Well, summer is over and another year of grad school has begun. This year already has a completely different feeling than last year. Not only do I know what to expect, but I had much more freedom in choosing my classes, and I picked some great ones.

  • First off, Visual Literacy, taught by Gail Swanlund, is a graphic design intensive meant to get incoming graphic designers up to speed with what they need to know for grad school. So far, we’ve been working on books with 100 illustrations of a chosen animal. I’ve been working on 100 octopi. It’s stretched some muscles I haven’t touched in years, and I’m already improving.
  • Video Installation, with Peter Flaherty, is one of our core classes where we spend the entire semester working on developing one installation piece. I’m developing a piece with a disassembled projector and the aurora borealis. More to come.
  • Our Video Seminar is the same as last year, where we discuss our projects and special topics.
  • I’m auditing Mona Heinze’s Towards an Interdisciplinary Critique, in which we conduct metacritique and strategies for discussing and analyzing work.
  • My IM class this semester is Contexts for Interaction, Performance and Play, where we talk about games as a medium and develop a collaborative interactive project at the end of the year.
  • My Life Drawing class with Marjan Hormozi is pretty great, too. She’s focused on teaching us how to analyze a body geometrically and the language of drawing.
  • Professional Video Environments is teaching us Hippo, Watchout and D3.
  • And, best of all, I’m taking a month-long Immersive Narrative workshop with Joe Rohde, the imagineer responsible for Animal Kingdom. It’s an incredible, inspiring class. He’s smart, opinionated, intuitive and insightful. And I think he’s really committed to and excited by the prospect of putting his skills and experience in the hands of a bunch of wacky young artists.

It’s a lot- 19 credits- it’s keeping me busy so far. I’ve started working on some productions going up next semester. It’s going to be a good year.