Blender is a dynamic tool that can be used to design real world sets, physical objects and virtual assets for various media and live performance. It can render robust animations and impose visual effects on recorded video. It has the capacity to interface easily with interactive softwares like Unity and Unreal, while having the potential to output hi-fidelity renders for print. But beyond that it’s just a software. The ability to create any believable world comes from you. In this class we will explore a variety of techniques to create living, breathing fictional worlds while honing the skills in Blender to bring them to life. Students will be asked to create food, buildings, clothing, people and traffic signs from their fictional universe – building consistency of aesthetic, narrative allusion, and the fine details that make any world “believable”. The class will involve dissecting and discussing media on this world building, technical tutorials and instruction in Blender, and hands on workshops that tackle the conceptual questions of world building while exploring how to interface Blender with an outside medium: (3D printing, Pattern Making, Asset Development, Unity, Unreal, After Effects, recorded video). Students will be expected to watch technical tutorials and read short pieces on these topics for homework. Students will also complete weekly deliverable assignments.
Archives
Experiments in Art and Technology (OART-UT 1059)
All art uses technology, yet technology alone isn’t art—it is the burning spark of imagination and personal vision that rips time, space, and the ordinary apart, harnessing tools and bending materials to create a manifestation born from the mind’s eye, and in this course, you will explore the relationships between art, imagination, and technology, paying homage to pioneering engineer-artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries by reconstructing historic work and learning to embrace the spark, bang, buzz, and smoke that often arise at the periphery of the known. Through research, field trips, discussions, and hands-on projects, you will celebrate past achievements, challenge boundaries, and embark on a personal journey between invention and art.
Hyperreal Spectacle in Interactive Performance (OART-UT 816)
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard proposes the concept of hyperreality as the condition in which human consciousness struggles to discern between actual reality and simulations of reality, particularly within societies that are deeply influenced by advanced technology. In the 21st century, hyperreality has become ubiquitous in mediated life, as society becomes more intertwined with social media, virtual and digital environments, and performance spaces. In this course students will engage in the aesthetics and theories of hyperreality in order to create a performative happening that reflects on the embodied experience of contemporary life. Through collaborative research, students will integrate choreography, improvisation, technology, and visual elements to craft an immersive experience that collapses boundaries between performers and audiences. Students will be encouraged to explore experimental compositional strategies where communication unfolds across screens, through bodies, and within designed environments by employing digital performance and mixed reality techniques. Potential tools and techniques which may be utilized include artistry in real time technology, live streaming in performance, motion capture, machine learning, TouchDesigner and wearable technology. This class will include critical discussions and hands-on workshops during which students will refine their artistic vision. Participants are invited to devise an interdisciplinary performance practice in order to bring their installations into being. By engaging in this course, students will gain practical experience in creating and producing interactive installations activated by performance, aiming to create transformative projects where reality and the contemporary imagination converge.
Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Green World: (OART-UT 1057)
According to the World Health Organization, 6.5 million people will die prematurely this year due to air pollution. That’s more deaths due to breathing bad air than from AIDS, auto accidents, cholera, malaria, and war combined. Climate change, fossil fuels, lack of drinking water, over-population, GMOs, pollution, and the wholesale corporate campaign to discredit science are among the most critical problems of our time. Living in denial of these issues has become the West’s de facto cultural standard with only a fraction of the public taking action. How can artists, citizen-scientists, and storytellers intervene in existing narratives regarding some of humanity’s most life-threatening issues? How will you further important conversations and seize the potential to activate change? Green World explores contemporary environmental issues while guiding artists to create informed, responsible works of positive social change using technology as a force multiplier. This course is open to all NYU students interested in developing an activist’s artistic, social, and/or scientific leverage point to help save the world.
New Video Dimensions (OART-GT 2569)
Experiments in Collective Joy (OART-UT 18)
How do ants or bees organize on a mass scale when their individual brains are incapable of understanding the bigger systems they’re creating together? How did a Twitch hive-mind of 1.2 million people beat Pokémon one collective move at a time? How do we make art that makes us and our audience feel more connected, more alive, more powerful? This hands-on project studio course is about making art where participants are the medium, and the masterpiece created exists inside and between them. Let’s explore community and its connection to transformational, radical joy — not complacent happiness, but a joy that is the feeling of power, agency, and capacity growing within us and within the people around us as we cooperate to overcome shared challenges. Which systems and forms of art, play, and expression foster that kind of joy? This course is heavy on imagination, vulnerability, reading, discussion, experimentation, playtesting, and interactive group activities. Each week explores the relationship of the individual to the group under various lenses and spheres of life (i.e. politics, religion, activism, evolutionary biology, sociology, pleasure, the universe, sports, games, childhood, etc.). Then together, we break down the relationships, dynamics, and effects those systems have, and create multi-media prototypes and performance experiments inspired by these themes and ideas. The early assignments are solo, and then almost all assignments are in groups. The core process of the class uses iterative game design as a structure for ideating, creating, playtesting, and refining, though students are welcome to work in any medium they choose, so long as the goal is to explore themes of collective joy.
Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Sections (Spring 2024)
OART-UT 18-000 (7263)01/22/2024 – 05/06/2024 Thu1:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Luhrs, August
Reality and Creation (OART-UT 106)
Reality & Creation is an interdisciplinary, collaborative workshop that requires students to develop and present original works using real-life material. While primarily focused on filmmaking – students may also explore writing and performance to investigate the artful manipulation of reality in order to evoke meaning and emotion. Students will explore the meanings of both documentary and narrative filmmaking – and the inherent conflicts between creative construction and telling true stories. They will analyze cinematic representations of reality and devise hybrid works that use inventive and surprising forms while playing with the notion of the real. Over the course of the semester, students will complete a series of classroom/studio projects as well as independent works from non-fiction sources: such as unscripted interviews, archival material, found footage and newsreel. These projects are designed to foster experimentation across the arts disciplines and to cultivate creative collaboration.
Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
History of Documentary Film (OART-UT 1701)
The course traces the documentary film from its origins to the present day. Pioneer documentarians like Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty saw in documentary film the ability to portray life with a kind of truthfulness never before possible. Early Polish filmmaker Boleslaw Matuszewski wrote that while “the cinematograph does not give the whole truth at least what it gives is unquestionable and of an absolute truth.” Since those heady days, it has become all too clear that documentaries have no special access to the truth. Nevertheless, as this still-young art evolved, documentarians of different schools constantly sought new means to tell the human story. Documentary filmmaking has always been a blend of artistry and technical means and we will also explore this critical relationship. The course explores the development of the documentary and the shifting intentions of documentary filmmakers through the evolution of narrative approach and structure paying special attention to the documentary tradition’s relationship to journalism. Students examine how different filmmakers have gone about trying to convey “reality” on screen both through the use and avoidance of narration, through interviews, editing and dramatizations. Throughout the semester, students investigate how image-driven medium attempts to report stories and the ways an emotion-driven art can be problematic for journalistic objectivity. Finally, the ethical and journalistic responsibilities the documentary filmmaker are discussed. Special attention is given to dramatic re-creations, the filmmaker’s relationship to his/her subjects and the construction of narrative through editing.
Bodies in Cultural Landscapes (OART-UT 706)
This course examines the Western fascination with the moving body in different cultural environments and throughout colonial and postcolonial historical periods until the present time. It will begin by investigating early images and artistic representation of the body in motion captured by European ethnographers at the turn of the 19th century, and continue tracing it to current trends of contemporary culture. The goal of this course is to develop a critical understanding of the culture built around the body as subject as well as a marker of otherness. This course will offer students an opportunity to study and articulate, intellectually and physically, the legibility of bodies in motion within different cultural landscapes. Bodies in Cultural Landscapes will provide an open forum in which to investigate human movement within the specific aesthetic system and cultural practice of early ethnographic representation to contemporary culture’s engagement with the moving body. It will offer insight into personal and cultural identity, stimulating an expanded recognition and appreciation of difference. This course offers students the opportunity to explore simultaneously their intellect (in class viewing, readings and discussions), as well as in the presentation of their own version of ethnographic research and representation based on a topic of their choice discussed with instructor. Students will engage weekly with exercises and assignments based on course material.
Devised Theater: History and Practice (OART-UT 144)
Note this class is called “Devised Theater: History and Practice.”This intensive focuses on both historic evolution of ritual-based/early theater models through contemporary theater philosophies (accentuating history of Futurist/Dada theater innovations to present), and on anatomizing the nature of performer, performance, story and storytelling via the non-traditional philosophies and methods of contemporary experimental theater. The class will be rigorously participatory in terms of discussing/physicalizing these experimental methods and will culminate in the creation and performance of simple class collaboration-generated stage narratives. Students will investigate the meaning and application of physical/environmental ’neutrality’ on stage as they simultaneously investigate and define for themselves the most essential markers needed for the viewer to perceive ‘story’ in performance. As the staged pieces are constructed from these anatomized building blocks of performance and story, more complex qualities of character, identity, archetype, mannerism, linguistic disfluencies (verbal and non-verbal) and psychological subtext will be introduced as tools for each performer’s role in the story. In the final phases of piece creation, simple analog elements of music, sound, light, mask, craft materials, dance, virtuosic/specialized skill, props will be introduced as tools. The final performance will aspire to clear and effective applications of the performance/story elements discussed (or discovered) in class. Techniques and exercises derived from the worlds of Futurism/Dada, Richard Maxwell, Blue Man Group, Elevator Repair Service, Ann Bogart, Joshua Fried, and others will be discussed and employed.
