Required Courses for SIM Majors Only
MPSM276/286, MPSM376/386, MPSM476/496 Studio for Interrelated Media Major Studio
THUR 1:30 – 6:30 pm C. Bi, E. Buckholtz, D. Moser, N. Sturiale, T. Yamamoto
This is a studio class in which individuals and groups present and discuss work in media of their choice such as audio, video, computer, performance, publishing, and production of events that interrelate media. Each week, student presentations of work are organized into performances, discussions, workshops, and exhibitions produced by students who select, schedule and technically support the presentation. This course repeats every semester and is required for all SIM Majors. It is not available to non SIM Majors.
Every Semester SIM offers a variety of Open Electives that are open to any MassArt student from any department. See below for the current offerings.
FA24 Courses
MPSM-337 Electronic Projects for Artists I
MON 1:30 – 6:30 pm D. Moser
The purpose of this studio course is to provide skills and information that will be useful for artists who use electrical devices in their artworks. Examples will be shown to help students in incorporating/integrating electrical circuits and sensors in a variety of media including sculpture, installation and performance. This intro course covers AC/DC electrical current and how to work with it safely. We show how to use components like breadboards, resistors, capacitors and transistors, Integrated Circuits, read schematics and build electrical circuits. The ultimate goal is for artists to incorporate this knowledge in the production of projects of their own design.
MPSM367 Dream Club Lab
MON 1:30 – 6:30 pm E. Buckholtz
Dream Club Lab spans the disciplines of Experiential Art and Design, Speculative Design, and Art Installation. Experiential design creates activations that live in the real world by participation through orchestrated experiences. Speculative design is concerned with future proposals and challenging our assumptions about the everyday. This course offers a data base of international artists and collectives such as Assemble Studio, Ruangrupa, Black Speculative Art, Future Farmers, teamLab, to choose from to present your own research in creative presentational formats. Your research will provide the foundation to conceptualize and develop your own projects in collaborative groups and to gain skills in creating ground plans, renderings, 3D models, and prototypes that will become experiential investigations, installations, and performative public art interventions in spaces both on and off campus. Presentations, planning and design sessions; visitations, investigations, and adventures await you in The Dream Club Lab. This class is a good preparation for Immersive Art.
MPSM320 Projects in Sound
TUE 9:00 am – 12:50 pm E. Buckholtz
A seminar for advanced students who wish to pursue independent sound projects. Projects may include “live” sound presentations, recorded sound works, a complete audio CD, sculptural sound art, digitally controlled sound art, public sound art, environmental sound art, and sound installation. Students are required to present their work in progress for critique, and to complete a final sound project. Additional class activities may include a field trip, guest speakers, and gallery visits. A prerequisite of Intro to Sound Studio (MPSM 273) is required, or by special arrangement with the instructor.
MPSM-402 Art, Life and Money
TUE 9:00 am – 12:50 pm Crystal Bi
This course is targeted towards soon-to-graduate art students who are thinking about the practicalities of continuing life as an independent artist after college. Throughout the semester students will meet MassArt Alum as well as others pursuing unconventional artistic paths. Through discussion, presentations and field trips, issues surrounding the realistic struggles of maintaining life as an independent artist alongside the celebration of such a choice will be explored. The course will attempt to demystify copyright law, basic finance skills, resilience strategies, and professional networking. Students will interview artists as well as explore methods for balancing art, life and money after school. Students will also practice writing their artist statement and resume, giving an artist talk, and creating a personal five year plan.
