This six-credit studio course is aimed at ensuring basic competence with a range of traditional and new media tools for artistic creation. The course begins with workshops to generate experiences of creativity, followed by trainings in visual thinking and spatial logic, drawing, photography, video, sound production and aural awareness, which amount to the arts of seeing and hearing in the age of technological convergence. Students are expected to operate, with proficiency, tools of various media, and then gradually generate their own artistic vocabulary. In the process, students are also encouraged to create works with humanitarian sensibilities and concerns, especially via keen observation of the world around them.

This course is comprised of a series of technique-focused studios, as well as semi-regular town hall meetings. The ultimate purpose of regular exercises within each "toolbox studio" module is to allow the students to befriend a broad range of tools to use and think with them playfully with competence. In addition to regular exercises within each studio module, the course requires all students to integrate what they learn with a first year thesis that demonstrates cross-media thinking and multiple media skills, which will take place in the final weeks of the Semester B.

STUDIO MODULES

1. Creativity in Action: Cross-media Sensibilities

This module aims at exposing students to a range of issues pertaining to the integration of artistic tools and cross-media thinking, and to extend and expand their creative vision beyond medium-specificity. Using writing as the initial activity, this module focuses on generating individualized experiences of creativity for each student. S/he will learn to generate and develop creative ideas, and to express their thoughts and ideas in innovative and engaging ways.

2. Drawing and Visual Thinking

This is a series of half-day intensive drawing sessions in which students explore both the representational and abstract languages of drawing. The goal of this module is to help students develop an acute sense of visual perception, and to expose students to the various stages involved in the crystallization of inspirations – from keen observation of the world, to personalization and formalization of ideas, to abstraction and/or representation with a given medium. From life drawing, students gradually move on to experimental drawings and other visual creation. In the process of making, basic theories in visuality and perception will be introduced.

3. Hearing and Sounding

The aim of this module is twofold: (1) to build a facility within each student to create sounds in the studio setting; and (2) to help students develop an acute sense of hearing, and to explore listening as an active yet nuanced process. Students will create a variety of sound works using a digital audio workstation, through which they will learn various techniques for audio recording, sound editing, sound transformation and design. Students may also be exposed to ear-opening and aural training exercises, which are aimed at expanding the boundaries / heightening the sensitivity of participants' aural perception.

4. Objects and Installation

In this series of hands-on intensive studios, students explore the fundamental concepts of objects in space, through the creation of three-dimensional art objects and installation. Students are encouraged to investigate both the structural and metaphorical potential of a range of materials.

5. Video and Digital Imaging

This module will focus on the art of digital imaging (photography and video), with an emphasis on developing a level of mastery of these tools as means of artistic expression. The ultimate goal of this module is to empower students to creatively engage two-dimensional imaging. This module is also designed to assist students in developing their own personal visual language through keen observation of the principles of space, shape, colour and movement. Artistic projects range from field photography, digital collage, stop-motion animation to modes of videography.