also read a diverse cross-section of texts from ethnoornithologists, Indigenous scholars, science writers and environmental philosophers as well as explore the work of contemporary artists. As such, course readings, active participation in class discussions as well as group critique will be key to our investigation as we explore together the landscape of human–bird encounters over time and place. Prerequisite: at least 1 PA course

Professor: Jana Mader

In this course, we will explore the theme of courage in artistic encounters with nature. Through the lens of artists like Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Werner Herzog, we will examine how creative expression can serve as a powerful tool for environmental activism and cultural transformation. Literary works such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring will illustrate the profound impact of courageous writing on ecological consciousness and conservation efforts. The course will delve into the ephemeral art of Andy Goldsworthy, whose creations, formed from natural materials, emphasize the transient beauty of nature and the impermanence of human interventions. We’ll also explore the bold and innovative approaches of filmmakers like Terrence Malick, whose films invite a spiritual contemplation of nature, and composers such as John Luther Adams, whose music evokes the vastness and power of the natural world. Throughout the semester, we will engage with various forms of creative expression, e.g. literature, visual arts, photography, film, music, and poetry, to examine how these artists and thinkers courageously confront the complexities of nature, whether by challenging societal norms, revealing uncomfortable truths about human impact on the environment, or inspiring a deeper, more mindful connection to the Earth. By the end of the course, we’ll have gained a deeper understanding of how art can both reflect and shape our perceptions of the natural world, and how courage in the arts can lead to profound environmental and social change. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Professor: A. Sayeeda Moreno

An introductory writing course that looks at creative approaches to writing short films and dialogue scenes. Starting with personal histories, lineage, and identities, students learn the tools to write invigorating, character-driven short screenplays. Building characters through transcription and investigation to enhance character development and story arc ultimately creating a visual language, students develop and workshop a short screenplay (maximum 10-15 pages). This course will require extensive outside research and you are responsible for committing to a writing and rewriting process. Registration open to Sophomores and above.

Professor: Chiara Pavone and Soonyoung Lee

This course will engage with works of literature, films, comics and television shows from Japan and South Korea belonging to the genre widely known as ‘SF’ (or ‘science’ and ‘speculative fiction’). We will, in particular, explore what we call the ‘sci-fi imagination’ that pervades cultural products from these two societies, and introduce some of the symbols reflecting the current anger and discomfort of their young people – such as the zombie, the monster/human hybrid, and the poisoned landscape. The main goals of the class will be to understand the history of this East-Asian region through the often inexplicit geopolitical factors molding it, such as the enduring influence of the United States; and to reflect on the sci-fi tropes we will encounter in the course of the semester as challenging entrenched social norms and aspiring towards the creation of a new culture. How does sci-fi literature and media help us imagine different futures – especially from the perspective of gender issues? How do ideas of the human change when facing the utopian or dystopian times to come? – are a couple of the questions we will consider in class. We thus aim to cultivate the students’ ability to conceive alternative societies and challenge the current power structures, while understanding the context of two countries far (but not too far) from their own. The material we will treat includes literary works by authors Murata Sayaka, Fujino Kaori, Bora Jung and Boyoung Kim; and TV series and films such as All of us are dead (2022), Hellbound (2021), Train to Busan (2016), Parasyte (2015), and Battle Royale (2000). This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Professor: Luis Chavez

This course surveys the ways Indigenous peoples have transformed the intellectual aims, frames, and methods of music studies over time – ranging from historic representations of Indigenous music by Euroamerican and Latin American composers and scholars, to contemporary aesthetics, philosophies, and research methodologies articulated by Indigenous artists and scholars. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which Indigenous musicians and communities engage notions of modernity to express self-determination, to engage diverse understandings of place and belonging, to participate in local and global exchanges, and to revitalize or reclaim traditions that have been suppressed through the forces of colonization. While “Indigenous” is a broad descriptor, we will use a hemispheric perspective to focus on performance cultures throughout the Americas. Many issues, however, will be relevant for political and intellectual decolonization initiatives across the globe. Students will be expected to develop an original research project that integrates class discussions and materials into their own area of specialty.

Professor: Patricia Lopez-Gay

This course explores some of the major literary works produced on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the present day. Students will become familiar with the general contours of Spanish history as they study in depth a selected number of masterpieces, including works by Miguel de Cervantes, Calderón de la Barca, Teresa de Jesús, Cadalso, Larra, Galdós, Emilia PardoBazán, Unamuno, Lorca, and Carmen Laforet. The course will be organized around three thematic modules: Spanish culture’s engagement with notions of purity and pollution; the emergence and evolution of the first person singular in Spanish literature; and the representations of the country and the city, the center and the periphery. In each module we will undertake a survey of relevant literature occasionally put in conversation with the visual arts. Conducted in Spanish.

Professor: Benjamin Hale

Philosopher Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” Ultimately, he determined the question unanswerable: A bat’s experience of the world is so alien to our own that it is beyond the human understanding of subjective experience. That’s arguable. But it is true at least that a bat’s experience—or that of any other nonhuman consciousness—is not inaccessible to human imagination. In this course we will read and discuss a wide variety of texts, approaching the subject of nonhuman consciousness through literature, philosophy, and science. We will read works that attempt to understand the experiences of apes, panthers, rats, ticks, elephants, octopuses, lobsters, cows, bats, monsters, puppets, computers, and eventually, zombies. Course reading may include Descartes, Kafka, Rilke, Jakob von Uexküll, Patricia Highsmith, John Gardner, J.A. Baker, Eduardo Kohn, David Foster Wallace, Zora Neale Hurston, Temple Grandin, Jane Goodall, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Susan Daitch, Giorgio Agamben, Bennett Sims, and E. O. Wilson, among others, in addition to a viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and possibly other films. There will be several long writing assignments over the course of the semester, and a workshop component. Students interested in this workshop must email [email protected]

Professor: Michael Cohen

This studio-based course introduces students to architectural tools of communication while presenting architecture as a field that is expansive—a field that engages not only with technical knowledge, but also with the making of public imaginaries, personal environments, cultural spatial aesthetics, and even the contested ground of the political, economic and social. The course is simultaneously an introduction to the techniques of representation that define the discipline of architecture and an opportunity to explore and question how architecture mediates the world. Students will learn and practice techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, mapping and compositional image-making. While the focus will be on an array of forms of architectural drawing, these techniques will be carefully positioned against a survey of paradigmatic moments and themes in the history of architecture that will help situate the practice today. Throughout the term, our design work will be supplemented by readings and periodic research work, and we will situate this against regular lectures that will introduce you to the broader culture of architecture. The course will provide a foundation of concepts and skills necessary to make architecture legible and to convey a spatial argument through design. No prerequisites.

Professor: Betsy Clifton

Architectural exhibitions are places that take stock of a field in constant movement; a site in which global shifts and debates intersect, bringing into view consequences and openings for a future under construction. In this course we will mine the medium of the architectural exhibition to ask: How can an archive be used to revise an established canon? How can the curation of an exhibition unsettle what has become commonplace? How do we situate present practice against an uncertain future? We will discuss the ways in which architecture is produced and reproduced within the space of an exhibition, as well as how the exhibition, as a contested space, can create openings for renewed understandings of culture and politics beyond architecture. This course will culminate in a public exhibition of large-scale architectural models as a central medium to re-present contemporary and historical ideas against one another. By critically surveying contemporary practice, students will employ a range of representational techniques and work to investigate the commonplace as a place for intersectional interrogation. The course will run concurrently with an exhibition to be mounted at Citygroup NYC, and we will follow the exhibition process in real time as a reference and case study. Our semester will include a field trip to New York City where we will meet architectural model makers, exhibition designers, and attend contemporary exhibitions. ARCH 211 is a prerequisite.

Professor: Susan Merriam

This course is a meditation on the meaning and histories of artistic experimentation in early modern Europe (1500-1800). At this time, art and science were often intricately connected, and artists took for granted the notion that they could manipulate and experiment with materials (oil paint for example), techniques (such as printmaking), and conceptual approaches to art making. Some of the areas we will examine include anatomical studies, optical experiments, and the use of materials and techniques. Questions we will pursue: What is meant by “visual experiment”? How might artistic failure be generative? How did artistic experiments shape practices we would now consider to be located solely in the realm of science, such as anatomical study? What is the relationship between experiment and risk? How might we compare artistic experiments in the early modern period to those undertaken in our own? As we study artistic experiment, we will create our own visual experiments using both old and new technologies. A highlight will be working with a life-sized camera obscura. This course satisfies the Experimental Humanities core course requirement for “History of the Experiment.” AHVC distribution: Post 1500, Europe.

Professor: Stephanie Lee

How might botanical worlds carry notions of extractive economies, settler colonialism and legacies of racial capitalism? This elective design studio seminar will focus on the interconnectedness of property, plants and bodies from the past to present. While understanding the role of architecture and landscape in agri-capitalism, we will expose matters of resiliency, reform and recovery through case studies such as the Yedikule Gardens, Victory gardens, the Millennium Seed Bank, Crystal Palace, Orangeries, biopiracy and others. Focusing on the role of “floor plans” as an architectural device, we will situate these complex entanglements by collaborating on a toolkit of care for humans, land and everything in between. For the second half of the studio, we will work with the Bard Horticulture and Arboretum Department to design a land-based intervention for the campus. Students will have weekly assignments, and learn techniques of digital drafting, model making, compositional image-making through Adobe Creative Programs and Rhino 3D. No prerequisites.

Professor: Anne Chen

What silences do archaeological archives unintentionally preserve? In what ways do power and privilege influence the creation and shape of archaeological archives, and dictate who has access to them? How might new technologies help us begin to rectify inequities of access? Once called by its excavators the “Pompeii of the East,” the ancient archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) preserves evidence of what everyday life was like in an ancient Roman city. The site is home to the earliest Christian church building yet found, the most elaborately decorated ancient synagogue known to date, and testifies to the ways in which ancient religions and cultures intermingled and inspired one another. Yet since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the site has been irreparably compromised for future archaeological exploration. More than ever, our knowledge and understanding of the site’s ancient phases will depend almost entirely upon archival information collected in the course of archaeological excavations that took place 100 years ago when Syria was under French colonial occupation. In this hands-on practicum course focused on the case-study of this fascinating archaeological site, students will not only learn what we know of Dura-Europos as it was in antiquity, but will also think critically about issues central to the use and development of archival resources more generally. Coursework will center around firsthand engagement with data, artifacts, and archival materials from the site, and will allow students the opportunity to develop guided research projects that ultimately contribute toward the goal of improving the site’s accessibility and intelligibility to users worldwide. The methods and critical perspectives explored in this class will be particularly relevant to students interested in exploring careers in GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museum) fields. AHVC distribution: Pre 1500, Middle East.

Professor: Theresa Law

This course introduces students to the methodologies of object-oriented design and programming, which are used throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Students will learn how to move from informal problem statement, through increasingly precise problem specifications, to design and implementation of a solution for problems drawn from areas such as graphics, animation, simulation. Good programming and documentation habits are emphasized.

Professor: Sven Anderson

This course takes a systems perspective to the study of computers. As our programs scale up from a single author, user, and computer to programs designed, written, maintained, and used by multiple people that run on many computers (sometimes at the same time), considerations beyond algorithms alone are magnified. Design principles and engineering practices help us cope with this complexity: version control for multiple authors, input validation for multiple (adversarial) users, build automation tools for multiple platforms, process and thread models for parallelism. From how numbers are represented in hardware to how instruction-level parallelism and speculation can lead to bugs: the design, implementation, evaluation, safety and security of computing systems will be stressed. Students will explore computers from the ground up, using a variety of programming languages (including assembly) and tools like the command line, debuggers, and version control. Pre-requisites: Object-Oriented Programming or permission of instructor.

Professor: Joshua Glick

This seminar explores the vibrant relationship between sound and the moving image arts. We will examine such topics as live musical accompaniment in early cinema, soundtrack design, sync sound in cinéma vérité, blockbuster aesthetics, audio-visual installations, experimental ethnography, and collaborations between the recording and film/TV industries. A core set of films along with writings of major Sound Studies theorists, critics, and historians will animate our discussions. Turning to the contemporary moment, we also examine points of intersection between the moving image arts and podcasting, musical performance, and AI-enabled synthetic media. Students will learn to use tools to create media that center the presence of sound, including essay films and augmented reality projects.

Professor: Daniel Williams

What is the relationship of literary writing to scientific experiment? How do literary authors and movements characterize themselves (or become characterized) as experimental? This course surveys a range of texts from the 19th century to the present that engage with experiment in terms of content, form, or shape. We will read texts that represent scientific praxis alongside texts that deploy literary improvisation. We will consider what commonalities exist across experimental and avant-garde modes: the commitment to linguistic innovation and metatextual reflection; the prevalence of manifestos and movements; the lure of technology and intermediality. Throughout we will also consider experimentalism as both value and vice in critical method, from deconstruction to the digital humanities. In keeping with our theme, class meetings and assignments will frequently adopt improvisational practices—from automatic writing to chance-driven composition to quantitative analysis. Authors might include Hopkins, Mallarmé, Kafka, Woolf, Stein, Breton, Calvino, Pynchon, Ashbery, Hejinian, Davis, and Saunders.

Professor: Nathan Shockey

The 1970s in Japan began with a bang. Excitement thrummed as the Osaka Expo envisioned new futures for humankind, and anxiety gripped the country as protests over the U.S. security treaty thronged cities and campuses. The years that followed were at once laconic and culturally fecund; sandwiched between the radical 1960s and the easy money bubble years of the 1980s, the seventies were a period of rich and varied aesthetic output. This course uses a synchronic lens, moving across a range of literature and media, and going deep into the fiction, film, art, and music of a single transitional decade in order to explore the remaking of modern everyday life. We will consider topics such as science fiction, utopianism, and the retro-futurism of the World’s Fair; new developments in photography and installation art; the Art Theater Guild and avant-garde filmmaking; intersections between belletristic and popular fiction; the student movement and its end; underground and alternative manga; women’s liberation and new currents in feminist thought and action; experimental theater; the Folk Guerrillas, psychedelic rock, and the role of music in protest; novels probing new forms of family life; and much more.

Professor: Matthew Sargent

This course will introduce students to Max/Msp, an object-oriented programming environment for real-time audio processing, digital synthesis, algorithmic composition, data sonification, and more. Students will learn fundamental concepts of digital audio and computer programming while engaging in creative projects and in-class performances. The class will include examples of Max patches found in major works of 20/21st century electroacoustic music and sound art repertoire. The course will also explore connectivity between Max and other software applications, including Max4Live. The course will conclude with a final project. Introduction to Electronic Music, or a 100-level course in Computer Science, is recommended as a prerequisite.

Professor: Miriam Felton-Dansky

As an art form that inherently includes watching and being watched, theater has always been a rich site for political and social considerations of surveillance, a space where artists have both enacted and resisted the dynamics of police, corporate, and state tracking and control. As the digital era transformed surveillance into the many forms of mass data collection today employed by private companies and governments alike, artists have written plays, staged performances, and constructed installations that engage with twenty-first century surveillance technologies, from racially biased image recognition softwares to the extractive practices of social media companies. This course will grapple with the politics of both analog and digital surveillance as understood through theater, asking questions about the relationship between surveillance and authoritarian regimes, surveillance and local policing, surveillance and consumer culture, and the ethics of employing surveillance technologies as tools for making art. We will study the work of artists such as Griselda Gambaro, Annie Dorsen, Big Art Group, American Artist, Hito Steyerl, Lucas Baisch, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Assignments will include essays, in-class reports, and collaborative creative projects.

Professor: Sucharita Kanjilal

This course explores the complex ways in which media animate our social, sensory and political worlds, and enable particular relationships between people, places, bodies and things. A key focus of this class will be to de-Westernize our understanding of media theory and practice, and critically evaluate what media “do” in time and space. We will tackle questions such as: Under what historical and social circumstances do people consume, produce and distribute media? How have people appropriated global, national and local media, especially in the Global South? How do power relations produced by race, gender, class, caste and capital shape encounters with media and media industries? Our class will engage with a range of media forms, from colonial cookbooks to movie theatres, community radio stations to the YouTube industry. We will read scholarly works from across the fields of media studies, feminist theory, anthropology and digital geography, putting key media theorists (such as Stuart Hall, Marshall McLuhan, Laura Marks, Lila Abu-Lughod, Lev Manovich and Charles Hirschkind) in conversation with contemporary media practitioners, artists and organizers. We will also prioritize working on media projects ourselves, in order to assess our own positions as producers as well as users and consumers of media.

Professor: Sucharita Kanjilal

This course explores how food cultures and histories are shaped, contested and preserved by examining the recipe as a cultural artefact. It invites students to ask: What is a recipe, and how does it relate to questions of place and territory, memory and archive? In the contemporary food media and restaurant industries, the showcasing of ‘lost recipes’, as they relate to particular peoples and places, is an enchanting and lucrative practice that promises both cultural representation and culinary reclamation. This raises the question: How and why are some recipes thought to be ‘lost’, and by whom and in what form are they considered to be found? What happens when the preservation of culinary knowledges becomes unmoored from the material questions of dispossession and land loss? How does the growing global interest in food history relate to ongoing struggles for food sovereignty and food justice? Lost (and found) recipes, then, provide a unique entry point into questions of land and conquest, representational politics and cultural contestation, media and memorialization. Throughout this course, we will draw on scholarly and multimedia resources from across anthropology, food history, anti-caste and indigenous studies in order to take a capacious look at the recipe form and its related archives. By examining recipes embedded in oral histories and narrative-based records, colonial and community cookbooks, television programming and digital media, we will consider the kinds of conservation projects and imagined futures to which recipes contribute. And, by taking a global and feminist perspective, we will foreground indigenous and Dalit efforts towards culinary revitalization that confront the colonial-capitalist culinary archive.

