Curriculum: Interdisciplinary Studios

Architecture | Design | Fine Arts | Humanities & Sciences

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIOS

UDIST300 Genetics to Time Travel (Undergraduate)
Instructor: Jody Gillerman
Explore Art and Science as you create works inspired by science principles, ideas, and topics of your choice. A significant component of this course will involve researching your chosen science topic. Works may range in scope from Genetics to Time Travel, from Nano-technology to Ecology, from Astronomy to Light—or any other science that you would like to explore. Works may be presented in forms consisting of interactive new media and web to sculpture, graphic design, architecture, and installation or combinations.

Students have the benefit of exploring in depth their chosen science topic, exposure to topics presented by other students in the class, and occasional guest artists or scientists. Readings and presentations about artists that use science to inspire their work, field trips to Bay Area museums, science centers and/or artist studios and relevant shows will be included.

Interdisciplinary Studios extend a student's cross-school experience from Core Studio up into his or her upper division years. Three units of Interdisciplinary Studio are required of all majors and must be completed in the junior or senior year.

UDIST300 Regeneration & Repair (Undergraduate)
Instructors: Ellen Babcock & Claudia Tennyson
This studio course focuses on the recombination of existing imagery and artifacts as a creative strategy. We will use three models of recombining to shape our approach. Everyday repair, medicine, and DNA replication serve as templates for the recycling and reconfiguration of preexisting imagery. The nature of these subjects encourages interdisciplinarity and existing art-making processes, and biological processes are brought into play as conscious strategies.

The projects in this class are meant to nurture the development of myriad connections across material, conceptual, and social categories. Instruction in molding and casting, modeling, and various methodologies of assembling and disassembling (fabrication and joinery) and repair—such as textile, auto body—will be provided.

UDIST300 Vapor (Undergraduate)
Instructors: Alison Sant & Jordan Geiger
Vapor is the subject matter, medium and metaphor for work being undertaken by contemporary artists today around the San Francisco region and beyond, a generation and a zeitgeist invested in activism and inspired to action by our changing air conditions and their potentials for vision. This advanced interdisciplinary studio explores some of that work and uses it as a launching point for projects of our own.

The work delved deeply into understanding air pollution, its origins and results; as well as the places where artistic and design response can intervene. The class undertakes much of its work outside the classroom through field study and exercises, as well as trips to such outside institutions as the Exploratorium locally and the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles. Another local site of great importance to our work is Southern Exposure. SoEx, a San Francisco nonprofit artist space, is also host to an exhibition that coincides with our class and addresses the same issues.

As curators of that exhibition, it is our intention in this class that our own work reach beyond the walls of this institution into real engagement with our community, city, and beyond. These are also the ambitions of the show at SoEx, and so we visit the show as it prepares to open and seal opportunities to augment its content through our own activist practices.

UDIST300 Contemporizing the Organic (Undergraduate)
Instructor: Victoria Wagner
This class takes as its starting point the age-old inspiration of the natural form in creating works of art, architecture and design. The class explores the organic form from internal human body structures, through the world of other living creatures and environments, to the world of modern science experimentation; blending and extending the organic through mechanization and cloning. Studio work develops from our spontaneous responses to the natural form. We go on to movement, ergonomics, and the manipulation of the organic in contemporary culture. There are technical demonstrations, slide lectures, videos, readings, and discussions.

Interdisciplinary Studios extend students' cross-school experience from Core Studio up into their upper division years. Three units of Interdisciplinary Studio are required of all majors and must be completed in the junior or senior year.

UDIST300 Re-Imaging Landscape (Undergraduate)
Instructor: Sylvi Herrick
In order to reacquaint ourselves with our surroundings and rediscover spatial relationships—our personal connection to spaces—this studio engages in a series of playful critiques and conceptual experiments with urban, suburban, rural and natural areas around the Bay Area. We will begin with a look at the Situationist International, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art movements to provide us with some games and theory as we unravel our familiar perceptions of the city.

The ways in which we journey through our environment seep into the work we make. We explore how observations of forces, such as light, geometry, repetition, boundaries, and life within a place are echoed in art. Half of the course focuses on urban settings and then we turn to rural spaces and nature for art fodder. A unique requirement of this class includes field trips in the Bay Area and beyond.

UDIST300 Waste and Excess (Undergraduate)
Instructors: Ranu Mukhergee & Victoria Heilweil
Under the veneer of economic rationality lie the baroque and excessive patterns of production and consumption which define our society. The course looks at this cultural condition as reflected in a variety of material practices and engages students in multidisciplinary projects which help define their relationship to these issues.

Are exuberance and environmental sustainability mutually exclusive? Where are the taboos around waste, garbage, and material remains? How are we affected by the proliferation of digital signals, imagery, and other forms of excess? Readings and projects engage five subtopics: scarcity versus abundance, evolutions of the readymade (sampling, material remains, recycling), gifting and potlatch, waste and garbage, and environmentalism.

Projects for analysis include Mark Dion's Thames Dig, Taniguchi's Hiroshima Incinerator plant, Notacornfield, SF Dump residency, Fresh Kills landfill, Meta-CC, Enron documentary, and Burning Man.