Spring at Tisch - Collaborative Arts

Movement Machines: Kinetic Art and Performance: COART-UT 706 | 4 units

Blood flows through your veins, sound travels through the air, the clock ticks, a record spins, animals roam the earth, and the internet crosses oceans through submarine cables. Movement is everywhere. This hands-on studio class will combine kinetic sculpture and performativity to explore the relationship between human bodies and sculptural machines. Students will be introduced to the practical aspects of working with motors, electricity, and gears and will experiment with the intersections of kinetic art, engineering, dance, and gesture to explore our mundane relationships with objects and technology to suggest new dynamics, hierarchies, and intimacies between humans and machines. While contemporary digital and cyber cultures are dematerializing our interaction with the physical world to representations, simulations, and avatars, their dependency on natural resources and human labor often remains invisible. This course will draw the connections between the natural, the mechanical, and the technological through kinetic art and performances to foster interspecies collaborations between humans and non-humans that will culminate in presentations of multidisciplinary kinetic experiences for live audiences.

Touch is a Point of Contact: COART-UT 709 | 4 units

Touch is a point of contact where distinct beings - human, object, or idea - meet, creating an exchange that can be both physical and transformative. Using contact as the main frame for thinking, this class will explore casting, molding, and related practices as both technical processes and conceptual frameworks for making art. Beginning with simple acts of rubbing, tracing, and walking as ways of recording and translating experience, students will explore how shapes, forms, and textures can be transferred across materials and contexts. Through a series of hands-on workshops, the class will move from mark-making practices toward more advanced methods of moldmaking and casting, such as working with negative space, making body casts, and positive object casting. Working with materials ranging from plaster, concrete, and resin to more experimental materials like wax, candy, or lard, students will develop technical fluency while also considering the poetic, sensory, and social dimensions of "contact." The semester culminates in a final performance that synthesizes learned techniques with individual artistic inquiry. This final project emphasizes the reciprocal influence of contact - how objects can shape the body's movement, and how the body alters the object's meaning and function.

Advanced Acting and Performance on Camera: COART-UT 208 | 4 units

This studio intensive on-camera performance workshop is designed for multidisciplinary artists who want to strengthen skills specifically for acting on camera. The act of being filmed every class gives actors and performers more confidence and prepares them for working in professional settings. Class projects allow for interdisciplinary work incorporating writing, directing, music, animation, and visual arts. Actors work to develop and expand their individual set of acting techniques and technical skills that work best on screen to create specificity in "moment-to-moment being," all of which expands the understanding of the actor’s role in visual storytelling. Students perform analyzed scripted scenes, “cold” reads, and improvize unscripted on-camera exercises. Equal time and energy in this workshop is dedicated to creating new work with two projects: Bio-Pic project, and Fusion Short. The Bio-Pic project is a deep dive into character with each actor choosing a real person they identify with to research, curate, improv, write and portray in short scenes with acting and design support from other students. Fusion Short is a devised short film project. Production teams will develop and film group generated scripts. For each Fusion Short, everyone acts (cameo, supporting or lead) and takes the lead on the creative production team as head writer, director, production design, director of photography. The short is open for fusion: creators may want to interweave other art forms (dance, design elements, music, digital art, etc) into the narrative.

The Collaborative Arts Theater Experience: COART-UT 213 | 4 units

In this course students will generate, devise, develop, and perform a theater production through solo authorship and collaborative creation processes in response to shared artistic goals. In the first 7 weeks students will write the play - assigning scenes to be created by student playwrights, as well as devising material collaboratively in pairs and larger groups. Students may choose to combine their original work with already-existing texts, adapt/deconstruct a classic play, incorporate interview material, etc. The second 7 weeks will consist of the rehearsal, tech and the final performance. Students will be encouraged to wear many different hats (designer, playwright, technician, composer) - though everyone will be cast as performers. Throughout the semester we will integrate essential production elements into storytelling by applying foundational principles of design and technical theater (sound, light, media, props, costumes, etc.) as purposeful tools that support character, atmosphere, and audience experience. The semester will culminate with a play staged and performed before a live audience. 

Clown And Audience: COART-UT 220 | 4 units

In this physical acting course you will learn how to develop trust with your audience and create work through that relationship using tools of theatrical clown. Tools of clown include playing with an expansive emotional and physical range, making bold improvisational choices, acknowledging when those choices are not working, trying again, celebrating triumphs, playing with hope and empathy, and authentically sharing yourself on stage with an audience. By learning how to impact and be impacted by an audience during the artistic process, you will create work with more specificity, clarity, relevance, and empathy, no matter the medium. This approach will provide new perspectives for your creative process; help you build unique live experiences with an audience; and make you more resilient, adaptable, playful, and brave. In-class work will include a rigorous physical exploration of the material through a progression of ensemble and individual exercises. Throughout the course of the semester you will workshop original performance material culminating in a final performance. You will also get to know the alternative clown scene in NYC by attending shows and interviewing a professional clown.