Professor: Stephanie Lee

This studio course will introduce students to the language of architectural representation by framing the field of architecture as an ever changing process of social imagination and spatial deterioration. We will aim to understand design practice as an inherent mediation between changes in natural and cultural forces on buildings and environments. Engaging with ideas of decay, disrepair, and decrepitude, we will create fictional histories of dying industries situated in rural and suburban environments such as malls, farms, bank branches, and gas stations. Alongside readings about the legacies of capitalism and socio-economic crises, students will utilize techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, physical modeling, and compositional image-making to explore regenerative design processes and the emergence of new spatial possibilities for “ruins”. No prerequisites.

Professor: Betsy Clifton

Architectural models are a unique medium, a visual language that references the built world through scale and abstraction. As physical objects, they represent futures (proposals), histories (sites and contexts), and current conditions (material resources, shifting societal demands), often slipping between these temporalities. Learning how to make models is as important as learning to read what they tell us about the world. In this elective design studio, students will make an architectural model as a continuous practice, utilizing a spectrum of physical and digital fabrication methods such as woodworking, casting, digital modeling, and laser cutting. In making architectural models, we will question how societal models (such as domestic routines, building regulations, political cycles, and environmental systems) can be represented in physical form. We will ask how this form of architectural translation can complicate latent biases within the built environment, making visible otherwise invisible networks of power. ARCH111 prerequisite.

Professor: Susan Merriam

This class examines the extraordinary body of visual material representing the natural world created in Europe from 1500-1800. Still life paintings, study drawings, scientific illustrations, maps, and prints will serve as our focus. Questions we will address include: How did this body of visual material both reflect and produce beliefs about the natural world? What visual conventions did artists develop to depict nature, and how did these conventions inspire viewers to think about the natural world in new ways? How did colonial practices and discourses shape the visual record of nature in colonized landscapes? How were colonized peoples engaged in discourses about the natural world, and what role did they play in creating visual material? Can we say that this visual record still resonates with contemporary views of nature? Weekly reading assignments and short papers. AHVC distribution: 1400-1800.

Professor: Ben Coonley

In this course, students are introduced to processes for creating moving image artworks using 3D animation software and its ancillary technologies. Topics include: the basics of 3D modeling and animation, 3D scanning, and creative use of other technologies that allow artists to combine real and virtual spaces. Weekly readings reflect on the psychological, cultural, and aesthetic impacts of the increasingly prevalent use of computer-generated imagery in contemporary media. Students are not assumed to have any previous experience with 3D animation. This production class fulfills a moderation requirement.

Professor: Jacqueline Goss

If a canon of film, video and new media exists, it includes provocative media made in response to presidential elections. Fiction and documentary works like Haskell Wexler’s “Medium Cool,” TVTV’s “Four More Years,” Robert Altman’s “Tanner 88” and “Nashville,” Jason Simon’s “Spin,” DA Pennebaker’s “War Room,” and RTMark’s “voteauction” and “gwbush.com” websites successfully capture the complex narratives and legacies of the last four decades’ election years. Designed to coincide with the months immediately prior and following the US presidential election in November, “Framing the Election” provides a structure for the course participant to capture, process, frame and produce some aspect of presidential politics in terms of one’s own personal experience. Following the chronology of the election, we will use the first two months of the semester to gather source material and consider texts produced out of prior elections. The latter part of the semester is dedicated to the production of films, videos, sound works or internet-based projects made in response to the results of this election. Works may reflect any political persuasion and take any form including documentary, diary, personal essay, fiction and music. Prerequisite: a familiarity with and access to the tools one intends to use to produce work. This production course fulfills a moderation/major requirement.

Professor: A. Sayeeda Moreno

An intensive screenwriting workshop designed specifically for someone who plans to make a film for moderation or senior project. We will work on multiple drafts with the goal to develop a concise and polished short screenplay in preparation for production. The course will focus on poetic strategies creating the blueprint for a narrative fiction film. The class will engage in writing assignments forming the bedrock for vigorous analysis as students workshop their scripts. This course will require extensive outside research, and a commitment to writing, rewriting, and analysis. Students must currently have a short script in progress that they intend to workshop during the semester. Prerequisite: Film 256 – Writing the Film or Film 229 – Character & Story, or the successful completion of a sophomore level production class. Non-majors can participate but must email the professor to highlight their screenwriting experience prior to registration for approval. ALL prospective students must email [email protected] one paragraph (no more than 200 words) with a short synopsis of the screenplay you want to workshop in class, and explain your interest in taking this course.

Professor: Beka Goedde

This class will work together at the Bard Farm Community Garden to identify, cultivate, maintain, harvest and process colorants derived from plants for use in Studio Arts department facilities and for students’ own studio practice work. We will experiment together with extraction methods for natural dye for fabric and ink for paper and host a dye workshop open to fellow peers. Students will make a contribution to a group-chosen object of study (such as Madder, Goldenrod, Marigold, Chamomile, Yarrow, Turmeric, Indigo, Weld, Dyer’s Coreopsis) with botanical identification drawing, swatch book building, and lightfast testing. Students will take materials they gather and extract for their own practices, and present an art project for critique, informed by critical consideration of the value of impermanent color and material in temporary exhibitions. Expect tools and materials in this course to total $50, including paper, fabric, tincture containers, clippers and gloves. This course is designed for students who have taken at least one level I course previously in Studio Arts.

Professor: Whitney Slaten

How does improvisation operate as social research? What does it mean to improvise? How do not only musicians, but also people in everyday life, and broader social structures, improvise with one another? How can critical improvisation studies shift our recognition of the phrase “jazz studies” from a noun to a declarative statement? This course provides an introduction to improvisation studies both within and beyond music. Students will read, present, and discuss scholarship about improvisation while considering examples that reveal the collective choices of individuals and groups who pursue various opportunities over time. Lectures and demonstrations will focus on how such examples outline “new” methodologies for qualitative social research. This course will culminate in a paper that explores how improvisational techniques in music can inform poststructural ethnographic research.

Professor: Thomas Keenan and Brent Green

State governors (and the President) in the United States possess a strange remnant of royal sovereignty: the power of executive clemency, by which they can pardon offenses or commute the sentences of people convicted of crimes. They can do this to correct injustices, show mercy, or undo disproportionate punishments. Clemency doesn’t just happen – it requires a lot of work on the part of the incarcerated person and his or her advocates. But there are almost no rules governing what a clemency appeal looks like, so there is significant room for creativity in how applicants present their cases. In this practical seminar we will join forces with a team of students at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to prepare short video presentations that will accompany a number of New York State clemency applications this fall. Proficiency with video shooting, editing, and an independent work ethic are important. Meetings with clemency applicants in prison are a central element of the class. This is an opportunity to work collaboratively with law students and faculty, to do hands-on human rights research and advocacy, and to create work that has real-life impact. The class will alternate between video production and the study of clemency and pardons, emotion and human rights, first-person narrative, and persuasion by visual means. Please submit a short statement describing your abilities in shooting and editing video, and your interest in criminal justice, by May 6th. There are no prerequisites, but we seek a class that includes filmmakers, analysts, and activists. This is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences (ELAS) class.

Professor: Theresa Law

This course introduces students to the methodologies of object-oriented design and programming, which are used throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Students will learn how to move from informal problem statement, through increasingly precise problem specifications, to design and implementation of a solution for problems drawn from areas such as graphics, animation, simulation. Good programming and documentation habits are emphasized.

Professor: Philip Pardi

Whether we train our gaze outward at the world around us or inward at worlds within, writers are called to pay attention in particular ways. In this class, we will consider attention as the first step of the creative process, and we will study and practice the seemingly simple act of attending to all that we encounter as we move through our days and (on a good day) make poems. While we will devote some time to revision, the focus of this workshop will be the fertile ground between immersive experience and early, generative, exploratory poetic composition. The longer Friday session will be spent writing together, taking short walks and excursions, reading poems, sharing our work, and discussing readings related to the science and practice of attention; the one-hour Wednesday session will be devoted to a sustained exploration of a single poem. Special Note: To facilitate our experiment with attentiveness, class meetings and most of the assignments will occur completely offline (i.e. no phone, no laptop, no smartwatch). If you have any concerns about this (or any) aspect of the course format, please contact me before registration.

Professor: Patricia Lopez-Gay

The changing notion of “witnessing” has become increasingly central to understanding forms of social and political violence. Widely theorized regarding the memorialization of mass suffering events occurred in the 20th century, this concept can also help readdress today’s sustained sentiment of socio-cultural crisis (ecological, migratory, gender- based violence, COVID19 pandemic…), as it is dealt with from literature, film, and the arts. In this transdisciplinary seminar, we will interrogate how the uses, targets, and moral responsibilities of testimony have shifted in a context where cultural manifestations often blur the boundaries between journalism and literature, judicial claims and forms of artistic performance, fiction and nonfiction writing. We will delve into intriguing questions raised by these new hybrid cultural practices, with a focus on literature and the visual arts originating from Spain in the 21st century. What does the current use of categories such as “documentary” and “testimonial” mean in self-proclaimed works of fiction? Can fiction bear witness by proxy? Can judicial claims become art? How do audiences receive these hybrid works? How can these fictional testimonies help us reassess our present and reshape our memory of the future? We will explore selected writings by Jorge Semprún, Lara Moreno, Javier Cercas, Sara Torres, Luis López Carrasco, and Layla Martínez; films by Víctor Erice and Carla Simón; and artwork by Paula Bonet and Santiago Talavera. This course will include a series of conversations with contemporary writers from Spain. Conducted in Spanish.

Professor: Laura Kunreuther

This course examines modern technologies of voice (eg. radio, gramophone, voice recorders) and asks how such technologies have shaped specific modes of listening, and vice versa. Modern ideologies of voice – deployed in politics, social movements and humanitarian organizations, as well as many musical and cultural productions – tend to naturalize the relationship between voice and individuality, agency, and empowerment. The voice, it is assumed, provides unmediated access to the self and a direct way of making one’s desires and ideas known in public. But the immediacy of the voice often depends upon specific technologies (eg. sound recording, amplification, broadcasting) and human language labor (eg. interpreters/translators, stenographers, spirit animators) through which particular voices are represented, cited, and made audible. Drawing inspiration from critical indigenous studies, sound and media studies, we will examine human and mechanical technologies of voice that have been central to the ethnographic recording and circulation of indigenous folktales, language, and songs in early anthropology. We will also explore the way more contemporary indigenous forms of listening have become part of broadcast culture and digital archives that offer models for novel approaches to ethnographic listening. Students will be required to focus on a specific technology of voice or listening practice from within or beyond the course syllabus, and will produce both a paper and a listening project that will be showcased at the EH share event and possibly on the EH and/or Rethinking Place website for broader public consumption. Readings will include selections from: Elizabeth Povinelli and Karrabing Collective (indigenous media collective based in New Zealand); Brian Hochman (Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology); Dylan Robinson (Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies); Audra Simpson (On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’, and Colonial Citizenship); Daniel Fisher (The Voice and its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia).

Professor: Michael Cohen

This studio-based course introduces students to architectural tools of communication while presenting architecture as a field that is expansive—a field that engages not only with technical knowledge, but also with the making of public imaginaries, personal environments, cultural spatial aesthetics, and even the contested ground of the political, economic and social. The course is simultaneously an introduction to the techniques of representation that define the discipline of architecture and an opportunity to explore and question how architecture mediates the world. Students will learn and practice techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, mapping, 3D modeling and compositional image-making. While the focus will be on an array of forms of architectural drawing, these techniques will be carefully positioned against a survey of paradigmatic moments and themes in the history of architecture that will help situate the practice today. Throughout the term, our design work will be supplemented by readings and periodic research work, and we will situate this against regular lectures that will introduce you to the broader culture of architecture. The course will provide a foundation of concepts and skills necessary to make architecture legible and to convey a spatial argument through design. No prerequisites.

Professor: Michael Cohen

As abstractions, architectural drawings must paradoxically detach themselves from the material world in order to represent it. However, as representations of the built environment, drawings are excellent tools to document corporeal conditions and social relations. Drawings are distanced yet rooted in reality, making them an effective medium to critique or make demands about the structures that constitute everyday life. In this elective design studio, students will focus on housing and domestic space to develop a capacity of architectural drawing, digitally and by hand, that both questions the conventional socio-spatial disposition of architecture, and that can propose new ways of being. The intention is not to learn methods of architectural representation as a means of mastery, but to mobilize drawing as a mode of speculation and intervention that holds weight on the plane of the real; to create drawings that demand.

Professor: Stephanie Lee

How might botanical worlds carry notions of extractive economies, settler colonialism and legacies of racial capitalism? This elective design studio seminar will focus on the interconnectedness of property, plants and bodies from the past to present. While understanding the role of architecture and landscape in agri-capitalism, we will expose matters of resiliency, reform and recovery through case studies such as the Yedikule Gardens, Victory gardens, the Millennium Seed Bank, Crystal Palace, Orangeries, biopiracy and others. Focusing on the role of “floor plans” as an architectural device, we will situate these complex entanglements by collaborating on a toolkit of care for humans, land and everything in between. For the second half of the studio, we will work with the Bard Horticulture and Arboretum Department to design a land-based intervention for the campus. Students will have weekly assignments, and learn techniques of digital drafting, model making, compositional image-making through Adobe Creative Programs and Rhino 3D. No prerequisites.

Professor: Anne Chen

What silences do archaeological archives unintentionally preserve? In what ways do power and privilege influence the creation and shape of archaeological archives, and dictate who has access to them? How might new technologies help us begin to rectify inequities of access? Once called by its excavators the “Pompeii of the East,” the ancient archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) preserves evidence of what everyday life was like in an ancient Roman city. The site is home to the earliest Christian church building yet found, the most elaborately decorated ancient synagogue known to date, and testifies to the ways in which ancient religions and cultures intermingled and inspired one another. Yet since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the site has been irreparably compromised for future archaeological exploration. More than ever, our knowledge and understanding of the site’s ancient phases will depend almost entirely upon archival information collected in the course of archaeological excavations that took place 100 years ago when Syria was under French colonial occupation. In this hands-on practicum course focused on the case-study of this fascinating archaeological site, students will not only learn what we know of Dura-Europos as it was in antiquity, but will also think critically about issues central to the use and development of archival resources more generally. Coursework will center around firsthand engagement with data, artifacts, and archival materials from the site, and will allow students the opportunity to develop guided research projects that ultimately contribute toward the goal of improving the site’s accessibility and intelligibility to users worldwide. The methods and critical perspectives explored in this class will be particularly relevant to students interested in exploring careers in GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museum) fields. AHVC distribution: Ancient.

Professor: A. Sayeeda Moreno

An introductory writing course that looks at creative approaches to writing short films and dialogue scenes. Starting with personal histories, lineage, and identities, students learn the tools to write invigorating, character-driven short screenplays. Building characters through transcription and investigation to enhance character development and story arc ultimately creating a visual language, students develop and workshop a short screenplay (maximum 10-15 pages). This course will require extensive outside research and you are responsible for committing to a writing and rewriting process. Registration open to Sophomores and above.

Professor: Ben Coonley

This production course explores the challenges and possibilities of video installation: an evolving contemporary art form that extends video beyond conventional exhibition spaces such as theaters into sculptural, site-specific, physically immersive, and multiple channel exhibition contexts. Presentations, screenings, and readings augment critical thinking about temporal and spatial relationships, narrative structure, viewer perception and the challenges of presenting time-based media artwork in a gallery or museum setting. Workshops hone technical skills and introduce methods for the creative use of video projectors, video monitors, sound equipment, surveillance cameras, media players, multi-channel synchronizers, digital software, and lightweight sculptural elements. Students develop research interests and apply their unique skill sets to short turnaround exercises and a larger self-directed final project. This is an advanced course. Students are expected to have some experience with videocamera operation and editing. This course fulfills a moderation/major requirement.

Professor: Kwame Holmes

Over the course of 5 novels: Kindred, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler laid out the blueprint for a project of Abolition; an ongoing unmaking and remaking of our world. We’ll read these novels in order to: 1. Locate Butler’s prophetic vision, i.e. how her work predicts the crises of climate change, warfare, and the intensification of suffering at the hands of capitalist-driven dispossession and deprivation. 2. Discern Butler’s vision for saving society, and ourselves from the future she, and so many of us now, see before us. With Butler’s philosophy in mind, students will design a guide for building communities that can survive the coming transition, and prevent humanity from reproducing the very cycles of division and violence that made it possible for Butler to so accurately predict the world as it is.

Professor: Matthew Sargent

In this seminar, our computers will act as composers, improvisers, orchestrators, and accompanists. Students will explore a variety of conceptual strategies for the real-time computer generation of musical events, while learning fundamentals of object-oriented programming. Students will engage in discussion of artificial intelligence and musical creativity, through the investigation of pioneering algorithmic works from the 20/21st century, including the music of Lejaren Hiller, Iannis Xenakis, George Lewis, David Cope, Laurie Spiegel, Tristan Perich, and Holly Herndon. This course will conclude with a final project and class performance. Course content will be directly relevant to composers, improvisers, film and electronic arts majors, and game designers, among others. Pre-requisites: Introduction to Electronic Music, a 200-level Computer Science course, or permission of the professor. It is encouraged that students enroll concurrently in Introduction to Max/Msp.

