Who makes a public image, who owns it, and how do we read it?

Students examine media technologies, institutions and creative practices through questions of authorship, representation, ownership and interpretation. Public broadcasting and independent media sit beside advertising, social platforms and systems of persuasion.

The course includes William Greaves and Black Journal, the Newsreel Collective, remix, experimental sound and collective practice. Students turn research into video essays and audio/video podcasts, bringing sources, argument and editorial form together. A reflective project asks them to consider how collaboration and the decisions made in production shaped their work.

Read the course profile / six areas of inquiry

An image can become a publication, a moving image or a performance.

Students work across photography, illustration, sound, video and animation while considering the cultural situations those forms enter. Case studies and screenings sit alongside software demonstrations, studio work and peer critique.

The course begins with the difference between vector and pixel-based images, then moves through collage, typography, GIF animation and editing. Projects ask students to observe the city, research family histories and respond to archival images. The semester develops into a portfolio of works with both a technical vocabulary and a reason to exist.

What happens when a photograph leaves its original format?

Photographic images and 2D digital artwork are the starting materials. Students learn to construct images through layers, selection, vector drawing and visual hierarchy, then carry those decisions into publications and moving-image work.

I use artistic research to connect these skills with a student’s own cultural interests. A street photograph can become a zine page. An archival image can generate a science-fiction narrative. Technical exercises build toward independently composed works, discussed and revised with the class.

What is sound doing to the image, the room and the listener?

We study the physical properties of sound and the choices that give recorded audio its character. Microphones, recording, editing and mixing are taught alongside listening to sound in film, visual art, performance and independent culture.

Students work in Pro Tools with sampling, synthesis, reverb, delay, distortion, EQ, compression, sends and buses. An unfamiliar album cover becomes a prompt for a piece of music. A film scene receives a score with the opposite emotional character. Foley and remix exercises make the relationship between sound and meaning something students can hear and change.

Type, drawings and photographs become events in time.

Students develop scripts and storyboards, then work with kinetic typography, animation, sound and video. We examine how a sequence establishes a message, how a visual identity behaves in motion, and how experimental structures can interrupt familiar media formats.

After Effects workshops connect keyframes and the graph editor with audio-driven animation, compositing and character design. In the Instagram Slideshow project, a topic important to the student becomes ten short videos, drawing on visual references from different historical periods and an imagined future.

The web is a place to make art and a subject to investigate.

This course joins the history of net art with the practical design of websites and interactive media. Students study the web’s social, political and cultural effects while developing a design language of their own.

Figma, low-code and no-code approaches make prototyping accessible, with attention to the structures underneath a web interface. Readings, screenings and critique inform projects about fandom, online identity, circulation and artistic research. Students consider hierarchy, readable type, responsive layouts, image descriptions and the experience of moving between pages.