Yale College First-Year Seminars
Enrollment limited to first-year Yale College students. Preregistration required through the First-Year Seminar Program.
ART 006a, Art of the Printed Word Jesse Marsolais
Introduction to the art and historical development of letterpress printing and to the evolution of private presses. Survey of hand printing; practical study of press operations using antique platen presses and the cylinder proof press. Material qualities of printed matter, connections between content and typographic form, and word/image relationships. Enrollment limited to first-year students. HU
T 1pm-4pm
ART 007b, Art of the Game Sarah Stevens-Morling and Elena Bertozzi
Introduction to interactive narrative through video game programming, computer animation, and virtual filmmaking. Topics include interactive storytelling, video game development and modification, animation, and virtual film production. Students produce a variety of works including web-based interactive narratives, collaboratively built video games, and short game-animated film production (machinima). Enrollment limited to first-year students.
MW 2:30pm-3:45pm
ART 010a, Interdisciplinary Exploration For Making Fictional Worlds, Flying Machines, and Shaking Things Up Nathan Carter
Whether you aspire to be an engineer, doctor, or astronaut, it can still be vital to dream and invent–by drawing and sculpting in order to generate ideas and develop strategies for learning how to make something out of nothing. In this course, students consider how artists and inventors have used seemingly unrelated materials and content in order to activate creative thinking and generative activity. Students engage in a wide variety of interdisciplinary activities such as drawing, sculpting, painting, printing, photography, reprographics, instrument-building and sound broadcasting. This course emphasizes experimenting with strategies for generating ideas, images and objects, and employs broad modes of creating, including elements of chance, spontaneity, collaborating communally, and synthesizing disparate elements into the process of making. Enrollment limited to first-year students. HU
MW 9am-10:15am
ART 014b, Research in the Making Matthew Keegan
Artistic research expands the research form to focus on haptic and tactile study of physical and historical objects. Through field trips to various special collections and libraries, including the Beinecke, the Yale Art Gallery, and the Map Collection, students respond to specific objects in the vast resources of Yale University. Group discussions, lectures, and critiques throughout the term help foster individual projects. Each student conducts research through the artistic mediums of drawing, photography, video, and audio, to slowly build an interconnected collection of research that is also an artwork. Enrollment limited to first-year students. HU
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm
ART 015a, Sculpture, Irrational Collaborative Play and Channeling Creativity Nathan Carter
How do artists, writers, dancers, musicians, architects, designers, and performers break the tension of trying to generate something new and exciting? When do we feel the most free to create? This course explores strategies inspired by artists who use unstructured free play as a way to develop new ways of making art and generating new ideas, images, and objects. Students are introduced to group activities and actions such as the costumes created for Bauhaus School parties and the seemingly absurd, irrational games of Fluxus as a way to reinvent and energize their notions of how art could be created. Working collaboratively and individually, students use sculptural materials and the sculpture studios to create a space for their own inventions. Enrollment limited to first-year students.
MW 11:35am-12:50pm
ART 016a, Artists Teaching Artists Ryan Sluggett
This course explores and questions artistic traditions between teachers and their students with a focus on how knowledge gets passed down, rejected, built upon, doubled down on, and sidestepped. Throughout history artists-as-educators have merged lived experiences, subjective taste, and ‘mis-readings’ of tradition in their official and unofficial syllabi. Students imagine what it might have been like to be a student of a range of influential artists, be encouraged to put themselves directly in the seat of the emerging artist, and come to understand the two-way street nature in the formation of one’s art education. Enrollment limited to first-year students.
HTBA
ART 040b / ENGL 0440b, Writer as Designer, Designer as Writer Rachel Kauder Nalebuff and Andrew Walsh-Lister
This seminar invites us to explore the boundaries between written and visual expression. Students with a background or interest in visual art learn to harness their voices as writers, and writers learn tools for how words take on new meaning through visual compositions. The course investigates the relationship between form and content through the creation of three projects—an interview, a manual, and an essay—each of which is written, designed, and physically produced using a variety of tools at our disposal. Through readings, in-class discussion and exercises, as well as workshops, we consider the ways language and ideas can be communicated to others through different media, and how that media in itself also carries meaning. The aim of the course is to playfully blur the categories of “writer” and “designer” so that we can be both at once: messengers. Previously ENGL 041. Enrollment limited to first-year students. This course does not count toward the Creative Writing Concentration for English majors. HU
MW 4pm-5:15pm