Professor: Brent Green and Thomas Keenan

State governors (and the President) in the United States possess a strange remnant of royal sovereignty: the power of executive clemency, by which they can pardon offenses or commute the sentences of people convicted of crimes. They can do this to correct injustices, show mercy, or undo disproportionate punishments. Clemency doesn’t just happen – it requires a lot of work on the part of the incarcerated person and his or her advocates. But there are almost no rules governing what a clemency appeal looks like, so there is significant room for creativity in how applicants present their cases. In this practical seminar we will join forces with a team of students at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to prepare short video presentations that will accompany a number of New York State clemency applications this fall. Proficiency with video shooting, editing, and an independent work ethic are important. Meetings with clemency applicants in prison are a central element of the class. This is an opportunity to work collaboratively with law students and faculty, to do hands-on human rights research and advocacy, and to create work that has real-life impact. The class will alternate between video production and the study of clemency and pardons, emotion and human rights, first-person narrative, and persuasion by visual means. Please submit a short statement describing your abilities in shooting and editing video, and your interest in criminal justice, by May 6th. There are no prerequisites, but we seek a class that includes filmmakers, analysts, and activists. This is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences (ELAS) class.

Professor: Kerri-Ann Norton and Sven Anderson

This course introduces students to the methodologies of object-oriented design and programming, which are used throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Students will learn how to move from informal problem statement, through increasingly precise problem specifications, to design and implementation of a solution for problems drawn from areas such as graphics, animation, simulation. Good programming and documentation habits are emphasized.

Professor: Dawn Lundy Martin

We are alive and writing during one of the most fragile times in most of our lifetimes—a time of plague and war, a time of elevated mass violence and white supremacist organizing, a time when most of us seek safety, not risk. Poetry, however, is a way toward thinking through what it means to be human in any context, whether we can recognize the world as ours or not. It has the capacity to shift our thinking—about sentence structures, about habitual patterns of thought, about what might be possible in the future. Poetry helps us recalibrate the already known so that we may re-see what appears ordinary or immutable. In this course, you’ll generate new poems that push the boundaries of what you already know about what a poem might be. In creative practice, we’ll investigate this notion of risk. Readings may include work by Carl Phillips, Claudia Rankine, Myung Mi Kim, Fahima Ife, Cecilia Vicuña, Saidiya Hartman, Jane Wong, JJJJJerome Ellis, Justin Phillip Reed, among others.

Professor: Julia Rosenbaum, Yuka Suzuki and Krista Caballero

A bright blue ring of baubles frames the entrance. An elaborate arch welcomes potential visitors. While we tend to associate human architects with the structures we call home, nonhuman animals such as Bowerbirds are also creative designers, carefully constructing environments like the one described above. What is at stake in distinguishing between the spaces that Bowerbirds and humans create and inhabit? Inspired by feminist and Indigenous frameworks, this course introduces students to the concept of home on multiple scales to explore how human and nonhuman animals imagine and make a sense of place. How, for example, do we define home and habitat? Whose homes and habitats do we interact with and move through? How do memory and storytelling shape our understandings of such places? How have ideas and practices of home and habitat changed and what will they look like in the future? This course addresses such questions through four specific themes: place-making and belonging; mobility and rootedness; aesthetics and animals; and site/non-site. Each section includes human and nonhuman experiences and is anchored with two to three key texts, a set of case studies, and interdisciplinary practices of art making.

Professor: Jana Mader

For centuries, the land on which the Bard College campus is located has been inhabited and utilized by various societies and cultures. In this course, we will critically examine the existing landscape to unfold the “story” of the land we currently call our home. Specific areas of study will include the history of Native Americans in the area, colonialism and slavery in the region; the Hudson Valley in art and literature and its role in the construction of an American identity in the 19th century; native plants and trees, agriculture, the river and environmental activism in the area; green spaces and the buildings on campus. We will explore the past, present, and possible future of the Hudson Valley through a range of primary and secondary sources, including Anne Whiston Spirn’s “The Language of Landscape,” Patrick Wolfe’s “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Myra Armstead’s “From Property to Proprietor: The Exceptional Journey of Alexander Gilson,” Susan Fox Rogers’ “My Reach,” Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Julia Rosenbaum’s “Visions of Belonging: New England Art and the Making of American Identity,” Lucy Sante’s “19 Reservoirs. On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City,” and John Stilgoe’s “The River.” While some meetings will take place in the classroom, we will also spend time outside the classroom at places like Old Growth Forest, Montgomery Place, Blithewood, Bard Farm, Bard Field Station, Tivoli Bays, and the Hessel Museum to close-read the language of landscape and to explore how our current home and what we see in it has changed over time. Students choose a semester-long research project based on their interests, culminating in an exhibition. This course includes a voluntary trip to Olana in Hudson, NY.

Professor: Krista Caballero

In both theory and practice, this course is designed to explore the intersections of technology, justice, and creative practice. One of our central lines of inquiry will be: How might technology be utilized in ethical and just ways to (re)imagine our human cultural practices and resulting ecological impact? In approaching this question, we will consider ways that artists and community activists are pushing boundaries to both critically and creatively address the future of technology and issues relating to identity and privacy, data sovereignty and governance, e-waste and rare earth mining, deepfakes and AI. Key theoretical texts from scholars such as Felix Guattari, Safiya Umoja Noble, Hito Steyerl, Gregory Cajete, Shannon Mattern, Lev Manovich, and Lisa Nakamura will ground our exploration alongside a series of guest lectures by a diverse group of artists, scholars and activists across the OSUN network. Through readings and discussions, this course will explore technology across historical periods and how past forms help shape our current moment. Students will also work intensively to develop creative projects that blur boundaries between physical and digital media, integrate field-based research, and experiment with interdisciplinary practices of making. This is an OSUN Online Class, taught online and open to Bard students and students from OSUN partner institutions.

Professor: Fahmidul Haq

South Asian Cinema is nearly synonymous with Indian Cinema to the international audience, though other South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal have developed strong film cultures too. The objective of the course is mapping the cine profile of the South Asian countries and examining Bollywood’s hegemonic presence in the region. This seminar course will study some cases across a range of South Asian Cinema cultures by exploring their common as well as different cultural backgrounds, historiography, and sociopolitical realities. Topics will include both historical and contemporary cinematic practices in South Asian countries such as the Partition of India in South Asian Cinema, cinematic representation of the Liberation War of Bangladesh, Bollywood’s cultural influence in other South Asian countries, portrayal of Kashmir in Indian cinema, diasporic Indian cinema and ‘other Bollywood’ cinema. Films by directors such as Raj Kapoor, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Anurag Kashyap from India, Zahir Raihan, Alamgir Kabir and Tareque Masud from Bangladesh, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Shoaib Mansoor from Pakistan, and Lester James Peries from Sri Lanka will be studied closely. 

South Asian Cinema is nearly synonymous with Indian Cinema to the international audience, though other South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal have developed strong film cultures too. The objective of the course is mapping the cine profile of the South Asian countries and examining Bollywood’s hegemonic presence in the region. This seminar course will study some cases across a range of South Asian Cinema cultures by exploring their common as well as different cultural backgrounds, historiography, and sociopolitical realities. Topics will include both historical and contemporary cinematic practices in South Asian countries such as the Partition of India in South Asian Cinema, cinematic representation of the Liberation War of Bangladesh, Bollywood’s cultural influence in other South Asian countries, portrayal of Kashmir in Indian cinema, diasporic Indian cinema and ‘other Bollywood’ cinema. Films by directors such as Raj Kapoor, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Anurag Kashyap from India, Zahir Raihan, Alamgir Kabir and Tareque Masud from Bangladesh, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Shoaib Mansoor from Pakistan, and Lester James Peries from Sri Lanka will be studied closely.

Professor: Michael Cohen

This studio-based course introduces students to architectural tools of communication while presenting architecture as a field that is expansive—a field that engages not only with technical knowledge, but also with the making of public imaginaries, personal environments, cultural spatial aesthetics, and even the contested ground of the political, economic and social. The course is simultaneously an introduction to the techniques of representation that define the discipline of architecture and an opportunity to explore and question how architecture mediates the world. Students will learn and practice techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, mapping, 3D modeling and compositional image-making. While the focus will be on an array of forms of architectural drawing, these techniques will be carefully positioned against a survey of paradigmatic moments and themes in the history of architecture that will help situate the practice today. Throughout the term, our design work will be supplemented by readings and periodic research work, and we will situate this against regular lectures that will introduce you to the broader culture of architecture. The course will provide a foundation of concepts and skills necessary to make architecture legible and to convey a spatial argument through design. No prerequisites.

Professor: Betsy Clifton

Architectural exhibitions are places that take stock of a field in constant movement; a site in which global shifts and debates intersect, bringing into view consequences and openings for a future under construction. In this course we will mine the medium of the architectural exhibition to ask: How can an archive be used to revise an established canon? How can the curation of an exhibition unsettle what has become commonplace? How do we situate present practice against an uncertain future? We will discuss the ways in which architecture is produced and reproduced within the space of an exhibition, as well as how the exhibition, as a contested space, can create openings for renewed understandings of culture and politics beyond architecture. This course will culminate in a public exhibition featuring the architectural model as a central medium to re-present contemporary and historical ideas against one another. By critically surveying contemporary practice, students will employ a range of representational techniques to enunciate questions for possible shared futures that escape the gravity of dominant cultural imaginaries. Moderation is a prerequisite.

Professor: Betsy Clifton

Architectural models are a unique medium, a visual language that references the built world through scale and abstraction. As physical objects, they represent futures (proposals), histories (sites and contexts), and current conditions (material resources, shifting societal demands), often slipping between these temporalities. Learning how to make models is as important as learning to read what they tell us about the world. In this elective design studio, students will make an architectural model as a continuous practice, utilizing a spectrum of physical and digital fabrication methods such as woodworking, casting, digital modeling, and laser cutting. In making architectural models, we will question how societal models (such as domestic routines, building regulations, political cycles, and environmental systems) can be represented in physical form. We will ask how this form of architectural translation can complicate latent biases within the built environment, making visible otherwise invisible networks of power. No prerequisites.

Professor: Gabriel Perron

In this course designed for non-majors, we will study the microorganisms that inhabit, create, or contaminate food. The first half of the course will introduce students to topics in food safety such as food spoilage, food borne infections, and antibiotic resistance. In the second half of the course, students will learn how to harness the capabilities of the many microbes present in our environment to turn rotting vegetables or spoiling milk into delicious food. Students will also learn how next-generation technologies are revealing the important ecological dynamics shaping microbial communities in transforming food with possible beneficial effects on human health. Throughout the course, students will learn how to design, conduct, and analyze simple experiments while working with microbiology techniques, including DNA sequencing. No prerequisite.

Professor: Rose Sloan (A) & Bob McGrail (B)

This course introduces students to the methodologies of object-oriented design and programming, which are used throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Students will learn how to move from informal problem statement, through increasingly precise problem specifications, to design and implementation of a solution for problems drawn from areas such as graphics, animation, simulation. Good programming and documentation habits are emphasized.

Professor: Argyro Nicolaou

The need to document contemporary and historical experiences has always been at the heart of the arts, be it literature, music, painting and sculpture, filmmaking or live arts/performance. Yet an equally long tradition of thought exists that insists on separating fact from fiction; stories from history; and aesthetics from politics, relegating any serious pursuit of truth to so-called documentary practices alone. But what counts as documentary? Can’t the artful also document? And if so, what sorts of relationships of representation and critical interpretation emerge from the merging of artistic practices with the facts and consequences of historical and/or contemporary sociopolitical events? This seminar will draw from a diverse tradition of historical fiction on the page and screen, political cinema, research-based art and critical theory to explore the different ways in which the arts can document reality and how ‘real-life’ documents are turned into art. (D&J justification: As a course dealing with the comparative study of how the arts can document reality, this course will emphasize the ways in which social differences of various types manifest in and are addressed by artistic practices in their documentation of reality.)

Professor: Gabriella Lindsay

What happens when photographs and texts are brought together? In the French-speaking world, there is a particularly strong tradition of writers and artists using photographic images and text to create new forms of meaning, unsurprising perhaps, given French claims on the invention of a photographic process in the early 19th century. This seminar will consider the relationship between literature and photography by engaging closely with photo-textual and theoretical works translated from French, focusing on the themes of autobiography, historical memory and postcoloniality. We will examine questions of documentation, experimentation, selfhood, violence, colonialism, memory and forgetting, perception, ethics, and the nature of representation. From Sophie Calle and Hervé Guibert’s photobiographical blurring of fiction and reality to Malek Alloula’s “album” of Algerian colonial postcards and Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi’s photo-poetic history of Guianan work-camps, we will think about how words and photographic images transform one another to create new understandings of the self, individual and collective memory, loss and history. Students will also have the opportunity to make photo-texts of their own. Authors to be studied may include Roland Barthes, Sophie Calle, Marie NDiaye, Hervé Guibert, Hélène Cixous, Malek Alloula, Patrick Modiano, Patrick Chamoiseau, Rodolphe Hammadi, Marc Garanger, Leïla Sebbar, Chris Marker. This course is conducted in English and does not assume any prior knowledge of French, photography, or literature in French. This course fulfills the World Literature requirement. By engaging with the representation of colonial violence and colonial memory, the class also counts for the Difference and Justice distributional area.

Professor: Matthew Sargent

This course will introduce students to MAX/MSP, an object-oriented programming environment for real-time audio processing, digital synthesis, algorithmic composition, data sonification, and more. Students will learn fundamental concepts of digital audio and computer programming while engaging in creative projects and in-class performances. The class will include examples of Max patches found in major works of 20/21st century electroacoustic music and sound art repertoire. The course will also explore connectivity between Max and other software applications, including Max4Live. The course will conclude with a final project. Introduction to Electronic Music, or a 100-level course in Computer Science, is recommended as a prerequisite.

Professor: Benjamin Hale

Philosopher Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” Ultimately, he determined the question unanswerable: A bat’s experience of the world is so alien to our own that it is beyond the human understanding of subjective experience. That’s arguable. But it is true at least that a bat’s experience—or that of any other nonhuman consciousness—is not inaccessible to human imagination. In this course we will read and discuss a wide variety of texts, approaching the subject of nonhuman consciousness through literature, philosophy, and science. We will read works that attempt to understand the experiences of apes, panthers, rats, ticks, elephants, octopuses, lobsters, cows, bats, monsters, puppets, computers, and eventually, zombies. Course reading may include Descartes, Kafka, Rilke, Jakob von Uexküll, Patricia Highsmith, John Gardner, J.A. Baker, Eduardo Kohn, David Foster Wallace, Zora Neale Hurston, Temple Grandin, Jane Goodall, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Susan Daitch, Giorgio Agamben, Bennett Sims, and E. O. Wilson, among others, in addition to a viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and possibly other films. There will be several long writing assignments over the course of the semester, and a workshop component. Students interested in this workshop must email [email protected]

Professor: Fahmidul Haq

Doing social media projects practically and analyzing their role critically are two main objectives of the course. This course will raise some critical question that evolve around social media which will include – surveillance and privacy, labor, big data, misinformation, cyborg and cyberfeminism. Topics will include the socio-historical perspectives regarding technology and society, the nature and characteristics of different social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, snapchat and more, big data capitalism and imperialism, civic engagement through digital platforms, mainstream media’s compelling realities to be more ‘social’, misinformation, racism and right-wing authoritarianism in social media, the role of social media influencers, branding and social media marketing and an exploration for a true social media. The course will draw from a broad range of social theory including communication and cultural theories, political economy and media anthropology to critically evaluate the impact of social media on human relationships, activism, branding, politics, news production and dissemination and identity formation. Theoretical notions such as hyperreality by Jean Baudrillard, network society by Manuel Castells and digital labor by Christian Fuchs will be discussed in the class. As ‘prosumers’, students will create social media projects and analyze some trendy cases evident in different platforms.

Professor: Vivien Sansour

Inspired by the Palestinian saying El Batin Bustan (The Belly is a Garden) this course explores bio-cultural diversity and the question of being of the earth and part of its diverse terrains. Fundamental questions we will explore are: How can biodiversity and human diversity be paths to wellbeing? How can humans understand themselves as nature’s co-creators? This course is designed as an experiential journey using multiple forms, including original texts, discussion, guided fieldwork directed by faculty, nature walks, in class writing exercises, and group workshops. Students will work in consultation with the professor on individual self-directed projects throughout the semester. These projects will be presented at the end of semester to the combined class of AQB and Annandale. The projects will all require some form of field research such as conducting interviews, gathering site related natural material for possible installations, photography, oral histories, film, among others including performance art. Students will engage in hands-on, outdoor activities such as cooking, planting, and possibly seed or crop harvesting with discussions of key texts grounding our interdisciplinary investigation. In an attempt to deconstruct colonial forms of being we will be exploring ourselves as living beings navigating a global landscape that is both in crisis and in constant transformation. How do we relate to the soil beneath our feet? How are we informed by other living beings in our surroundings? Between the question of settler and Indigenous how can we better understand ourselves, and our place in the world, while engaging in collaborative designs of new possible futures? As an OSUN Network Course, students will have the opportunity to participate in shared online events and conversations with students at Al-Quds Bard College, Palestine but the majority of the semester will be in-person on Bard’s Annandale Campus.

Professor: Jesse McCormick

In this introductory course, the ‘tools of the trade’ (plans, sections, digital drafting, perspectives, collages, physical and digital modeling and montage) will be entry points into deciphering the politics, practices and protocols that govern our built environment. Seeking to proactively challenge certain assumptions of the field—that architecture is a practice based on production (of buildings, of assets, of products, of space, of culture, of drawings of images, of ideas…)—the aim of the course will be to reposition architecture as a method of seeing and reading space; a production of legibility. Through a series of explorations, students will learn the tools, techniques and media of spatial-visual communication used in the field of architecture while attempting to make new claims about its production and productivity, opening up new roles for architects in evolving social paradigms. Students will be asked to interrogate both lived space, representations of it, and existing precedents, as well as to engage with texts that will inform an evolving and consistent discussion throughout. No prerequisites.