MPSM-273 Intro to Sound Studio
TUE 1:30 – 6:30 pm E. Freeman
Students study principles of electroacoustic and digital sound processing, including audio recording, editing, mixing, and signal processing techniques. Students are required to present “live” or recorded sound pieces. Sound studio includes analog and digital synthesis, analog and digital recording and editing systems, signal processors. Weekly assignments. No prerequisite. (fall term only)
MPSM-211 Interrelated Media Practice
WED 9:00 am – 12:50 pm C. Bi
This course is centered around explorations of you as an interrelated media artist with a special focus on space/place and creative interventionism. This course aims to deepen our intentionality in considering place and viewers when creating artwork. How can we – as artists – deeply observe the current conditions of a place and intervene in spaces to produce new, more desirable outcomes and futures? We will explore these themes through a series of group/individual projects, observations, artist talks, and site visits. This is an introductory critique studio course where students produce and present interrelated media artworks in progress and in final form in order to expand their artistic practice, interact with artists from other disciplines, and refine public speaking skills. Great option for non-SIM majors to explore interdisciplinary art practice.
MPSM-377 Choreography & Performance
WED 9:00 am-12:50 pm T. Yamamoto
This course will focus on students’ developing their own performance pieces while introducing improvisational practices and several time/spatial-based compositional structures and tactics to enhance the development of students’ performance works. Considering the expanded notion of choreography, students are encouraged to create not only dance and movement pieces, but also performance art, live site-specific works, spoken word, sound art, or music that involve the use of the body and action in space and time. The emphasis will be on developing an individual voice, conceptual clarity, and how to utilize the flow of time and possibility of space fully and effectively.
MPSM-221 Interdisciplinary Video
WED 3:00 – 8:00 pm A. Flackett
This is a studio course in which students learn the basics of video production – from shooting to editing to the use of effects and finally publishing/screening final works. The class explores the inclusion of video in installations, live performance, and other experimental applications. The contemporary practice of video production is presented within the historical context of the moving image from silent films up to the modern Youtube era. Additionally, introductory video mapping technologies and video sound techniques are presented. The course combines lectures, demonstrations, workshops, visiting artists, and both collaborative and individual assignments.
MPSM-205 Stagecraft and Technical Production
WED 3:00 – 7:50pm Max Azanow
This course aims to demystify basic lighting, rigging, sound and staging practices. Technical workshops will be conducted during class time where students work in teams to complete assignments. Demonstrations and lectures also include site planning, power distribution, and safety in the workspace. For credit the students will prepare and present their own personal projects using the class as crew and SIM’s technology.
MPSM-336 Event Planning and Production
THUR 9:00 am-1:00 pm N. Sturiale
This is the fall segment of a year-long course designed for those that are actively involved in organizing and producing ambitious events and exhibitions throughout the year. Open to any MassArt student that is actively producing on or off campus events. Required for Eventworks producers and Godine Family Gallery Managers. Registration is by permission of instructor.
SP24 Courses
MPSM-311 Electronic Project For Artists 2 – Programming
MON 1:30-6:20 pm Dana Moser
This course introduces students to computer interfaces for connecting interactive sculpture, performance and installation with software. Course content includes micro-controllers, electrical sensors, custom-made circuits and programming. No previous programming experience is necessary. Pre-req: MPSM337 suggested, but none required.
MPSM-410 Immersive Experience Design – Virtual Worlds
TUE 1:30-6:20 pm Eric Freeman
MPSM-216 Performance Art Fundamentals
TUES 1:30-6:20 pm Takahiro Yamamoto
This course will explore, physically and intellectually, a wide range of performance practices. We will collectively practice strategies, forms, and methods of making and performing while developing awareness for performers’ bodies, audience, environment (site), and nature of time. Students will be introduced to various different types of performance practices including, but not limited to mundane actions, rituals, body art, social choreography, narrative, conceptual/experimental performance, dance, theatre, durational art, and so on. In addition, students will gain a greater understanding of the legacy of this ever-revolving art form by observing historical precedents and contemporary approaches to performance.
MPSM-402 Art, Life and Money
WED 8:00am – 12:50 pm Crystal Bi
This course is targeted towards soon-to-graduate art students who are thinking about the practicalities of continuing life as an independent artist after college. Throughout the semester students will meet MassArt Alum as well as others pursuing unconventional artistic paths. Through discussion, presentations and field trips, issues surrounding the realistic struggles of maintaining life as an independent artist alongside the celebration of such a choice will be explored. The course will attempt to demystify copyright law, basic finance skills, resilience strategies, and professional networking. Students will interview artists as well as explore methods for balancing art, life and money after school. Students will also practice writing their artist statement and resume, giving an artist talk, and creating a personal five year plan.