Portrait of an Artist: Walter Murch (OART-UT 901)
This course examines the artistic career and creative work of Walter Murch, Oscar-winning film editor and sound designer, and the first and only artist to win Academy Awards for both film editing and sound mixing on a single film (The English Patient, 1997). The class will provide an unprecedented inside look into Mr. Murch’s processes of sound designing, editing, mixing, writing, and directing on such acclaimed and memorable films as THX 1138, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Return to Oz, The English Patient, Touch of Evil, and Cold Mountain. Through interviews, articles, and materials from his private archives never before publicly available, students learn about the creative world of an artist who has brought the importance of sound and editing to a new level. In addition to his work in film and his inventions used in the filmmaking process, two additional areas of interest of Mr. Murch will be examined: translations of Curzio Malaparte’s writings and his passion for astronomy. Mr. Murch will participate on several occasions in the course as a guest lecturer by visiting the class and/or via video conferencing.
Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Sections (Fall 2021)
OART-UT 901-000 (15488)09/02/2021 – 12/14/2021 Tue5:00 PM – 8:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Zivkovic, Brane
Poetics of Witnessing (OART-UT 829)
Today, many documentarians consider themselves working within a well-defined human rights framework where images and film are used to raise awareness about social injustice. On the far edge of this movement, however, there are writers, photographers and filmmakers whose work calls attention to the traditional documentary ethics of bearing witness but whose modes of representation blur the lines between fact and fiction. This body of work is more open-ended to interpretation and multiple readings, which also include more personal themes such as loss and melancholy, the ephemeral nature of time and memory, nostalgia and change. While not a production course per se, most students create short poetic films for their midterms and finals. The course is a great opportunity for students to open this door on short-form media production for the first time even if they wish to shoot on their smartphones. We will study several different kinds of visual poetics such as combining documentary photos with literature, artists working with archives and found images, the essay film, the personal diary and journal film, the performance film, ethnographic poetics, and new trans-media platforms and webdocs. Some of the writers and artists we will study include Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Chris Marker, Christian Boltanski, Forough Farrokhzad, RaMell Ross, Roland Barthes, Miguel Rio Branco Charles Burnett, William Greaves, Agnes Varda, Margaret Tait, Robert Gardner, Jean Rouch, and Jonas Mekas.
Zine Scenes (OART-UT 24)
In this hands-on zine making course we’ll absorb the methods and intentions of historical “fanatic magazines” to inform and inspire our new work. Since the 1930s, artists, fans, and subcultures have found community through self-publishing niche, small-circulation publications – driven not by profit, but by a burning desire to communicate. Students will each create their own periodical based on their personal “obsession”, learn different zine formats and make distinct editions that culminate in a self-directed final project. Tracing the material evolution of DIY publishing, students will explore pivotal moments in counterculture, from Russian Futurist booklets and Mexican revolutionary chapbooks to sci-fi fanzines, Tijuana Bibles, 1960s Mimeo Revolution ephemera, Fluxus scores, punk zines, and Riot Grrrl minicomix. Through hands-on object lessons, archival research at NYU Special Collections, and local site visits, students will master diverse production methods – including linoleum printing, hectograph degradation, two-color Risograph printing, comic scripting, and audio interview transcription. Working both individually and collaboratively, students will navigate every phase from raw concept to physical editioning, building a collection of peer work along the way. The semester culminates in a synthesized final zine and a distribution and critique event at Desert Island comics in Brooklyn, launching student work directly into real-world circulation.
Composing Music with Max (OART-UT 1097)
The foundations of Max, a powerful visual programming language for music and multimedia, will be covered in this course. We will examine how computers can be utilized to create situations for music creation, performance, and collaborative improvisation as well as applied to building interactive, generative music. In addition to learning Max’s fundamental building blocks, we will also use fundamental music theory as a tool to better understand music making. We will create programs that examine rhythm, melodies, chords, scales, and recognize other qualities of music like timbre, texture, and dynamics while taking into consideration the principles of harmony, melody, and rhythm defined in basic music theory. The final will require you to develop a collaborative piece of interactive computer music, a collaborative performance environment, or another final project that has been discussed and agreed upon together. This class does not require any prerequisite programming skills or prior music theory knowledge.
Abrupt Climate Change (OART-UT 1058)
Combining science and the art of storytelling, this course will tackle one of the most pressing issues facing the future of humanity: Abrupt Climate Change. In a unique collaboration with NYU physical climate scientist Professor David Holland, students will research and create work that bridges the divide between science and the public through accurate, creative science-based storytelling. This highly multidisciplinary, hands-on course welcomes students from all backgrounds and fields of study to imagine and invent creative ways of telling stories about this global phenomenon and to investigate solutions. Weekly assignments will lead to a final collaborative project and an exhibition open to the public.
