This course will develop students' ability in perceiving worth in objects of art through consideration of fundamental concepts in painting, sculpture and architecture, involving analysis, interpretation and principles of aesthetics.

This course seeks to enrich students’ understanding of the visual by studying its historical, technical, and social construction. Recognizing the biases and issues of access embedded in visual media, we will consider how these media can both limit and liberate one’s experience of the visual world depending on ability, identity, and socioeconomic status. In addition to studying a range of image-making technologies—such as photography, film, photocopying, and virtual reality—we will also analyze the resulting images as expressions of aesthetic, cultural, and social values. We will set our sights on legacy Rochester companies, such as Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and Xerox, to explore how the Flower City has contributed to the invention of modern and contemporary ways of seeing. Visits to institutions on and/or beyond campus will offer further insight into how RIT and Rochester remain at the forefront of experiments in visual art and visual science.

The advent of text-to-image generative AI models has upended longstanding assumptions about the human labor and social impact of visual art. Questions about veracity, originality, and intellectual property, however, are not new to visual culture. This course will connect visual practices rooted in ideas of automation and computation to current debates about artificial intelligence and its practical/ethical implications for human creativity. We will focus on contemporary art and design practices from the 1950s to the present, such as conceptual art, new media art (e.g., video, digital, and computer art), generative art, and algorithmic art, as well as the emergence of computer-aided software, rapid prototyping, and other automated approaches to design. Studying how artists and designers have tackled such issues as authorship, collaboration, open sourcing, and appropriation will underpin our efforts to envision informed, ethically sound approaches to AI-generated image making. In addition to class discussions and debates, experimental activities employing text-to-image models will be a central component of the course.

This course examines the history and aesthetics of the motion picture in the United States between the 1890s and the early 1960s; emphasis will be placed on the analysis of both the work of major American filmmakers and the development of major American film genres during the Classical Hollywood Studio period. Among the filmmakers to be studied are Griffith, Chaplin, Hawks, Ford, Capra, Welles, Curtiz, Wilder, Donen, Sirk, Ray, Hitchcock, and Kubrick. Genres to be covered include the melodrama, silent comedy, screwball comedy, western, thriller, film noir, newspaper film, and the gangster film. The films will be studied within the context of contemporary cultural and political events, and will be discussed from several viewpoints, including aesthetic, technical, social, and economic. The ways in which gender and class are constructed through the movies will also be a major focus of study.

This course examines the history and aesthetics of the motion picture in the United States since the late 1960s, when the classical studio era ended. Emphasis will be placed on the analysis of both the work of major American filmmakers and the evolution of major American film genres between 1967 and 2001. Among the filmmakers to be studied are Kazan, Cassavetes, Penn, Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Allen, Seidelman, Lee, Burton, Altman, Tarantino, Coen, and Lynch. The course will consider the evolution of such traditional Hollywood genres as the gangster film, the romantic comedy, and the Hollywood movie, study the development of new, blended genres, investigate the rise of the blockbuster, explore the rise of the Independents, and follow the aesthetic changes that occurred since the 1967. The films will be studied within the context of contemporary cultural and political events, and will be discussed from several viewpoints, including aesthetic, technical, social, and economic. The ways in which gender, race, and class are constructed through the movies will also be a major focus of study.