Professor: Stephanie Lee

How can we approach architecture beyond form-based explorations, but as a mode to re-imagine current sociopolitical, institutional, and territorial entanglements? This design studio seminar explores architecture as a network of situated relationships between built and non-built environments. Focusing on the colonial construction of rural imaginaries, students will pull apart and realign existing agricultural food systems at various scales. We will question the destructive and extractive processes of industrial agriculture, globalization and late capitalism by suggesting a para-fictional alternative: a land practice of resistance, regeneration, and mutual care based on the network of radical farms in the Hudson Valley. For the final project, students will produce a series of speculative projection drawings that read as one collective canvas with multiple scales, perspectives, and realities.

Professor: Ivan Lopez Munuera

In the contemporary world, the concept of the human being has transcended traditional boundaries. In the face of the climate crisis, and with the challenges made by non-normative knowledge structures, our bodies are increasingly understood as intricate ecosystems, composed of bacteria, fungi, viruses, microplastics, prosthetics, chemical regimes, and myriad other components. However, prevailing historical and theoretical narratives in architecture have remained predominantly anthropocentric, placing autonomous and zipped-up human beings at the core of their discourse. This course offers an exploration of the complex interplay between non-human and human designs within contemporary global contexts, delving into historical examples and new imaginations. Emphasis is placed on the incorporation of what is traditionally termed “nature” into design processes, as well as the roles that the evolution of animal, vegetal, and mineral have played in design. Additionally, we will investigate non-human forms of intelligence and healing, ceremonial and repair practices in architecture, challenging the notion that design must solely serve human needs. We will work collectively in the production of an exhibition on Non-Human Architecture, and a publication that will accompany this show.

Professor:  Anne Chen

What silences do archaeological archives unintentionally preserve? In what ways do power and privilege influence the creation and shape of archaeological archives, and dictate who has access to them? How might new technologies help us begin to rectify inequities of access? Once called by its excavators the “Pompeii of the East,” the ancient archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) preserves evidence of what everyday life was like in an ancient Roman city. The site is home to the earliest Christian church building yet found, the most elaborately decorated ancient synagogue known to date, and testifies to the ways in which ancient religions and cultures intermingled and inspired one another. Yet since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the site has been irreparably compromised for future archaeological exploration. More than ever, our knowledge and understanding of the site’s ancient phases will depend almost entirely upon archival information collected in the course of archaeological excavations that took place 100 years ago when Syria was under French colonial occupation. In this hands-on practicum course focused on the case-study of this fascinating archaeological site, students will not only learn what we know of Dura-Europos as it was in antiquity, but will also think critically about issues central to the use and development of archival resources more generally. Coursework will center around firsthand engagement with data, artifacts, and archival materials from the site, and will allow students the opportunity to develop guided research projects that ultimately contribute toward the goal of improving the site’s accessibility and intelligibility to users worldwide. The methods and critical perspectives explored in this class will be particularly relevant to students interested in exploring careers in GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museum) fields. This course is offered by default as a 2-credit class that meets approximately eight times during the semester (precise meeting schedule to be set at the beginning of the semester); however, students interested in earning a full 4-credits have the option of adding a 2-credit tutorial (must be arranged in consultation with the professor in the beginning of the semester). AHVC distribution: Ancient.

Professor: Jeannete Estruth

This seminar uses the space of the Silicon Valley to explore larger threads and themes in post-war economic, urban, political, and intellectual United States history.

Professor: Jacqueline Goss

In this course we will make video and web-based projects using digital animation and compositing programs (primarily Adobe Animate and After Effects). The course is designed to help students develop a facility with these tools and to find personal animating styles that surpass the tools at hand. We will work to reveal techniques and aesthetics associated with digital animation that challenge conventions of storytelling, editing, figure/ground relationship, and portrayal of the human form. To this end, we will refer to diverse examples of animating and collage from film, music, writing, photography, and painting. Prerequisite: familiarity with a nonlinear video-editing program. This production course fulfills a moderation/major requirement. Registration open to Sophomores and above.

Professor: Chiara Pavone

In a famous speech given shortly after the occurrence of the Great Tōhoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster in 2011, writer Murakami Haruki affirmed that “To be Japanese means, in a certain sense, to live alongside a variety of natural catastrophes.” This course’s main objective will be to explore and dispute the origins and genealogy of this – widespread and undisputed – claim. Each cvlass will introduce literary works and media tracing Japan’s history of natural and man-made disasters, explore different methodologies in disaster research (including disaster anthropology, sociology, post-colonial theory and ecocriticism), and engage critically with issues shaping the perception and representation of disasters – such as the proximity of narrators and narratees to the epicenter of the catastrophe, minority populations’ vulnerability to hazards and systemic discrimination, authority and biases in the process of memorialization. The course will offer some critical instruments to answer the question through the close reading of literary works, films and visual artifacts; and by situating these pieces in a larger cultural and technological history that extends well beyond the borders of the modern Japanese nation. This course is part of the World Literature offering.

Professors: Philip Pardi

Although frequently depicted as living and working in isolation, Emily Dickinson was vitally connected to the world around her. In this class, we will immerse ourselves in Dickinson’s writing, in the writers she was drawn to, and in the historical moment of which she was a part. By exploring how her work participates in the poetic practices and intellectual currents of her day, we will sharpen our understanding of her unique, even radical, contribution to American poetry. Along the way, we will consider Dickinson as a reader (of Emerson, the Psalms, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and periodicals delivering news of the Civil War, for example) as well as her influence on poets who have read and responded to her (Adrienne Rich, Lorine Niedecker, Camille Dungy, and Rae Armantrout, to name a few). And as we read our way into Dickinson’s world, we will also take up the question of reading itself: What does it mean to read a poem “closely” and what kind(s) of attention does the act of reading require of us? What happens in the brain when we read and how can we enrich or deepen the experience? Note on Course Format: This course meets once a week for six hours. At the beginning of each session, we will turn off our phones (and laptops, smart watches, etc.) and be completely offline for the duration of the class. This will allow us to explore our existing habits as readers and to experiment with new ones. (Students who have concerns about the format of the course should contact the professor before registration.)

Professor: Dawn Lundy Martin

There is a certain perversity in knowing. The disciplinary apparatuses of the state have taken forms of which we are newly aware. They watch and document under the auspices of providing safety for citizens. We, in turn, provide almost everyone with excess access to what we do, who we believe ourselves to be, and what we think. Is counter documentation possible? What does it mean to attempt to speak against power? What narratives, forms, languages, gestures, and means toward performance can help us create future selves liberated from the overabundance of record? In this course, we will work toward uncovering the effects of surveillance and AI on writing and imagine strategies for refusing those effects. Together we will generate anti-dossiers that resist totality and information accumulation (secret or other).

Professor: Joshua Glick

This course offers a foundation in media history and theory, with particular focus on how artists have experimented with emerging technologies and changing media landscapes in ways that both reflect and transform culture. We will consider old and new forms alike, from print media to social media, from the camera obscura to photography, from broadcast television to early net.art, and from the diorama to virtual reality, as we explore how media have continually constructed our perceptions of time, space, knowledge, and identity. We will read media theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Jessica Marie Johnson, Donna Haraway, Lev Manovich, Erkki Huhtamo, and Lisa Nakamura alongside examining the work of artists such as Nam June Paik, Stephanie Dinkins, Guillermo Goméz-Peña, Wendy Red Star, Ricardo Dominquez, Mary Flanagan, and Will Wilson. We will also spend hands-on time working creatively with media, in order to assess our own positions as producers as well as users and consumers of media. This course fulfills a requirement for the Experimental Humanities concentration.

Professor: Thena Tak

This introductory studio course to architecture foregrounds the discipline as a practice of entanglements. Rather than privileging object-based thinking, the course considers architecture through a more alchemic approach: one that focuses on relationships, transformations, and ritual-making. The emphasis on relational-architecture, as opposed to object-architecture, will be explored through precedent analysis, critique, and transformation. The detrimental consequences of dominant western colonial tendencies to fragment, singularize, and flatten complex planetary stories and entanglements will be challenged through the examination of representation as a verbal, visual, and sonic language. Students will be asked to investigate these spatial relationships through representations that focus on illustrating time with basic animation techniques using digital softwares including Rhino, Illustrator, and Photoshop. No prerequisites. All spaces are reserved for incoming first year students. Registration for this class will take place in August.

Professor: Stephanie Lee

How might botanical worlds carry notions of extractive economies, settler colonialism and legacies of racial capitalism? This elective design studio seminar will focus on the interconnectedness of property, plants and bodies from the past to present. While understanding the role of architecture and landscape in agri-capitalism, we will expose matters of resiliency, reform and recovery through case studies such as the Yedikule Gardens, Victory gardens, the Millennium Seed Bank, Crystal Palace, Orangeries, biopiracy and others. Focusing on the role of “floor plans” as an architectural device, we will situate these complex entanglements by collaborating on a toolkit of care for humans, land and everything in between. For the second half of the studio, we will work with the Bard Horticulture and Arboretum Department to design a land-based intervention for the campus. Students will have weekly assignments, and learn techniques of digital drafting, model making, compositional image-making through Adobe Creative Programs and Rhino 3D. No prerequisites.

Professor: Julia Rosenbaum

If we want to understand ourselves, we would do well to take a searching look at our landscapes. –D.W. Meinig (paraphrasing Peirce Lewis), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes This course explores the relationship between the natural world and United States culture, considering specifically the visual expression of that relationship: How have Americans imagined “nature” and represented it? How have concepts of land and landscape shaped perceptions about social order, identity, and sustainability? The course provides both a historical framework for thinking about these questions as well as a contemporary perspective, particularly in the context of a potential new era known as the “Anthropocene.” Scholars in the sciences and the humanities increasingly use this term to describe the current global impact of human-dominated ecosystems. Over the semester we will examine diverse imagery, from mound-building to mapmaking to landscape painting, and explore multiple perspectives, from indigenous practices to visual tools of settler colonialism to environmental art activism. The class will engage both past and present ideas and debates about the natural world through visual and textual analysis, writing exercises, local sites, and individual research. AHVC distribution: 1500-present, Americas

Professor: Gabriel Perron

In this course designed for non-majors, we will study the microorganisms that inhabit, create, or contaminate food. The first half of the course will introduce students to topics in food safety such as food spoilage, food borne infections, and antibiotic resistance. In the second half of the course, students will learn how to harness the capabilities of the many microbes present in our environment to turn rotting vegetables or spoiling milk into delicious food. Students will also learn how next-generation technologies are revealing the important ecological dynamics shaping microbial communities in transforming food with possible beneficial effects on human health. Throughout the course, students will learn how to design, conduct, and analyze simple experiments while working with microbiology techniques, including DNA sequencing. No prerequisite.

Professors: Christian Crouch and Peter L’Official

“The waters that are never still” flow past rural and urban communities alike that bear witness – or silence – in varying degrees the long-term presence of individuals of Indigenous and African descent in this region. This section uses an interdisciplinary approach to allow students to see how artists, critics, writers, and activists have approached ideas of belonging, transformation (willing or unwilling), removal, and race politics in the Mahicantuck Valley and beyond. Race and Place will re-read signal works of American literature alongside urban planning documents and historical works, in order to trace back the often-fraught relationship between people of color and the often-unseen forces that structure the landscapes that they call home. Historical context for case studies will supplement first-hand sources and literary works to provide students a grounding in the formations of removal policies, racial capitalism, and predatory real estate. Texts include writings by Hendrick Aupaumut, W.E.B Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Brandon Hobson, Mat Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Louise Erdrich, Alaina Roberts. Possible additional course place work may include visits to the Du Bois homestead site, Forge Project, and Winold Reiss’s studio and archive.

Professor: Sven Anderson

This course takes a systems perspective to the study of computers. As our programs scale up from a single author, user, and computer to programs designed, written, maintained, and used by multiple people that run on many computers (sometimes at the same time), considerations beyond algorithms alone are magnified. Design principles and engineering practices help us cope with this complexity: version control for multiple authors, input validation for multiple (adversarial) users, build automation tools for multiple platforms, process and thread models for parallelism. From how numbers are represented in hardware to how instruction-level parallelism and speculation can lead to bugs: the design, implementation, evaluation, safety and security of computing systems will be stressed. Students will explore computers from the ground up, using a variety of programming languages (including assembly) and tools like the command line, debuggers, and version control. Pre-requisites: Object-Oriented Programming or permission of instructor.

Professors: Brent Green and Thomas Keenan

State governors (and the President) in the United States possess a strange remnant of royal sovereignty: the power of executive clemency, by which they can pardon offenses or commute the sentences of people convicted of crimes. They can do this to correct injustices, show mercy, or undo disproportionate punishments. Clemency doesn’t just happen – it requires a lot of work on the part of the incarcerated person and his or her advocates. But there are almost no rules governing what a clemency appeal looks like, so there is significant room for creativity in how applicants present their cases. In this practical seminar we will join forces with a team of students at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to prepare short video presentations that will accompany a number of New York State clemency applications this fall. Proficiency with video shooting, editing, and an independent work ethic are important. Meetings with clemency applicants in prison are a central element of the class. This is an opportunity to work collaboratively with law students and faculty, to do hands-on human rights research and advocacy, and to create work that has real-life impact. The class will alternate between video production and the study of clemency and pardons, emotion and human rights, first-person narrative, and persuasion by visual means. Please submit a short statement describing your abilities in shooting and editing video, and your interest in criminal justice, by May 6th. There are no prerequisites, but we seek a class that includes filmmakers, analysts, and activists. This is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences (ELAS) class. Students are strongly encouraged to take HR 321 B together with this course.

Professor: Jeannette Estruth

Artificial intelligence and the knowledge economy. Computation and Credit. Satellites and social media. Philanthropy and factory flight. “Doing what you love” and digital activism. Climate change and corporate consolidation. This class will explore changes in capitalism, technology, and labor in the twentieth- and twenty-first century United States. We will learn how ideas about work and technology have evolved over time, and how these dynamic ideas and evolving tools have shaped the present day.

Professor: Marisa Libbon

Around 1475, an Englishman named William Caxton set up England’s first printing press at Westminster in London. Prior to this technological innovation (which the sixteenth-century writer John Foxe deemed miraculous), books were made from vellum (animal skin) and were written and illuminated—or painted—by hand. In this course, we’ll study medieval English manuscript-books as both cultural objects and literary artifacts, dividing our time between learning how manuscripts were imagined and constructed before the invention of the printing press, and reading them. For us, “reading” will mean engaging in literary and visual analysis of our texts—including epics, lyrics, myths, and romances, all of which will be made available in modern printed editions—as well as learning to decipher the handwriting of scribes responsible for copying our texts. Our work will raise questions about literacy and its definitions; literary labor; the history of the book; the development and preservation of literary and visual artifacts; the relationship between image and text; the ethical and practical problems of producing modern printed editions of handwritten texts; and the proximity of anonymous pre-print culture to the so-called Internet Age. We will also gain some hands-on experience with manuscripts via the College’s recently acquired raw manuscript materials, medieval manuscript leaves, and manuscript facsimiles. This is a pre-1800 Literature course offering.

Professor: Peter L’Official

Calderwood Seminar: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Attributed at times to Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk, among many others, this irresistible aphorism suggests the myriad difficulties of writing arts and cultural criticism—not to mention of writing in general. What does it mean to write about American culture? What is culture? What is America, for that matter? What might it mean to “study” America’s cultural products, aesthetics, and history, and how can we translate our experiences of these into critical argument or reflection? The title of New York Times film critic A.O. Scott’s book is Better Living Through Criticism. In this class, we will attempt to understand American culture and life by practicing the art of criticism. This course examines various forms of culture writing that interrogates and illuminates works in American literature, art, film, music, and, yes, architecture, space, and the city. For this class, “study” will constitute a collective, investigative, and interdisciplinary practice. This is a Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing. Calderwood seminars are writing-intensive classes intended for majors in the field or in affiliated fields. They are designed to help students think about how to translate their discipline or interdisciplinary training to non-specialists through different forms of public writing. The focus of the seminar is on student writing, peer review, and editing, with required weekly assignment deadlines. Assignments will likely include book, film, music, and art reviews, and omnibus essays.

Professor: Philip Pardi

Whether we train our gaze outward at the world around us or inward at worlds within, poets are called to pay attention in particular ways. In this class, we will consider attention as the first step of the creative process, and we will study and practice the seemingly simple act of attending to all that we encounter as we move through our days and (on a good day) make poems. While we will devote some time to revision, the focus of this workshop will be the fertile ground between immersive experience and early, generative, exploratory poetic composition. The longer Friday session will be spent writing together, taking short walks and excursions, sharing our work, and discussing readings related to the science and practice of attention; the one-hour Wednesday session will be devoted to a sustained exploration of a single poem. Special Note: To facilitate our experiment with attentiveness, class meetings and most of the assignments will occur completely offline (i.e. no phone, no laptop, no smartwatch). If you have any concerns about this (or any) aspect of the course format, please contact me before registration. All spaces are reserved for incoming first year and transfer students. Registration for this class will take place in August.

Professor: Fahmidul Haq

Social media has transformed into profit-driven platforms that monetize user data by selling it to marketers. Despite this, many individuals have attempted to leverage these platforms for social change. In recent years, social and political movements have effectively utilized social media as a tool for advancement. This course will explore the various aspects of social media activism. Theoretical concepts by Manuel Castells, Christian Fuchs, and Zeynep Tufekci will be explored, with an emphasis on major movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, as well as movements from countries like Hong Kong, India, Nigeria, and Bangladesh. Discussion will focus on issues and challenges related to digital activism, including platform capitalism, misinformation, alt-right populism, and the collaboration between platforms and governments. Additionally, the course will delve into the future of social media activism. Work will include several short assignments as well as a research project.

Professor: Stephanie Lee

This studio course will introduce students to the language of architectural representation by framing the field of architecture as an ever changing process of social imagination and spatial deterioration. We will aim to understand design practice as an inherent mediation between changes in natural and cultural forces on buildings and environments. Engaging with ideas of decay, disrepair, and decrepitude, we will create fictional histories of dying industries situated in rural and suburban environments such as malls, farms, bank branches, and gas stations. Alongside readings about the legacies of capitalism and socio-economic crises, students will utilize techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, physical modeling, and compositional image-making to explore regenerative design processes and the emergence of new spatial possibilities for “ruins”. No prerequisites.