Film: A Transformative Process, a Vision Beyond Technology (OART-UT 140)
This course emphasizes the content, the aesthetics, and the purpose of cinema as a truly distinctive and dynamic art form uncovering the inner vision of the filmmaker, and the organic and transformative process where filmmakers projects their original truth, not compromising or borrowing ideas and themes from other films. Students explore the use of technology as a valuable tool that enhances the vision of the filmmaker without diminishing the organic texture of the work by its overwhelming presence. The course brings to light the stagnant and repetitious formulae of commercial cinema, resulting in diluted mainstream films. The works of iconic filmmakers who embrace and use film as an original, vibrant and reflective art form are reviewed throughout the course. Extracts and readings from relevant filmmakers are given throughout the course.
Imagining the Future through the Arts (OART-UT 300)
The world-wide pause caused by the pandemic created a space of reflection and concern, and brought us to a consideration of meaning. As artists and scholars, we have been called to make sense of the ways we have told the stories of our communities, and been summoned to imagine a future world that is vibrant, inclusive and just, one that embraces our deepest values. As the vanguards of culture, we are now recording and creating new history together, constructed from examples of reexamined experience and awakened by new ideas. The important work of reinvigorating arts education, of imagining and designing the future through the arts, now more than ever before, must be a part of our mission as a school in a great research university. A Tisch education has always been about access to the people who create our community: the great thinkers and creators among our faculty, staff and alumni in cross collaboration with NYU, New York City and the globe. Together, we have already led transformative change, and continue to be leaders in fields that will adapt to our changing times. You too are the advocates, artists, innovators, scholars, and storytellers who collectively reflect upon the past, record the present, and imagine our future. We are co-creators of humanity’s most important re-set. Spark your imagination of the future through conversations with the leading creators in their fields. NYU Tisch School of the Arts Dean Allyson Green will moderate twelve talks with outstanding faculty and alumni of the school from a range of artistic disciplines. Create your own role in a movement to catalyze innovation and creativity to create a more beautiful, more just, more inclusive and more connected world. Please reach out to tisch.openarts@nyu.edu if you have any questions about the course.
Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
2 credits – 15 Weeks
Designing Motion (OART-UT 149)
In this course, we will explore the versatile usage of animation in the world of graphic design as a unique form of expression. We will examine how motion design combines movement, rhythm, space, and timing to orchestrate abstract shapes, words, and symbols. Through a series of weekly exercises, students will gain an understanding of key concepts in motion design while using and learning Adobe After Effects. We will follow the footsteps of motion design history, reconstructing classic pieces in order to gain a fundamental understanding of this art form. We will learn how graphic design, music, choreography, and acting can all be applied to the motion of design elements and furthermore, how the combination of animation and design can convey compelling stories, emotions, and ideas. Students will survey the technologies and methods that enabled the fields’ developments – from drawing on 18 mm film, the analog Scanimate in the 80s, to UX motion, interactive design, and contemporary live performances. Inspired by those traditions, students will be encouraged to take on an experimental approach, discuss thought processes, and develop their own visual language while combining interdisciplinary practices. *Adobe After Effects will be used as a main tool in the course, therefore a sufficient computer (over 16GB of RAM and a graphic card) is required.
Unruly Images: Centering the (In)visible and (Im)possible (OART-UT 833)
This course explores unruly images, bodies, faces, spaces, aesthetics, and even feelings that exist at the margins of categorization, making these powerful subjects for artistic work. We will manipulate image-making tools and give form to expressions that reveal the hidden structures of power. Through lectures, discussions, workshops, and readings, we will look at topics such as memes and glitch art, cyberface and AR filters, monsters and glitched bodies, uncanny valley and AI images, as well as liminal space and collaborative world-building. We will pay particular attention to selected writings from Hito Steyerl, Legacy Russell, Rosa Menkman, and Adam Greenfield, and apply these critiques to emerging perceptual technologies (volumetric 3D capturing, machine learning, AR/VR, web-based 3D game engines) that students will use to create their projects.
Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Virtual Performance and Unreal Interactions (OART-UT 27)
What types of performance can we create if we’re not limited to a physical stage or even a physical body? How much more can we communicate with video once our audience has the power to directly interact with the content, not just passively observe? We can create dynamic, digital experiences and innovative, virtual performances using Unreal Engine, a game engine and powerful suite of development tools. Students will learn the fundamentals of Unreal Engine, including 3D environments and assets, lighting, cameras, animations, audio, basic VFX, and programming interactivity using visual scripting blueprints. Then, we will incorporate external hardware such as depth cameras, LiDAR scanners, and motion capture suits to create our own digital assets, including virtual avatars of ourselves. Students will use this foundation in virtual production to create projects ranging from 3D music videos to choose-your-own-adventure memoirs to Performances with puppet avatars in an online 3D environment. The final assignment will be a part of a public show.