MPSM-366 Art in/with/on/from TIME
WED 9:00-12:50 pm Takahiro Yamamoto
What does it feel to observe impermanence? Why do we forget things? How can time be related to space, mind, body, and objects? Through the lens of the ubiquitous yet profound notion of time, students are invited to investigate various time-oriented notions such as duration, repetition, ephemerality, movement, ritual, attention, changes, stillness, futility, suspension, speed, history, and more. Using the approach of mind and body integration, this class encourages students to think and intellectualize in-class physical exercises and workshops. Simultaneously, class exercises explore physical engagement that feels, senses, and moves with theoretical and poetic discourses about time. Together, students critically cultivate time-oriented perspectives as they develop individual projects of their chosen medium.
MPSM-205 Stagecraft and Technical Production
WED 3:00 – 7:50pm Max Azanow
This course aims to demystify basic lighting, rigging, sound and staging practices. Technical workshops will be conducted during class time where students work in teams to complete assignments. Demonstrations and lectures also include site planning, power distribution, and safety in the workspace. For credit the students will prepare and present their own personal projects using the class as crew and SIM’s technology.
MPSM-207 Beat Research
WED 3:00-7:50 pm Antony Flackett
This is a studio course in which students will produce work that is influenced by the cultures of hip-hop and electronic music. Students will learn the techniques of sampling, sequencing, and drum programming using Ableton Live and other music-making software. Most assignments will involve the creation of music, but we will also go over the production of video and live performance.
MPSM-317 Event Planning and Production
THUR 9:00 am-12:50 pm Nita Sturiale
This is the spring segment of a year-long course designed for those that are actively involved in organizing and producing ambitious events and exhibitions throughout the year. Open to any student that is actively producing on or off campus events. Required for Eventworks producers and Godine Family Gallery Managers. Registration is by permission of instructor.
MPSM-365 Imagining Possible Futures: Activism & Socially Engaged Art
FRI 1:30-6:20 pm Crystal Bi
‘Socially engaged art’ nurtures the relationship between artist and audience, a relationship that itself becomes the artwork. By designing new ways of being together, we can practice inhabiting new worlds and invite others into possible futures. This is art as political action, as intervention, as social change, as role playing the collective future we want to see. The course will offer explorations of work by social practice, interventionist, participatory, and community engaged artists. Students may develop their personal ethics/value system for collaborations with community as part of their artistic practice. In the course, students have the opportunity to deeply investigate their own community at MassArt and are invited to design an offering for the MassArt community by creating their own community engaged project. Finally, students are given the tools to develop a grant proposal for a socially engaged project that could be used in public art grant applications.
This semester we are also offering the following class to satisfy the SIM Elective requirement:
AETE-213-01 Make Radio
TUES 1:30 pm – 6:20 pm Erik DeLuca
We make radio in this student-driven, multi-disciplinary introductory course (no prerequisites required). Established in the early 20th century, broadcast radio is a powerful source for cultural expression and connection through voicing, sounding, listening, and learning. Radio is at once a site for reflection, agitation, and a compositional tool for making art and dialogue. From this context, students explore open source, free tools to record, edit, and broadcast a variety of radio styles of their choosing (like audio documentary, DJ sets, themed mixes, sound art, audio essays, talk radio, and experimental theater). We study keywords of sound including echo, noise, resonance, silence, space, and synthesis; and entanglements of human rights, borders, capitalism, the cannon, processes of decolonization, and systems of power. As we question authorship and intersect social boundaries, we work through processes where materials and tools get us places. Towards the end of the semester we produce a live radio broadcast event for the MassArt community. One overarching aim is to consider a longstanding, sustainable MassArt radio station that includes a network of broadcasters and listeners.
Questions? email nsturiale@massart.edu
Studio for Interrelated Media 2023-2024