Professor: Betsy Clifton

This studio course is an introduction to architecture through a close examination of the societal norms and rituals embedded in ordinary spaces. How do these spaces breed indifference, passivity and alienation? How might they afford moments of repose, performance or joy? What potentials do these spaces hold for collective, creative revolutionary transformation? Students in this course will closely examine how routines of everyday life, both public and domestic, are spatialized in architecture. We will unpack and revise our common understandings of places we use habitually; gas stations, ATM vestibules, waiting rooms, awnings, bus stops, janitor closets, among many others. Using (and misusing) architectural representational methods, such as digital drafting, conceptual analysis, physical models, and experimental image-making, as well as readings and discussions on contemporary theorists and practitioners, students will propose new spatial strategies that suggest alternative everyday rituals. We will treat our design material as propaganda. As such, we will compile our work in the form of a graphic manual that at once looks to unsettle the relation between space and ritual, while at the same reimagining them. No prerequisites.

Professor:  Anne Chen

What silences do archaeological archives unintentionally preserve? In what ways do power and privilege influence the creation and shape of archaeological archives, and dictate who has access to them? How might new technologies help us begin to rectify inequities of access? Once called by its excavators the “Pompeii of the East,” the ancient archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) preserves evidence of what everyday life was like in an ancient Roman city. The site is home to the earliest Christian church building yet found, the most elaborately decorated ancient synagogue known to date, and testifies to the ways in which ancient religions and cultures intermingled and inspired one another. Yet since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the site has been irreparably compromised for future archaeological exploration. More than ever, our knowledge and understanding of the site will depend almost entirely upon archival information collected in the course of archaeological excavations that took place 100 years ago when Syria was under French colonial occupation. In this hands-on practicum course focused on the case-study of this fascinating archaeological site, students will not only learn what we know of Dura-Europos as it was in antiquity, but will also think critically about issues central to the use and development of archival resources more generally. Coursework will center around firsthand engagement with data, artifacts, and archival materials from the site, and will allow students the opportunity to develop guided research projects that ultimately contribute toward the goal of improving the site’s accessibility and intelligibility to users worldwide. The methods and critical perspectives explored in this class will be particularly relevant to students interested in exploring careers in GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museum) fields. Class meetings will occur approximately eight times during the semester (precise meeting schedule to be set at the beginning of the semester). AHVC distribution: Ancient.

Professors: Elias Dueker and Krista Caballero

We generally assume maps are objective, accurate representations of data and the world around us when, in fact, they depict the knowledge, experience, and values of the humans who draft them. This practicum section brings together the arts and sciences to better understand changes in water, climate and communities via creative, hands-on projects focused on the Saw Kill watershed, which encompasses the Bard campus. We will study radical cartography practices as a method for environmental advocacy alongside artistic and counter-mapping approaches that experiment with ways we might communicate scientific and humanistic knowledge to a wider audience. Throughout the semester, specific projects will be created in collaboration with the GIS for Environmental Justice course.

Professors: Margaux Kristjansson and Luis Chavez

This section is an introduction to advanced embodied and place-based methodologies in Indigenous Studies. It will focus on Indigenous performance and sensory modes of knowing; along with exploring anticolonial queer and feminist modes of knowledge production. Texts from: Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Anderson, Maggie Walter, Jessica Berrea, Zoila Mendoza, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eve Tuck, Lisa Stevenson, Beverly Diamond, Audra Simpson, Mikinaak Migwans and Oyeronke Oyewumi.

Professor: Rose Sloan (A) & Bob McGrail (B)

This course introduces students to the methodologies of object-oriented design and programming, which are used throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Students will learn how to move from informal problem statement, through increasingly precise problem specifications, to design and implementation of a solution for problems drawn from areas such as graphics, animation, simulation. Good programming and documentation habits are emphasized.

Professor: Ben Coonley

In this course, students are introduced to processes for creating moving image artworks using 3D animation software and its ancillary technologies. Topics include: the basics of 3D modeling and animation, 3D scanning, and creative use of other technologies that allow artists to combine real and virtual spaces. Weekly readings reflect on the psychological, cultural, and aesthetic impacts of the increasingly prevalent use of computer-generated imagery in contemporary media. Students are not assumed to have any previous experience with 3D animation. This production class fulfills a moderation requirement.

Professor: Ben Coonley

This production course explores the challenges and possibilities of video installation: an evolving contemporary art form that extends video beyond conventional exhibition spaces such as theaters into sculptural, site-specific, physically immersive, and multiple channel exhibition contexts. Presentations, screenings, and readings augment critical thinking about temporal and spatial relationships, narrative structure, viewer perception and the challenges of presenting time-based media artwork in a gallery or museum setting. Workshops hone technical skills and introduce methods for the creative use of video projectors, video monitors, sound equipment, surveillance cameras, media players, multi-channel synchronizers, digital software, and lightweight sculptural elements. Students develop research interests and apply their unique skill sets to short turnaround exercises and a larger self-directed final project. This is an advanced course. Students are expected to have some experience with videocamera operation and editing. This course fulfills a moderation/major requirement.

Professors: Brent Green and Thomas Keenan

This class is a 2-credit companion to HR 321A, for those students who wish to read additional scholarly material on clemency, the U.S. criminal justice system, pardons and forgiveness, the role of images in human rights activism, first-person testimony and narrative, advocacy, and other related topics. It does not include a video production component. Students in HR 321A are urged to take it; others are welcome, space permitting.

Professor: Jana Mader

For centuries, the land on which the Bard Arboretum now sits has been inhabited and used by diverse societies and cultures. In this course, students learn to critically engage with the existing landscape and vegetation to unfold “the story” of the land now owned by Bard College. By confronting the narratives that shaped these lands from an interdisciplinary perspective, students can build skills to become informed and impactful agents of change. Particular areas of inquiry include the Hudson River Valley in art, literature, music, and film; the history of Native Americans, colonialism, and slavery in the region; horticulture, bio-diversity, and native plants of the Hudson River Valley (living collection). We will explore the past, present, and possible future of the Hudson River Valley through a series of primary and secondary sources including fiction and nonfiction works of literature, visual art, film, etc. Meetings will be held in the classroom, and outdoors at the Bard Arboretum, Montgomery Place, and Blithewood; we will observe and study the actual river, our native plants, and learn more about how our current home and what we see in it have changed over time.

Professor: Adhaar Desai

We are often drawn to characters more than anything else in our encounters with books, plays, or movies. This happens despite our knowing that characters remain exactly what their name implies: trapped by printed letters, scriptedness, or the limits of a screen. Characters are always mediated, but they can also show us how concepts like humanity and personhood depend on and contend with the media humans use to share ideas. In this course, we will study the history of characters in western fiction to learn how archetypes, racial and gendered stereotypes, historical or geographical settings, and the capabilities of different media technologies shape our encounters with them. We will also explore different ways of “reading” characters by thinking about how computer algorithms might understand something as supposedly complex as an individual’s personality. Primary texts will include Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Parks’s The America Play, Cusk’s Outline, and short stories by Toni Morrison, Kate Chopin, and others. We will also consider films, television shows, and video games. Students will have the opportunity to become characters in class debates, discuss fan fiction, and experiment with how to translate characters between media as we engage in analytical, theoretical, and creative work throughout the term.

Professor: Adhaar Desai

When we think about Renaissance poetry, we tend to think of the sonnet: rule-bound, artificial, and old-fashioned. The funny thing is, the poets writing in the English Renaissance tried everything they could to make their poems appear as just the opposite: organic, sincere, and excitingly new. When they realized that their experiments were failures, they also came to see the failures as interesting in new ways. What resulted was a period of wild and flourishing literary inventiveness. Beginning with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and ending around the tumultuous English Civil Wars and the regicide of King Charles I, the century spanning 1550 to 1650 in English history was responsible for grand upheavals in culture, religion, politics, and science. Accordingly, just beneath the veneer of formal qualities like rhyme and meter, poems from the period are sensitive and probing explorations of chaos, frustration, madness, desire, and the sublime. By focusing on experiences of error, uncertainty, shame, and failure, this course examines how Renaissance poets fought with language as they tried to say things that they did not know how to say. Through both critical and creative exercises, students will develop an approach to writing unafraid of failure and emboldened by experiences of risk-taking. We’ll hone a deep understanding of essential aspects of poetry while we think about how it was (and still is) a tool for thought and an instrument of emotional understanding. The course covers a broad range of major works as well as less commonly-read (yet indelibly great) poetry—especially poetry by women. Shakespeare, Spenser, and Donne will take their place in context alongside poets like Isabella Whitney, Mary Wroth, Katherine Philips, George Herbert, and Amelia Lanyer. This is a pre-1800 Literature course offering.

Professor: Miriam Felton-Dansky

Theater artists have been engaging with digital culture for as long as digital culture has existed — using live performance to ask fundamental questions about media and using software and other forms of computing to expand the practice of live performance. This Bard network course addresses how theater and performance, as live embodied practices and forms of communal encounter, have permanently shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and celebrates new forms of performance that have emerged. We will ask questions about the politics of the digital world, the capacity of digital encounters to both reinforce and interrogate societal of biases and injustices, and the power of placing live art in conversation with digital art. We will investigate dispersed digital formats – WhatsApp and instagram performances, VR/AR-experiences, Zoom theater – using case studies from Berlin, Vienna/Budapest, Bogota, London, Johannesburg and Annandale/New York City. This is an OSUN Network Collaborative Course taught in partnership courses on Digital Theatres offered at (list of all partner institutions) Universidad de los Andes, Bard College Berlin, Birkbeck, CEU, and University of the Witwatersrand. Our work will be both practice and analytical, and the semester will culminate in a digital performance mini-festival. Assessment will be based on critical responses, creative digital projects, and participation. This course counts as a Junior Lab for Theater & Performance majors, but welcomes students from all fields and years who are enthusiastic about the subject matter.

Professor: Stephanie Lee

This studio course will introduce students to the language of architectural representation by framing the field of architecture as an everchanging process of social imagination and spatial deterioration. We will aim to understand design practice as an inherent mediation between changes in natural and cultural forces on buildings and environments. Engaging with ideas of decay, disrepair, and decrepitude, we will create fictional histories of dying industries situated in rural and suburban environments such as malls, farms, bank branches, and gas stations. Alongside readings about the legacies of capitalism and socio-economic crises, students will utilize techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, physical modeling, and compositional image-making to explore regenerative design processes and the emergence of new spatial possibilities for “ruins”. No prerequisites are necessary.

Professor: Thena Tak

Site analysis in architecture has become a rather routine practice, perhaps even performative. Oftentimes, an expected set of drawings acts only as evidence of due diligence rather than as instruments for an archaeological kind of thinking and seeing whereby a place is invited to share its ancestors, proclivities, and quirks. Given that architecture is a practice very much entangled with place, how might we expand our anthropocentric conventions of how a ‘site’ is considered and represented? How do we form invitations to a place that engages its deep time? How do we greet its varied, and continuously forming biographies? And can ‘site analysis’ even be approached as a deeper form of land acknowledgement? In this 5 week-long, intensive workshop, students will be asked to rethink ‘site analysis’ through the design and making of plaster core samples that reflect an expanded understanding of place – where trees, soil, and fossils are acknowledged as both witnesses and makers of memory, mineral, and myth. Each core sample becomes a vessel of specific temporal, material, and spatial meditations of a given place. From the making of these, students will then draw and represent their core samples digitally using Rhino and Adobe Suite software. No prerequisites. This intensive workshop will run only during the first 5 weeks of the term.

Professor: Anne Chen

What silences do archaeological archives unintentionally preserve? In what ways do power and privilege influence the creation and shape of archaeological archives, and dictate who has access to them? How might new technologies help us begin to rectify inequities of access? Once called by its excavators the “Pompeii of the East,” the ancient archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) preserves evidence of what everyday life was like in an ancient Roman city. The site is home to the earliest Christian church building yet found, the most elaborately decorated ancient synagogue known to date, and testifies to the ways in which ancient religions and cultures intermingled and inspired one another. Yet since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the site has been irreparably compromised for future archaeological exploration. More than ever, our knowledge and understanding of the site will depend almost entirely upon archival information collected in the course of archaeological excavations that took place 100 years ago when Syria was under French colonial occupation. In this hands-on practicum course focused on the case-study of this fascinating archaeological site, students will not only learn what we know of Dura-Europos as it was in antiquity, but will also think critically about issues central to the use and development of archival resources more generally. Coursework will center around firsthand engagement with data, artifacts, and archival materials from the site, and will allow students the opportunity to develop guided research projects that ultimately contribute toward the goal of improving the site’s accessibility and intelligibility to users worldwide. The methods and critical perspectives explored in this class will be particularly relevant to students interested in exploring careers in GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museum) fields. Class meetings will occur approximately eight times during the semester (precise meeting schedule to be set at the beginning of the semester). AHVC distribution: Ancient.

Professor: Susan Merriam

Can we radically reimagine the traditional historic site for the twenty-first century? That question will be our focus in this course, which will use Bard’s Montgomery Place as a laboratory to experiment with ideas about exhibitions, historical narratives, and archives. In the early weeks of the semester we’ll consider the origins and reception of historic sites, and then turn our attention to the house, grounds, and outbuildings at Montgomery Place. Topics animating our discussions will include: the relevance of the site to contemporary life; the relationship between center and periphery; the types of historical narratives we might reimagine; the way we value, display, describe, and archive objects. Course work will include object and archive research, writing, and curating. Our work will be publicized on a course website designed to engage the public in our experiments, and will thus create a new archive for the site. Open to all moderated students. AHVC distribution: Modern, Americas.

Professor: Fahmid Haq

Doing social media projects practically and analyzing their role critically are two main objectives of the course. This course will raise some critical question that evolve around social media which will include – surveillance and privacy, labor, big data, misinformation, cyborg and cyberfeminism. Topics will include the socio-historical perspectives regarding technology and society, the nature and characteristics of different social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, snapchat and more, big data capitalism and imperialism, civic engagement through digital platforms, mainstream media’s compelling realities to be more ‘social’, misinformation, racism and right-wing authoritarianism in social media, the role of social media influencers, branding and social media marketing and an exploration for a true social media. The course will draw from a broad range of social theory including communication and cultural theories, political economy and media anthropology to critically evaluate the impact of social media on human relationships, activism, branding, politics, news production and dissemination and identity formation. Theoretical notions such as hyperreality by Jean Baudrillard, network society by Manuel Castells and digital labor by Christian Fuchs will be discussed in the class. As ‘prosumers’, students will create social media projects and analyze some trendy cases evident in different platforms.

Professor: Vivien Sansour

Inspired by the Palestinian saying El Batin Bustan (The Belly is a Garden) this course explores bio-cultural diversity and the question of being of the earth and part of its diverse terrains. Fundamental questions we will explore are: How can biodiversity and human diversity be paths to wellbeing? How can humans understand themselves as nature’s co-creators? This course is designed as an experiential journey using multiple forms, including original texts, discussion, guided fieldwork directed by faculty, nature walks, in class writing exercises, and group workshops. Students will work in consultation with the professor on individual self-directed projects throughout the semester. These projects will be presented at the end of semester to the combined class of AQB and Annandale. The projects will all require some form of field research such as conducting interviews, gathering site related natural material for possible installations, photography, oral histories, film, among others including performance art. Students will engage in hands-on, outdoor activities such as cooking, planting, and possibly seed or crop harvesting with discussions of key texts grounding our interdisciplinary investigation. In an attempt to deconstruct colonial forms of being we will be exploring ourselves as living beings navigating a global landscape that is both in crisis and in constant transformation. How do we relate to the soil beneath our feet? How are we informed by other living beings in our surroundings? Between the question of settler and Indigenous how can we better understand ourselves, and our place in the world, while engaging in collaborative designs of new possible futures? As an OSUN Network Course, students will have the opportunity to participate in shared online events and conversations with students at Al-Quds Bard College, Palestine but the majority of the semester will be in-person on Bard’s Annandale Campus. This is an OSUN Network Collaborative Course, taught on multiple OSUN partner institutions and designed to allow students to learn and work together across campuses.

Professor: Jacqueline Goss

In this course we will make video and web-based projects using digital animation and compositing programs (primarily Adobe Animate and After Effects). The course is designed to help students develop a facility with these tools and to find personal animating styles that surpass the tools at hand. We will work to reveal techniques and aesthetics associated with digital animation that challenge conventions of storytelling, editing, figure/ground relationship, and portrayal of the human form. To this end, we will refer to diverse examples of animating and collage from film, music, writing, photography, and painting. Prerequisite: familiarity with a nonlinear video-editing program. This production course fulfills a moderation/major requirement. Registration open to Sophomores and above.

Professor: Gregory Moynahan

The scientific method and the modern form of the scientific experiment are arguably the most powerful innovations of the modern period. Although dating back in its modern form to only the sixteenth century, the concept of the experiment as an attempt to find underlying continuities in experience has numerous origins stretching back to earliest recorded history. In tttempturse, we will examine how different experiments and artisanal practices have been used to interpret the natural world, and how those interpretations are reflective of the time periods and cultural contexts in which they were made. We will conduct our own experiments in replicability, discuss performance and the public culture of science, and explore the visual and material cultures of science. This course is required for those who wish to concentrate in Experimental Humanities.