Electronics for Artists: COART-UT 501  | 4 units

You don’t have to be an electrical engineer to be able to hack power and twist it for your own wild experiments. No matter what art/performance mediums you use in your creative practice, there are so many exciting and cutting-edge ways to augment your craft with connected devices and computer-assisted fabrication. This entry-level, hands-on electronics course is for students who want to test, build, fail, break, guess, burn, explore, and to ultimately make weird stuff that has never existed before.

Some example projects include: interactive installations, moving sculptures, wearable devices for fashion, dynamic lighting, and DIY music devices. The course goes over the basics of electronic circuits and coding for Arduino — programmable micro-computers that process inputs from buttons, biofeedback sensors, and microphones and translate them into outputs expressed through LED lights, sounds, motors, and relays. We use laser cutters, 3D printers, woodworking tools, and sewing machines to assist us, and learn the best practices of creating robust circuits through soldering, component selection, and power supply. Each week we look to contemporary hardware artists for inspiration and use our classmates to test and analyze our prototypes, getting feedback on not just the practical design of the circuits and mechanisms, but the feelings, ideas, and creative effects our connected art elicits.

No prior coding, hardware, or fabrication experience necessary, but time and dedication is — most projects will require out-of-class time spent in the shop. Students will need a laptop, but basic hardware and materials will be provided.

IRL/URL Performing Hybrid Systems: COART-UT 212  | 4 units

This course is a unique collaboration between the Collaborative Arts and IMA Tisch departments, and CultureHub based at La Mama. During the pandemic many performing artists moved their work online, leading to an increasing acceptance of experimental practices that their predecessors developed in on-line work for the past 30 years. In Experiments in Hybrid (IRL/URL) Performance, students will have the opportunity to design, prototype, and present collaborative projects that build on this tradition, blending both physical and virtual elements. Over the course of the semester, students will have the opportunity to study at the CultureHub studio where they will be introduced to video, lighting, sound, and cueing systems. In addition, students will learn creative coding fundamentals allowing them to network multiple softwares and devices generating real-time feedback systems. The class will culminate with a final showing that will be presented online and broadcast from the CultureHub studio.

Modeled as an accelerated intensive on methods of collaboration, students will work together in groups of 4 to produce new performance work to be presented to an invited in person and online audience. Participation in class discussions and in-class movement workshops are mandatory, and always based on each student’s physical ability. All body types and abilities are welcome and needed for this course to be successful.

New Video Dimensions: COART-UT 100  | 4 units

The introduction of the video camera into the artist’s studio pushed the boundaries of time-based media beyond its traditional use in cinema and television production to embody technology and narrative as an intimate material process. This video course will explore the various dimensions of video art, including its physical sculptural qualities, its use as a tool for poetic and conceptual gestures, performative approaches, and its role as a spatial dimension in video objects and installations. Video's ability to collapse an art object through its process, utilizing experimental documentary approaches and research-based methods, enables unique collaborations between artists and disciplines to invent formats such as dance-on-film, poetic essay records, personal and collective social experiments, remote documentary performances, and hybrid forms of audience interaction. Through thematic case studies and assignments, students will develop and produce several video works in the semester, providing them with the art historical context, technical skills, and conceptual framework necessary for creating and installing time-based video art. The course will culminate in a gallery special video installation, emphasizing the audience's interaction with time-based media within the visual art context of galleries, museums, and site-specific presentations.

Phantom Projections: COART-UT 111  | 4 units

The ghost is an iconic figure in literature and film, as well as a powerful metaphor: of memory, regret, longing, inner turmoil, unresolved trauma or guilt. Much like cinema itself, ghosts blur the line between reality and fantasy, challenging perceptions of what is real and what is imagined. This course examines how filmmakers explore the spectral realm to evoke themes of unresolved memories, traumatic events, and the lingering effects of the past. Through an interdisciplinary approach blending cinema studies, writing and hands-on filmmaking, students will reflect on the mysteries of existence and the nature of consciousness by exploring this powerful metaphor in a series of original works. Investigating the blurred boundaries between dreams, imagination, and the supernatural, we'll analyze how filmmakers use visual language and narrative techniques to create ghostly encounters that defy rational explanation. We will examine films that spurn conventional representations of "ghost stories," and instead delve deeper into themes of mortality, human psychology and emotions so powerful they can not be contained by death. Screenings include: "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives," "Heart of a Dog," "Hausu" and "Personal Shopper" (amongst others). Student projects will include shooting and editing narrative, documentary and hybrid short films that creatively interpret representations of haunting.