Professor: Nathan Shockey

In the global imaginary, Japan frequently floats as a symbol for high-tech hyper-futurism, a vision into a techno-utopian (or dystopian) wonderland. This course takes up the rich body of theoretical and conceptual work on media from and surrounding Japan in order to decenter Eurocentric media theory while exploring the complexity of modern Japan’s own media ecologies. In addition to reading major Japanese texts of media theory on topics like film, photography, animation, games, and networked subjectivity, we will also peruse the robust body of recent English-language scholarship thinking with and through the Japanese context, as well bring works of Japanese literature and visual art into conversation with movements in global media theory. Further nexuses of investigation include the connections and intersections between: architecture, infrastructure, and communications; media environments, consumer technology, and climate change; role-playing games, virtual, and augmented realities; and techne-zen, personal computing, and the spirit of global capitalism, among others. We will also consider the role of fantasies of Japan in the Western imaginary, including conversations on techno-orientalism, post-human consciousness, and strategies for making sense of digital age excesses of sensation and information. No prior knowledge or coursework on Japan or Japanese is required and students with backgrounds in Experimental Humanities and media art are especially encouraged to register.

Professor: Patricia Lopez-Gay

This course explores some of the major literary works produced on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the present day. Students will become familiar with the general contours of Spanish history as they study in depth a selected number of masterpieces, including works by Miguel de Cervantes, Calderón de la Barca, Teresa de Jesús, Cadalso, Larra, Galdós, Emilia PardoBazán, Unamuno, Lorca, and Carmen Laforet. The course will be organized around three thematic modules: Spanish culture’s engagement with notions of purity and pollution; the emergence and evolution of the first person singular in Spanish literature; and the representations of the country and the city, the center and the periphery. In each module we will undertake a survey of relevant literature occasionally put in conversation with the visual arts. Conducted in Spanish.

Professor: Benjamin Hale

Philosopher Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” Ultimately, he determined the question unanswerable: A bat’s experience of the world is so alien to our own that it is beyond the human understanding of subjective experience. That’s arguable. But it is true at least that a bat’s experience—or that of any other nonhuman consciousness—is not inaccessible to human imagination. In this course we will read and discuss a wide variety of texts, approaching the subject of nonhuman consciousness through literature, philosophy, and science. We will read works that attempt to understand the experiences of apes, panthers, rats, ticks, elephants, octopuses, lobsters, cows, bats, monsters, puppets, computers, and eventually, zombies. Course reading may include Descartes, Kafka, Rilke, Jakob von Uexküll, Patricia Highsmith, John Gardner, J.A. Baker, Eduardo Kohn, David Foster Wallace, Zora Neale Hurston, Temple Grandin, Jane Goodall, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Susan Daitch, Giorgio Agamben, Bennett Sims, and E. O. Wilson, among others, in addition to a viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and possibly other films. There will be several long writing assignments over the course of the semester, and a workshop component. Students interested in this workshop must email [email protected]

Professor: Betsy Clifton

This studio course is an introduction to architecture through a close examination of the societal norms and rituals embedded in ordinary spaces. How do these spaces breed indifference, passivity and alienation? How might they afford moments of repose, performance or joy? What potentials do these spaces hold for collective, creative revolutionary transformation? Students in this course will closely examine how routines of everyday life, both public and domestic, are spatialized in architecture. We will unpack and revise our common understandings of places we use habitually; gas stations, ATM vestibules, waiting rooms, awnings, bus stops, janitor closets, among many others. Using (and misusing) architectural representational methods, such as digital drafting, conceptual analysis, physical models, and experimental image-making, as well as readings and discussions on contemporary theorists and practitioners, students will propose new spatial strategies that suggest alternative everyday rituals. We will treat our design material as propaganda. As such, we will compile our work in the form of a graphic manual that at once looks to unsettle the relation between space and ritual, while at the same reimagining them. No prerequisites.

Professor: Stephanie Lee

How can we approach architecture beyond form-based explorations, but as a mode to reimagine current sociopolitical, institutional, and territorial entanglements? This design studio seminar explores architecture as a network of situated relationships between built and non-built environments. We will inquire design research from a planetary dimension by zooming in, pulling apart, and realigning various forms of rural, agricultural, and food systems. Through the appropriation of fact and fiction, students will learn to utilize architectural mediums to produce new subjectivities instead of cementing existing hierarchies and visual relationships. Using speculative drawings, modeling and experimental mapping, students will explore the Hudson Valley region as a site of radical ruralism. We will question the destructive and extractive processes of industrial agriculture, globalization and late capitalism, by carefully suggesting a parafictional alternative: a land practice of resistance, regeneration, and mutual care. Operating as a collaborative studio-seminar, we will produce a series of drawings that reads as one collective canvas with multiple scales, perspectives, and realities. In addition to design workshops, we will discuss readings from Monica White, Dolores Hayden, bell hooks, Adrienne Brown, Lydia Kallipoliti, Jenny Odell, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Leah Penniman, Saidiya Hartman and Kathryn Yusoff – among others. Prerequisites: ARCH 111 or professor’s permission.

Professor: Susan Merriam

This course is a meditation on the meaning and histories of artistic experimentation in early modern Europe (1500-1800). At this time, art and science were often intricately connected, and artists took for granted the notion that they could manipulate and experiment with materials (oil paint for example), techniques (such as printmaking), and conceptual approaches to art making. Some of the areas we will examine include anatomical studies, optical experiments, and the use of materials and techniques. Questions we will pursue: What is meant by “visual experiment”? How might artistic failure be generative? How did artistic experiments shape practices we would now consider to be located solely in the realm of science, such as anatomical study? What is the relationship between experiment and risk? How might we compare artistic experiments in the early modern period to those undertaken in our own? As we study artistic experiment, we will create our own visual experiments using both old and new technologies. A highlight will be working with a life-sized camera obscura. This course satisfies the Experimental Humanities core course requirement for “History of the Experiment.” AHVC distribution: Modern, Europe.

Professor:  Olga Touloumi

What can we learn about the built environment and its politics from someone’s biography? What kind of evidence and stories lie within the personal? Building on Saidiya Hartman’s experiments with speculative histories for “minor figures”, this course foregrounds intersectional and feminist methodologies in the study of women’s lives and their role in architecture. We will use the life of Afro-French architect Christine Benglia (1936-2020) as a lens to examine the role that biography and personal narratives can play in recovering marginalized voices and positionalities in the production of space. Students will engage in work with primary sources – Benglia’s personal papers, oral history records, correspondence, sketches – in order to uncover the perspective of a black, middle-class woman from France learning, teaching, and working as an architect in the United States during the post-World War II period. The goal will be to extrapolate the larger framework and questions around gender, race, and class that shaped postwar American architecture and art from Benglia’s personal and intimate world of objects and words. To help us in this exploration, we will be using as our lens theoretical texts by Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michel Foucault, Saidiya Hartman, Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. The course will culminate in the collaborative design of a website and an exhibition, involving also independent research and writing. Art History and Visual Culture Requirements: Modern, Americas.

Professor: Fahmid Haq

South Asian Cinema is nearly synonymous with Indian Cinema to the international audience, though other South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal have developed strong film cultures too. The objective of the course is mapping the cine profile of the South Asian countries and examining Bollywood’s hegemonic presence in the region. This seminar course will study some cases across a range of South Asian Cinema cultures by exploring their common as well as different cultural backgrounds, historiography, and sociopolitical realities. Topics will include both historical and contemporary cinematic practices in South Asian countries such as the Partition of India in South Asian Cinema, cinematic representation of the Liberation War of Bangladesh, Bollywood’s cultural influence in other South Asian countries, portrayal of Kashmir in Indian cinema, diasporic Indian cinema and ‘other Bollywood’ cinema. Films by directors such as Raj Kapoor, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Anurag Kashyap from India, Zahir Raihan, Alamgir Kabir and Tareque Masud from Bangladesh, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Shoaib Mansoor from Pakistan, and Lester James Peries from Sri Lanka will be studied closely.

Professor: Krista Caballero

From species extinction to radioactive soil and climate change, we are now in the age of the Anthropocene. This recently proposed geologic period refers to the ways in which human activities have dramatically impacted and altered every ecosystem on Earth. Now in an age of mass extinction, what does it mean to visually interpret our more-than-human world and explore the often messy and complicated encounters between human and nonhuman animals? Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge will ground our exploration as we consider the cultural, artistic, and technological implications of species decline. Our focus will include examining animal representations from caves to cages and from the living to the virtual, as well as themes of the wild and the tame, zoos, laboratory research, and companion species. Each of these topics will be paired with an exploration of the ever-increasing presence of animals in contemporary art with particular emphasis on multimedia and inter-species installations, bio art, as well as experimental video, film, and performance. Students will work intensively to develop experimental humanities approaches that blur boundaries between physical and digital media, integrate field-based research in the Hudson Valley, and experiment with interdisciplinary practices of art making in order to grapple with ways in which our understanding of other species directly relates to human self-understanding. This course is part of the Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Initiative.

Professor: Rose Sloan

This course introduces students to the methodologies of object-oriented design and programming, which are used throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Students will learn how to move from informal problem statement, through increasingly precise problem specifications, to design and implementation of a solution for problems drawn from areas such as graphics, animation, simulation. Good programming and documentation habits are emphasized.

Professor: A. Sayeeda Moreno

An introductory writing course that looks at creative approaches to writing short films and dialogue scenes. Starting with personal histories, lineage, and identities, students learn the tools to write invigorating, character-driven short screenplays. The course will focus on poetic strategies creating the blueprint for a narrative fiction film. Building characters through transcription, investigation, and fictionalizing of family and friends to enhance character development, story arc, creating a visual language. With writing assignments and vigorous analysis establishing the bedrock, students develop and workshop a short screenplay (maximum 10-15 pages). This course will require extensive outside research. You are responsible for committing to a rigorous writing and rewriting process. Registration open to Sophomores and above. This is an elective course for Film and Electronic Arts and does not fulfill moderation/major requirement.

Professor: Adhaar Desai

This course satisfies the “History of the Experiment” requirement for the Experimental Humanities concentration. Modernity is often described in terms of the development of science’s experimental method and in terms of the proliferation of populations living in urban environments. What does experimentation have to do with how communities and publics organize their lives in cities? How have certain populations been disempowered and marginalized, and how have other aspects of civic life, such as politics, infrastructure, the environment, cultural production, and public health been impacted by the relationship between science and technology and urban life? This course studies two twinned concepts, “the city” and “the experiment,” from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives to interrogate the distances between experimentation and lived experience, theory and practice, and the humanities, the arts, and the sciences. Collaborative and interdisciplinary in both form and content, this is an OSUN Network-Collaborative course that will involve sustained interactions between students at Bard College and students in a parallel urban sociology course at the European Humanities University in Lithuania. Culminating in the study of “urban laboratories” as sites of sociological experimentation, the course will challenge students at Bard and EHU to collaboratively, imaginatively, and experimentally engage with concrete civic problems. Readings will stretch from early modernity and the Enlightenment through urgent contemporary texts, and will situate artistic works by authors such as Thomas More, Italo Calvino, Octavia Butler, and N. K. Jemisin alongside theoretical, historical, and critical texts by Francis Bacon, Augusto Boal, Jane Jacobs, Michel de Certeau, Doreen Massey, and Bruno Latour. This is an OSUN Network Collaborative Course, taught on multiple OSUN partner institutions and designed to allow students to learn and work together across campuses.

Professor: Matthew Sargent

This course will introduce students to Max/Msp, an object-oriented programming environment for real-time audio processing, digital synthesis, algorithmic composition, data sonification, and more. Students will learn fundamental concepts of digital audio and computer programming while engaging in creative projects and in-class performances. The class will include examples of Max patches found in major works of 20/21st century electroacoustic music and sound art repertoire. The course will also explore connectivity between Max and other software applications, including Max4Live. The course will conclude with a final project. Introduction to Electronic Music, or a 100-level course in Computer Science, is recommended as a prerequisite.

Professors: Christian Crouch and Miriam Felton-Dansky

Societies in different historical periods have strategically used performance to stage, reinforce, and re-imagine the scope of political and colonial power. The history of the theater connects directly with the history of how societies have performed conquest, colonialism, cultural patrimony, and cultural resistance in different parts of the world. This interdisciplinary course, covering performance and power of the early modern period, disrupts assumptions about both the disciplines of theater and history. Students will read baroque plays as well as modern plays reflecting on the colonial Atlantic world, study the historical context of this era, and experiment with staging scenes, to uncover the links between imagined and actual Atlantic expansion and the impact of colonialism, from 1492 forward. Artistic forms to be examined include the English court masque, the Spanish auto sacramental, and spectacles of power and conversion staged in the colonial Americas; plays will range from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Marivaux’s The Island of Slaves to allegorical works by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and works by Aimé Césaire and Madeline Sayet. The course readings also cover history and theory around settler colonialism, performance studies, and transatlantic slavery. This course is part of the Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Initiative.

Professor: Michael Robinson Cohen

This studio-based course introduces students to architectural tools of communication while presenting architecture as a field that is expansive—a field that engages not only with technical knowledge, but also with the making of public imaginaries, personal environments, cultural spatial aesthetics, and even the contested ground of the political, economic and social. The course is simultaneously an introduction to the techniques of representation that define the discipline of architecture and an opportunity to explore and question how architecture mediates the world. Students will learn and practice techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, mapping, 3D modeling and compositional image-making. While the focus will be on an array of forms of architectural drawing, these techniques will be carefully positioned against a survey of paradigmatic moments and themes in the history of architecture that will help situate the practice today. Throughout the term, our design work will be supplemented by readings and periodic research work, and we will situate this against regular lectures that will introduce you to the broader culture of architecture. The course will provide a foundation of concepts and skills necessary to make architecture legible and to convey a spatial argument through design. No prerequisites.

Professor: Betsy Clifton

In this half-semester design workshop, students will create ‘domestic agents’–spatial objects which question the norms and rituals of our everyday lives through design tools and inquisitive disruption. We will begin by reorienting our expectations of domestic spaces by considering the things around us and our relationships to them. We will encounter these against a series of case studies—architectural precedents and historical places—which may allow us to understand how societal expectations of domestic design have emerged and transformed. From there, we will seek to reimagine the home towards more inclusive, provocative and liberating futures. The course will privilege new family compositions, accommodating new social configurations, rather than our inherited one. We will design our ‘domestic agents’ using experimental digital drawing techniques to create our own visual language. This class meets for the first half of the semester. No prerequisites.

Professor: Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee

This research and design studio will focus on rural approaches to social, racial, and economic liberation. Working collaboratively, we will create a global atlas of radical farming collectives to be later published as a zine. By looking at historical, fictional, and realized case studies, students will map out a spatial taxonomy of cooperatives, intentional communities, regenerative agriculture farms, and back-to-land initiatives. What does it mean to create an infrastructure of care, and systems of resilience within a capitalist landscape of production, extraction, and exploitation? In this course, we will construct a network of political ecologies, linking case studies like Freedom Farm Cooperative, Marinaleda, and Soul Fire Farm. Through seminars and workshops, students will learn to create and analyze each project through 2D and 3D drawings alongside diagramming and multimedia collaging. Through this collective process, students will articulate notions of “land” and “labor”, and pair them with new dialogues on how the rural countryside operates as a site for radical forms of collective living.  No Prerequisites. Please email Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco ([email protected]) for inquiries.

Professor: Anne Hunnell Chen

What silences do archaeological archives unintentionally preserve? In what ways do power and privilege influence the creation and shape of archaeological archives, and dictate who has access to them? How might new technologies help us begin to rectify inequities of access? Once called by its excavators the “Pompeii of the East,” the ancient archaeological site of Dura-Europos (Syria) preserves evidence of what everyday life was like in an ancient Roman city. The site is home to the earliest Christian church building yet found, the most elaborately decorated ancient synagogue known to date, and testifies to the ways in which ancient religions and cultures intermingled and inspired one another. Yet since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the site has been irreparably compromised for future archaeological exploration. More than ever, our knowledge and understanding of the site will depend almost entirely upon archival information collected in the course of archaeological excavations that took place 100 years ago when Syria was under French colonial occupation. In this hands-on practicum course focused on the case-study of this fascinating archaeological site, students will not only learn what we know of Dura-Europos as it was in antiquity, but will also think critically about issues central to the use and development of archival resources more generally. Coursework will center around firsthand engagement with data, artifacts, and archival materials from the site, and will allow students the opportunity to develop guided research projects that ultimately contribute toward the goal of improving the site’s accessibility and intelligibility to users worldwide. The methods and critical perspectives explored in this class will be particularly relevant to students interested in exploring careers in GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museum) fields. Class meetings will occur approximately eight times during the semester (precise meeting schedule to be set at the beginning of the semester).

Professor: Krista Caballero

This course offers a foundation in media history and theory, with particular focus on how artists have experimented with emerging technologies and changing media landscapes in ways that both reflect and transform culture. We will consider old and new forms alike, from print media to social media, from the camera obscura to photography, from broadcast television to early net.art, and from the diorama to virtual reality, as we explore how media have continually constructed our perceptions of time, space, knowledge, and identity. We will read media theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Jessica Marie Johnson, Donna Haraway, Lev Manovich, Erkki Huhtamo, and Lisa Nakamura alongside examining the work of artists such as Nam June Paik, Stephanie Dinkins, Guillermo Goméz-Peña, Wendy Red Star, Ricardo Dominquez, Mary Flanagan, and Will Wilson. We will also spend hands-on time working creatively with media, in order to assess our own positions as producers as well as users and consumers of media. This course fulfills a requirement for the Experimental Humanities concentration

Professor: Robert McGrail

This course introduces students to the methodologies of object-oriented design and programming, which are used throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Students will learn how to move from informal problem statement, through increasingly precise problem specifications, to design and implementation of a solution for problems drawn from areas such as graphics, animation, simulation. Good programming and documentation habits are emphasized.

Professor: A. Sayeeda Moreno

Engaging and activating autobiographical and biographical methodology to collect, observe, and adapt dialogue, this live-action production class will investigate approaches to storytelling and the narrative form with a goal towards identifying the subtext within given dialogue scenes. Students will locate “the lie” in the spoken word and “the truth” through visual indicators. Reworking scenes over the course of a semester, students will discover how their filmmaking choices either support, undermine or contradict what their characters are saying. Students will consider the impact of screenwriting, casting, improvisational rehearsal techniques, actor and camera movement, camera placement, and editing on a particular scene to build observational cadence and highlight unspoken “truths.” This course fulfills a moderation/major requirement. Registration open to Sophomores and above.

Professor: Joshua Glick

This class explores the vibrant intersection between different forms of media and artificial intelligence (AI). Topics include deepfakes and disinformation, gaming and the metaverse, social media and networked activism, installation and public art, experimental film and Hollywood blockbusters. Students will learn the ways in which AI can be used for malicious purposes as well as to push aesthetic boundaries and to serve the civic good. Key projects range from the data art of the Refik Anadol studio to the online satire of Bill Posters to deepfakes used in the war in Ukraine. The course will introduce students to new tools and platforms and will involve experimenting with AI-enabled media, all the while reflecting on the ethical, social, and political ramifications of these technologies. This course fulfills a Film and Electronic Arts moderation requirement.

Professor: Patricia Lopez-Gay

This interdisciplinary course will focus on some of the numerous literary, film and photography productions of the 20^th and 21^st centuries that seek to undermine the foundations of the split between fiction and reality, through old or new media. We will propose a possible archeology of autobiographical works with an emphasis on Spain, in conversation with Latin America, including Brazil. In this context, fiction will be understood as the lens through which the self – the author or the artist, the reader or the viewer – negotiates their place in the world. Some questions that will arise throughout the semester are: How does fiction operate within life? What are the limits of art and literature, in the so-called “post-truth” era? How does life interfere with fiction, politically? We will consider autofictional and testimonial works produced by writers, artists, and filmmakers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Roberto Bolaño, Alicia Partnoy, Jorge Semprún, Paula Bonet, Miguel Ángel Hernández, Sergio Oksman, Joan Fontcuberta, Paula Bonet, Carla Simón, Marta Sanz, and Pedro Almodóvar, among others. An online Guest Creators Series will complement this class. Students’ final projects may take different forms, ranging from written research essays to podcasts, visual essays, and other artistic interventions. Conducted in Spanish. This is an OSUN class and is open to Bard students as well as students from multiple OSUN partner institutions.

Professor: Philip Pardi

Whether we train our gaze outward at the world around us or inward at worlds within, poets are called to pay attention in particular ways. In this class, we will consider attention as the first step of the creative process, and we will study and practice the seemingly simple act of attending to all that we encounter as we move through our days and (on a good day) make poems. While we will devote some time to revision, the focus of this workshop will be the fertile ground between immersive experience and early, generative, exploratory poetic composition. The longer Friday session will be spent writing together, taking short walks and excursions, sharing our work, and discussing readings related to the science and practice of attention; the one-hour Wednesday session will be devoted to a sustained exploration of a single poem. Special Note: To facilitate our experiment with attentiveness, class meetings and most of the assignments will occur completely offline (i.e. no phone, no laptop, no smartwatch). If you have any concerns about this (or any) aspect of the course format, please contact me before registration. All spaces are reserved for incoming first year and transfer students. Registration for this class will take place in August.

Professor: Betsy Clifton

During this studio-based course, students will learn to use architectural representation techniques to create a new vocabulary for reimagining the architecture of commonly shared, everyday services. Waiting rooms, walk-in clinics, dmv offices, bank lobbies, among other spaces have become commonplace and by extension, unquestioned and underutilized. Though often taken for granted as background spaces, we will come to understand how they are part of the construction of societal norms, and their potential to host unconvential forms of public life that we will explore and reimagine through this course. Using tools of digital drafting, site analysis, physical models, and experimental image making, students will interrogate and reimagine these everyday spaces in our built environment. Through research, discussion and design proposition, each student will rewrite the role of their selected space of everyday services and propose alternatives that speak to our evolving understanding of shared resources, policies, societal tendencies, and expectations. We will think of our sites of intervention as testing grounds for new social relations to emerge, using design to reposition these everyday services as crucial elements in a larger societal transformation. The studio will conclude by imagining the proposals as a collective set of new urban elements, repositioning our conversation as a negotiation between the unquestioned past and the multiple possible futures. No prerequisites.

Professor: Thena Tak

Through a series of carefully selected texts, this seminar focuses on building better relationships with our planet by engaging areas of discourse that actively and intimately connect us to the natural world.  In architecture, our relationship to the natural world has been framed through many lenses – most familiar is perhaps through the more clinical lens of technology and performance.  Little Blue Marble however, foregrounds empathy, attentiveness, and participation as ways to bring us in better communion with the earth and perhaps, this form of relation may allow for an alternative set of cultural and social practices within architecture that shift our discipline’s dominant modes of thinking and being.  A few key texts that will help guide this conversation include Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, and Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection edited by Carolyn F. Strauss.  In addition to readings and discussions, Little Blue Marble will ask students to create letters to the earth throughout the term.  These letters will also take on varied expressions and forms through writing and ‘open’ drawing, i.e. a range of drawing forms, from digital to analogue methods, will be welcome.  The making of these letters will be opportunities for students to rethink language, representation, and storytelling as a way to help us build literacy with the more-than-human world. No prerequisites required. Please email Ross Exo Adams ([email protected]) for inquiries.

Professor: Heeryoon Shin

This course will examine the global interconnections of art and material culture in the early modern period (c. 1500-1800) through networks of empires, missionaries, and long-distance trade. We will focus on the circulation of Asian objects across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the New World, and trace the ways in which their mobility led to new uses and meanings and contributed to the growth of a shared visual and material culture. Using examples drawn from the luxurious moving goods of the early modern period, including blue and white porcelain, lacquerware, textiles and ivory, we will explore techniques and production, trade and circulation, and histories of consumption, collecting and display. The course seeks to move beyond more conventional Eurocentric approaches of West looking East to better understand the complexity of global objects in the early modern world. Coursework includes exams, a paper, and a final group project.

Professor: Susan Merriam

This course examines the relationship between visual culture and human rights. It considers a wide range of visual media (photography, painting, sculpture), as well as aspects of visuality (surveillance, profiling). We will use case studies ranging in time from the early modern period (practices in which the body was marked to measure criminality, for example), to the present day. Within this framework, we will study how aspects of visual culture have been used to advocate for human rights, as well as how images and visual regimes have been used to suppress human rights. An important part of the course will be to consider the role played by reception in shaping a discourse around human rights, visuality, and images. Subjects to be addressed include: the nature of evidence; documentation and witness; stereotyping; racial profiling; censorship; iconoclasm; surveillance; advocacy images; signs on the body; visibility and invisibility.

Professor: Katherine Boivin

Although scholarship on medieval art has often been separated by medium, Gothic church programs were actually multi-media spaces with meaning transcending the individual work of art.  This class, therefore, explores a wide range of artistic media, including stained glass, painting, sculpture, architecture, textiles, and metalwork, as they contributed to the dynamic space of the Gothic church.  In addition, it considers modern technologies for representing these complex programs, drawing parallels between the explosion of images in the Gothic era and the role of media today.  Structured around the investigation of case-study churches throughout western Europe—with a particular focus on France and Germany from the 13^th through 15^th centuries—this class will cover topics including architectural structuring of space, image placement, dramatic performances of the liturgy, the “economy of salvation,” and cultural notions of decorum.  Coursework includes weekly writing assignments, active in-class discussion, and a final 15-page research paper. AHVC distributions: Ancient/Europe

Professor: Keith O’Hara

This course introduces students to the methodologies of object-oriented design and programming, which are used throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Students will learn how to move from informal problem statement, through increasingly precise problem specifications, to design and implementation of a solution for problems drawn from areas such as graphics, animation, simulation. Good programming and documentation habits are emphasized.

Professor: Ben Coonley

This course surveys the history of appropriation in experimental media from the found footage, cut-up and collage films of the 1950’s through the Lettrists and Situationists and up to current artistic and activist production efforts such as culture jamming, game hacking, sampling, hoaxing, resistance, interference and tactical media intervention.  The spectrum of traditions which involve the strategic recontextualizing of educational, industrial and broadcast sources, projects that detourn official ‘given’ meaning, re-editing of outtakes, recycling of detritus, and a variety of works of piracy and parody which skew/subvert media codes will be examined for their contribution to the field.  Issues regarding gender, identity, media and net politics, technology, copyright and aesthetics will be addressed as raised by the work.  Students are required to produce their own work in video, gaming, installation, collage and/or audio through a series of assignments and a final project. This course fulfills a moderation/major requirement. Registration open to Sophomores and above.

Professor: A. Sayeeda Moreno

An introductory writing course that looks at creative approaches to writing short films and dialogue scenes. There will be writing and research exercises, screenings, discussions, readings and script critiques. The course will focus on researching and developing ideas and structure for stories, building characters, poetic strategies and writing comedic, realistic and awkward romantic dialogue. This is an elective course for Film and Electronic Arts and does not fulfill moderation/major requirement.

Professor: Nathan Shockey

This course explores the literature, history, and media art of Japan since the Second World War. Beginning with the lean years of the American occupation of 1945 to 1952, we will trace through the high growth period of the 1960s and 1970s, the “bubble era” of the 1980s, and up through to the present moment. Along the way, we will examine radio broadcasts, television, popular magazines, manga/comics, film, fiction, theater, folk and pop music, animation, advertising, and contemporary multimedia art. Throughout, the focus will be on works of “low brow” and “middle brow” culture that structure the experience of everyday life, as we think about the transformation of forms of narrative in tandem with different forms of popular media. Among other topics, we will consider mass entertainment, the emperor system, the student movement and its failure, changing dynamics of sex, gender, and family, “Americanization,” the mythos of the middle class and the rise of economic precarity, immigration, and climate disaster.  In addition, we will think about changing images of Japan in American media and the ways in which the mass culture of postwar Japan has shaped global pop cultural currents in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

Professor: Miriam Felton-Dansky

What happens when theater goes digital? This Bard network course addresses how theater and performance, as live embodied practices and forms of communal encounter, have permanently shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and celebrates new forms of performance that have emerged. We will investigate dispersed digital formats – WhatsApp and instagram performances, VR/AR-experiences, Zoom theater – using case studies from Berlin, Vienna/Budapest, Bogota, London, Johannesburg and Annandale/New York City. Digital Theaters will examine how the performing arts have fundamentally altered their reach, audience, institutional structures, and the quality of social encounter by going digital and what that suggests about the future make-up of the performing arts sector. This is an OSUN Network Collaborative Course taught in partnership courses on Digital Theatres offered at (list of all partner institutions) Universidad de los Andes, Bard College Berlin, Birkbeck, CEU, and University of the Witwatersrand.  As an OSUN collaborative network course, we will attend a digital theater festival based in South Africa and attend workshops with classmates in Berlin and London, while also functioning as an independent classroom community to build digital theater projects and investigate the stakes of the digital theater encounter in our own performance spaces and viewing lives. Assessment will be based on critical responses, creative digital projects, and participation.

Professor: Michael Robinson Cohen

This studio-based course introduces students to architectural tools of communication while presenting architecture as a field that is expansive—a field that engages not only with technical knowledge, but also with the making of public imaginaries, personal environments, cultural spatial aesthetics, and even the contested ground of the political, economic and social. The course is simultaneously an introduction to the techniques of representation that define the discipline of architecture and an opportunity to explore and question how architecture mediates the world. Students will learn and practice techniques of contemporary digital drafting, diagramming, mapping, 3D modeling and compositional image-making. While the focus will be on an array of forms of architectural drawing, these techniques will be carefully positioned against a survey of paradigmatic moments and themes in the history of architecture that will help situate the practice today. Throughout the term, our design work will be supplemented by readings and periodic research work, and we will situate this against regular lectures that will introduce you to the broader culture of architecture. The course will provide a foundation of concepts and skills necessary to make architecture legible and to convey a spatial argument through design. NO PREREQUISITES REQUIRED. For inquiries, contact Ross Adams, [email protected]

Professor: Ross Adams

What can we learn when we approach architecture as a ‘planetary’ practice? Aside from opening up new scales of design or shifting our focus to ecological concerns, how does this perspective fundamentally alter what it means to practice architecture? This design studio-seminar is an effort to introduce architecture as a worldmaking practice by acknowledging its inherently fictional capacity to imagine ways of being—modes of existence that depart from our present world. Unsettling notions that have underpinned architectural thought for centuries—private property, territory, racial capitalism, terra nullius—the aim of this studio-seminar is to approach architecture from alternate sites of inquiry that reveal it to be, more than anything else, a technology that mediates our relation to the world. Our work will be to design institutions for planetary fictions, architectural interventions that seek to instigate public imaginaries around sites of common existence—air, water, soil, forest, clouds—as a basis to exploit the narrative and fictional capacity of architecture at a moment of climatic and cultural transformation. We will develop our planetary fictions through a network of readings, films, discussions, collective design work, image making and invited guest lectures. Prerequisite for this course is ARCH 111 or permission from the professor. Please note studio work involves weekly assignments and, when possible, extracurricular events, such as field trips and studio-related talks. Computers with required software will be provided by the College.

Professor: Betsy Clifton

Where is the line between a presentation of proposed use (built space) and a presentation of potential use (exhibited space)? This design studio-seminar collapses the distinction between curating and creating by designing an exhibition, as well as the objects to be exhibited. By constructing our own vocabulary of contexts, codes, systems, and details of architecture, we will examine components of built space at multiple scales through a series of evolving models. We will reframe the institutional space of the gallery as a site of intellectual and creative production itself, and collapse the boundary between specified collections and our everyday context.  Through a series of experimental workshops our focus will be on ubiquitous elements of space which inhabit most projects, but whose agency is usually anonymous (fire codes, mechanical systems, utilities, for example). Over the semester, we will iterate scaled physical models and interchange their roles between gallery and architectural mock up, speculative object and utilitarian element. The semester will culminate in a built exhibition which intends to open up architecture as a future practice that can more readily accept itself as a collective/collected environment. Prerequisites ARCH 111 or permission from the program. Email [email protected]

Professor: Heeryoon Shin

This interdisciplinary course explores the history of Korea from ancient times to the present through the lens of art and culture. We will examine intersections of art, religion, and politics in Korea, as well as Korea’s interactions with the larger region of East Asia and beyond. The first half of the course is dedicated to canonical artworks from premodern Korea, designated as national “treasures” by the South Korean government; the second half will shift the focus to the modern and contemporary period to critically examine how such a “canon” and dominant narratives of Korean art history were formulated. Topics include Buddhist art and ritual; landscape and travel; material culture and collecting; female artists and representations of women; visual culture and politics under the Japanese colonial rule; monuments and anti-monuments; art as political activism; and contemporary Korean art within the global art world. Coursework includes exams, weekly responses on Brightspace, a 3-4 page paper, and a digital group project.

Professor: Heeryoon Shin

This course explores the art and architecture of the Mughal Empire (1526–1858), one of the most powerful and opulent empires in the early modern world. As prolific patrons and collectors of art, the Mughals drew upon Persian, Indian, and European sources to create new and distinctive forms of art and architecture. The rich artistic production of the Mughals and the regional courts of India include imperial palaces and tombs such as the Taj Mahal, pleasure gardens, temples and shrines at pilgrimage centers, illuminated manuscripts, lavish albums of painting and calligraphy, and embroidered, painted, and printed textiles. Together we will explore their political, social, and cultural contexts. A special emphasis will be placed on the cross-cultural interactions at the Mughal court initiated by diplomacy, trade, and religion, and how the Mughals positioned themselves globally through art and architecture. Coursework includes exams, midterm paper, and a group digital project.

Professor: Julia Rosenbaum

How does the world of interior spaces, their furnishings and decorative objects, tell us stories, assert values, project identities? Through an engaged-learning experience with three early twentieth-century National Park sites in the Hudson Valley—the Vanderbilt Mansion, the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s Home at Val-Kill—this seminar explores both the relationship between objects and identities and issues of consumption and appearance. The course will focus on American decorative arts from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century addressing theories about the purpose, meaning, and value of design and decoration as well as key movements, designers, and artists. Visiting the sites and collections regularly, we will combine the scholarly study of aesthetic ideals and social practices with hands-on examination of specific objects in the museum collections.  Key themes to be addressed include gender and the body; consumer capitalism and labor; political/class/queer identities; ethics and aesthetics.

Professor: Krista Caballero

This advanced course will investigate the “aliveness” of archives and collections and what political theorist Jane Bennett describes as vibrant matter – that capacity of things “to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” We will take up this idea of archives and collections as a kind of lively, vibrant matter while simultaneously exploring ways they reveal which bodies and whose histories matter. Students will work in the media of their choosing to create artwork utilizing archives as a tool for both contestation and reanimation. Alongside this creative making will be an examination of key theoretical texts with emphasis on those that center indigenous scholarship and BIPOC artists. As such, course readings, active participation in class discussions as well as group critique will be key to our investigation. Topics will include: collective memory and erasure; repatriation and decolonization; fragmentation and digital accumulation; the collection and indexing of other species; agency and control. An integral component of this course will also include site-visits to both on and off-campus archives such as the Associated Press in NYC, Hudsonia at the Bard College Field Station, and local historical societies. Prerequisite: at least one 200 level practicing arts course.

Professor: Joshua Livingston

Cookouts are paramount in the Black American community. The cookout has always been an event that allows “folx” to celebrate culture, fellowship with new and old faces, sing, dance, play games and generally preserve the legacy of ancestors. The practice also has had lasting economic impact for entrepreneurs in the Black community. What is notable however is that the root of the cookout—the barbecuing itself—largely came Native American community’s practices of pit cooking, and in some part through the complex relationship between African Americans and Native Americans. This class will be centered around the book Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue— among other important texts, video, audio and film—to explore the main elements that have aided in shaping this pivotal form of placemaking among Black people. Goals of the course are: To critically examine the “human” design of placemaking and the important elements of fellowship; To explore the complex relationship between Black peoples and Native American tribes that brought about the art of barbecuing as a cultural trapping; To unpack and understand the economic implications of barbecue in the Black community; To share and learn about Black cookout cultural norms, and practices; To share and learn about fellow students’ community practices, and; To utilize campus resources, insights from Native American community members, and other wider Hudson Valley community resources. Along the way, students in the course will work on the design and construction of a custom barbeque pit—likened after traditional Native American design— to create a lasting “place” and cultural practice on campus. The course will culminate in students throwing a cookout in the spirit of the Black community that in turn pays homage to the rich history of indigenous and Black peoples. This course has no prerequisites and is open to students at all levels.

Professor: A. Sayeeda Moreno

An intensive screenwriting workshop designed specifically for someone who plans to make a film for moderation or senior project. In a seminar setting we will work on multiple drafts, at times utilizing actors to workshop the scripts. The goal will be to develop a concise and polished short screenplay ready for production. The class will engage in poetic strategies and writing assignments forming the bedrock for vigorous analysis as students workshop their scripts. This course will require extensive outside research, and a commitment to a rigorous writing and rewriting process. Students must currently have a short script in progress that they intend to workshop during the semester.  Pre-requisite: Film 256 – Writing the Film or Film 229 – Character & Story, or the successful completion of a sophomore level production class. Non-majors can participate but must email the professor to highlight their screenwriting experience prior to registration for approval. ALL prospective students must email [email protected] one paragraph (no more than 200 words) with a short synopsis of the screenplay you want to workshop in class, and explain your interest in taking this course.

Professor: Keith O’Hara

This course studies games using the lens of computing systems; exploring the design and implementation of historic and modern computing systems for games, including the hardware, software, and their interface. For more than the sake of automation or communication, games have exploited a unique affordance of computers, the ability to simulate & ask questions of “what if?”  This course will go beyond only creating games, and will challenge students to critically reflect on how the architectural and programming choices in games can encode inequality and particular worldviews procedurally, as much as other game elements like visuals, audio and narrative. We will cover the low-level aspects of games platforms: graphics programming, networking, and peripherals; mid-level concerns: software engineering, design patterns, concurrency, and interfaces; and higher-level issues related to emulation, ethics, platform studies and media archaeology. Prerequisites: CMSC 201, Data Structures.

Professor: Gregory Moynahan

In 1725, Giambattista Vico presented to the world a “New Science” of poetic imagination that was intended as a point-by-point re-contextualization of the already established foundations of the natural sciences of Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon. In 1939, with much of the world enveloped in fascism and on the verge of a new technological war, James Joyce presented an immersive demonstration of Vico’s science in Finnegans Wake. By turns confusing, hilarious, and profound, Joyce’s “vicociclometer” sought to provide a reorientation in myth and history of the relation of ancient and modern life, religion, and politics. In this course, we will use the “exception” provided by both texts to look at the norms of modern intellectual history, using selections in their context to reconsider the background assumptions of modern societies and their political implications. Central issues will include the destruction of oral and traditional cultures (and peoples) by print based-civilizations, the function of science and myth in the organization of modern life (particularly as mediated by law), the definition of individuals and collectives by narrative and institutional form, the relation of written history to power, the function of technological media in politics, and the place of complexity in aesthetics and life. A central theme will be the history of the book as it develops among other media technologies, which we will thematize through the use of Bard’s collection of the facsimiles of Joyce’s voluminous notecards on Finnegans Wake (the so-called “Buffalo Manuscripts”). The only prerequisite for this class is to have read Joyce’s Ulysses, which will be used as a sort of methodological tool-kit and skeleton key for understanding Finnegans Wake.

Professor: Daniel Williams

What is the relationship of literary writing to scientific experiment? How do literary authors and movements characterize themselves (or become characterized) as experimental? This course surveys a range of texts from the 19th century to the present that engage with experiment in terms of content, form, or shape. We will read texts that represent scientific praxis alongside texts that deploy literary improvisation. We will consider what commonalities exist across experimental and avant-garde modes: the commitment to linguistic innovation and metatextual reflection; the prevalence of manifestos and movements; the lure of technology and intermediality. Throughout we will also consider experimentalism as both value and vice in critical method, from deconstruction to the digital humanities. In keeping with our theme, class meetings and assignments will frequently adopt improvisational practices—from automatic writing to chance-driven composition to quantitative analysis. Authors might include Hopkins, Mallarmé, Kafka, Woolf, Stein, Breton, Calvino, Pynchon, Ashbery, Hejinian, Davis, and Saunders.

Professor: Patricia Lopez-Gay

The proliferation of digital information and communications technologies over the past half-century has transformed and continues to transform how literary works are composed, produced, circulated, read, and interpreted. What new forms and practices of reading and writing have emerged in this late age of typography? What is the nature, extent, and significance of these changes? This course re-assesses questions and themes long central to the study of literature including: archiving, authorship, canon formation, circulation, materiality, narrative, poetics, and readership, among others. The course aims to understand our present moment in historical context by pairing contemporary works with texts from and about other shifts in media from the ancient world to the modern era. Readings include Augustine, Borges, Eisenstein, Flusser, Hayles, Jenkins, and Plato, as well as works of HTML/hypertext fiction, Twitter literature, online poetry, fan fiction, and so on. Coursework will include online and off-line activities in addition to traditional papers. Recommended for current and potential Experimental Humanities concentrators. This will be an OSUN course, with half of the spots reserved for Annandale students who have completed two or more years of college. Please contact the professor prior to registration.

Professor: Betsy Clifton

This one-month workshop will run from February 2^nd to March 2^nd and introduces drawing techniques to investigate the inherited conditions of our constructed environment and to speculate on its future. Throughout the workshop, students will create a full-scale perspectival drawing to reveal aspects of our environment that have come together not by intention, but by chance. With this, we will construct an alternative architectural language which measures, recomposes, and acknowledges our built environment as an accumulation of codes, patents, systems and legal frameworks, in service of proposing new opportunities. Each student will isolate an intersection of built space around campus (mechanical, structural, material, open to closed, corner, hallway, gap, etc.) and productively work to collapse its boundaries. Through readings (both from architecture and our own interpretations) and technical documents such as building codes and patents, students will name their constructed context, and draw over and around the existing site as a means to transform it. This class invites students from all backgrounds to engage with the fundamentals of architectural language. The course will conduct a series of drawing workshops and short exercises testing physical and conceptual space through digital 2D/3D modelling, drafting and image collaging. The final installation of the course will result in full scale perspective drawings and collages installed on the sites around campus. NO PREREQUISITES REQUIRED. For inquiries, contact Ivonne Santoyo Orozco, [email protected]

Professor: Ivonne Santoyo Orozco  

Architecture is both the product of labor and the organizer of its relations, yet often these issues remain overshadowed by aesthetic considerations and the broader discourse of design. In shifting the question of labor in architecture to the foreground, this course invites students to reflect on the spatio-political role architecture has played in mediating bodies, work and capital. To do this, we will analyze contemporary transformations to paradigmatic sites of work (offices, factories, tech campuses), as well as the many spaces that have been produced to feed architectural production and its endless cycles of extraction (camps, slums, mines), or the architecture that reproduces forms of maintenance (houses, squares, resorts). We will analyze a diverse set of contemporary and historical architectural precedents against a heterogenous landscape of voices from Maurizio Lazzarato, Silvia Federici, Mierle Laderman Ukeless, David Harvey, Peggy Deamer, Mabel O. Wilson, among others. The course will unfold in a combination of lectures and seminars. There are no exams but students are expected to complete weekly assignments, a midterm and a final project. This is an OSUN class and is open to Bard students as well as students from multiple OSUN partner institutions.

Professor: Ellen Driscoll

Maps have been dynamic visual and conceptual inspiration for many artists.  In this class, we will work with drawing and sculptural installation to investigate the translation of scale and data to abstraction inherent in the art of mapping.  We will study a range of contemporary artists around the world for whom maps are central to their artistic practice. We will study the visual strategies, content, and context of maps in these artist’s works. We will also look at a rich range of historical maps from Polynesian navigation charts to the soundless silk maps of World War 2. The work of Katherine Harmon, Rebecca Solnit, W.E. B. DuBois, the counter-maps of the Black Panthers, and the Indigenous Mapping Collective, among others will form foundations for our research and artistic exploration. The 1000-acre campus of Bard will be our laboratory for focused research and for generating three visual projects. This is an Engaged Liberal Arts & Sciences (ELAS) course. In this course you will be given the opportunity to bridge theory to practice while engaging a community of interest throughout the semester. A significant portion of ELAS learning takes place outside of the classroom: students learn through engagement with different geographies, organizations, and programs in the surrounding communities or in collaboration with partners from Bard’s national and international networks. To learn more please click here.

Professor: Susan Merriam

This course is a meditation on the meaning and histories of artistic experimentation in early modern Europe (1500-1800). At this time, art and science were often intricately connected, and artists took for granted the notion that they could manipulate and experiment with materials (oil paint for example), techniques (such as printmaking), and conceptual approaches to art making. Some of the areas we will examine include anatomical studies, optical experiments, and the use of materials and techniques. Questions we will pursue: What is meant by “visual experiment”?  How might artistic failure be generative? How did artistic experiments shape practices we would now consider to be located solely in the realm of science, such as anatomical study? What is the relationship between experiment and risk?  How might we compare artistic experiments in the early modern period to those undertaken in our own? As we study artistic experiment, we will create our own visual experiments using both old and new technologies. A highlight will be working with a life-sized camera obscura. This course satisfies the Experimental Humanities core course requirement for “History of the Experiment.”

Professor: Olga Touloumi

This class explores the theory and practice of utopia from an architectural perspective. Utopias have always been imagined through a variety of mediums like the manifesto, the blueprint, and visual and performing arts. The course investigates the manifold scales of utopian articulation and realization, from compound communities to projects designing the entire globe, and from unrealized proposals to intentional communes of co-liberation. The class will use the concept of utopia to map out the ways that men and women have sought to transform the spatial, psychic, and social landscapes they inhabited. What can we learn from the utopian imperative? What is the shape of utopia? How should we understand the relationship between thought and practice, hope and disappointment, idealism and realism? Projects presented range from early industrial colonies, socialist utopias, Christian communities, and anarchist utopias to shopping malls, factories, and afrofuturism. The projects will be discussed in conjunction with major texts by Sir Thomas More, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Karl Marx, Robert Owen, Louis Marin, to name a few. Course requirements involve short assignments, class presentations and a final paper. AHVC Requirements: Modern, Americas

Professor: Fahmid Haq  

Doing social media projects practically and analyzing their role critically are two main objectives of the course. This course will raise some critical question that evolve around social media which will include – surveillance and privacy, labor, big data, misinformation, cyborg and cyberfeminism. Topics will include the socio-historical perspectives regarding technology and society, the nature and characteristics of different social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, snapchat and more, big data capitalism and imperialism, civic engagement through digital platforms, mainstream media’s compelling realities to be more ‘social’, misinformation, racism and right-wing authoritarianism in social media, the role of social media influencers, branding and social media marketing and an exploration for a true social media. The course will draw from a broad range of social theory including communication and cultural theories, political economy and media anthropology to critically evaluate the impact of social media on human relationships, activism, branding, politics, news production and dissemination and identity formation. Theoretical notions such as hyperreality by Jean Baudrillard, network society by Manuel Castells and digital labor by Christian Fuchs will be discussed in the class. As ‘prosumers’, students will create social media projects and analyze some trendy cases evident in different platforms.

Professor: Fahmid Haq

South Asian Cinema is nearly synonymous with Indian Cinema to the international audience, though other South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal have developed strong film cultures too. The objective of the course is mapping the cine profile of the South Asian countries and examining Bollywood’s hegemonic presence in the region. This seminar course will study some cases across a range of South Asian Cinema cultures by exploring their common as well as different cultural backgrounds, historiography, and sociopolitical realities. Topics will include both historical and contemporary cinematic practices in South Asian countries such as the Partition of India in South Asian Cinema, cinematic representation of the Liberation War of Bangladesh, Bollywood’s cultural influence in other South Asian countries, portrayal of Kashmir in Indian cinema, diasporic Indian cinema and ‘other Bollywood’ cinema. Films by directors such as Raj Kapoor, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Anurag Kashyap from India, Zahir Raihan, Alamgir Kabir and Tareque Masud from Bangladesh, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Shoaib Mansoor from Pakistan, and Lester James Peries from Sri Lanka will be studied closely. This is an OSUN class and is open to Bard students as well as students from multiple OSUN partner institutions.

Professor: Kerri-Ann Norton

This course introduces students to the methodologies of object-oriented design and programming, which are used throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Students will learn how to move from informal problem statement, through increasingly precise problem specifications, to design and implementation of a solution for problems drawn from areas such as graphics, animation, simulation. Good programming and documentation habits are emphasized.

Professor: Laura Parnes

This course explores intersections of video and performance art. Course participants develop strategies for exploiting video’s most fundamental property: its ability to reproduce a stream of real-time synchronized images and sounds. How does video technology mediate between on-screen performer and audience? How can artists interested in creating critical and self-reflexive media respond to video’s immediacy and “liveness”? How can performance artists use video playback devices, displays, projectors, interactive elements, and live video mixing software to shape and enhance live art? The first half of the course concentrates on the creation of performance “tapes” (or tape-less video recordings) and the history of experimental video focused on performance for the camera. The second half of the course concentrates on the use of video as a central component within live performance art. We will read about and carry on a sustained conversation about the cultural and psychological impact of video technology on subjectivity and conceptions of the artist as “medium.” Readings on and viewings of work by Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Trisha Baga, John Baldessari, Paul Chan, Patty Chang, Chris Burden, Coco Fusco,  Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Wynne Greenwood, Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Miranda July, Mike Kelley, George Kuchar, Kalup Linzy, Tata Mateik, Shana Moulton, Jayson Musson, Bruce Nauman, Nam Jun Paik, Sondra Perry, Walid Raad, Martha Rosler, Jacolby Satterwhite, Michael Smith, Ryan Trecartin, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, among others. This production course fulfills a moderation/major requirement.

Professor: Jeannette Estruth

This course is an introduction to the history of Silicon Valley. Moving chronologically between 1945 and the present, we will study the history of this significant region, and stories about the area’s technology industry. With a focus on social justice,  this class will explore race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, health and disability, immigration and labor, and diversity and inequality in technology and the modern United States. In this class, students will experience first-hand the history of the early Silicon Valley through a wealth of primary sources, such as newspaper accounts, oral histories, photographic images, government documents, corporate reports, advertisements and business journalism, and more. We will also engage an exciting and emerging secondary literature.

Professor: Adhaar Desai

We are often drawn to characters more than anything else in our encounters with books, plays, or movies. This happens despite our knowing that characters remain exactly what their name implies: trapped by printed letters, scriptedness, or the limits of a screen. Characters are always mediated, but they can also show us how concepts like humanity and personhood depend on and contend with the media humans use to share ideas. In this course, we will study the history of characters in western fiction to learn how archetypes, racial and gendered stereotypes, historical or geographical settings, and the capabilities of different media technologies shape our encounters with them. We will also explore different ways of “reading” characters by thinking about how computer algorithms might understand something as supposedly complex as an individual’s personality. Primary texts will include Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Parks’s The America Play, Cusk’s Outline, and short stories by Toni Morrison, Kate Chopin, and others. We will also consider films, television shows, and video games. Students will have the opportunity to become characters in class debates, discuss fan fiction, and experiment with how to translate characters between media as we engage in analytical, theoretical, and creative work throughout the term.

Professor: Matthew Sargent

This course will introduce students to Max/Msp, an object-oriented programming environment for real-time audio processing, digital synthesis, algorithmic composition, data sonification, and more. Students will learn fundamental concepts of digital audio and computer programming while engaging in creative projects and in-class performances. The class will include examples of Max patches found in major works of 20/21st century electroacoustic music and sound art repertoire. The course will also explore connectivity between Max and other software applications, including Max4Live. The course will conclude with a final project. Introduction to Electronic Music, or a 100-level course in Computer Science, is recommended as a prerequisite.

Professor: Dominique Townsend

Many high profile figures associated with world religions, such as the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis, have adopted social media to communicate with followers, spread philosophical views, and offer spiritual instructions. In the Buddhist world, teachers use digital technologies to reach huge followings and to disseminate Buddhist texts, practical and ethical instructions, and iconic Buddhist imagery to students across the globe. The engagement with digital media has radically increased due to the pandemic as Buddhist communities have sought ways to convene safely. How have digital technologies reshaped how Buddhist teachers instruct students and attract new disciples, especially since the arrival of COVID-19? How do platforms such Twitter and WeChat constrict or alter Buddhist teacher’s messages, and how do they allow for an unprecedented global reach? What are the social and political risks and benefits of digital expressions of Buddhism? In this course students will analyze the function of digital Buddhist texts and images and investigate the use of digital media as a means for Buddhist teachers and communities to reach large and distant audiences. Recent digital trends will be considered in multiple cultural, political, and historical contexts that takes into account a diversity of Buddhist practices and pedagogies.

Professor: Patricia Lopez-Gay

This course explores some of the major literary works produced on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the present day. Students will become familiar with the general contours of Spanish history as they study in depth a selected number of masterpieces, including works by Miguel de Cervantes, Calderón de la Barca, Teresa de Jesús, Cadalso, Larra, Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Unamuno, Lorca, and Carmen Laforet. The course will be organized around three thematic modules: Spanish culture’s engagement with notions of purity and pollution; the emergence and evolution of the first person singular in Spanish literature; and the representations of the country and the city, the center and the periphery. In each module we will undertake a survey of relevant literature occasionally put in conversation with the visual arts. Conducted in Spanish.