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Display All HSS Courses for 2021-22

Filtered HSS Courses (2021-22)

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Hum/VC 48
Ways of Seeing
9 units (3-0-6)  | first term
"The knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet," wrote artist László Moholy-Nagy in 1928. "The illiterate of the future," he warned, "will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen." Almost a century later, this pronouncement rings as true as ever in a world so profoundly shaped not just by photography but also films, advertisements, and video games, cartoons and comics, molecular graphics and visual models. In this course we will explore how visual culture shapes our lives and daily experiences, and we will learn to find wonder in its rich details. In doing so, we will develop the visual literacy that Moholy-Nagy envisioned: essential skills in reading, analyzing, discussing, and writing about visual materials and their circulation through the physical and virtual networks that structure our world.
Instructor: Jacobson
Hum/VC 49
Consuming Victorian Media
9 units (3-0-6)  | first term
Proliferating communication and entertainment media technologies in 19th-century England vexed the imagined boundaries between humans and machines while catalyzing social anxieties about aesthetics, attention, and distraction. We will explore both "old" (novels, paintings, sculptures) and "new" forms of 19th-century media (telegraphs, magic lanterns, and photography) as we analyze overly stimulating Gothic print media in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Wordsworth's contempt for popular entertainments in The Prelude, and the inversion of imperial consumption in Bram Stoker's Dracula, a novel mediated through characters' telegrams, diary entries, and phonographic recordings. Authors studied also may include: Dickens, Christina Rossetti, Doyle, Kipling, and Vernon Lee.
Instructor: Sullivan
Hum/VC 50
Introduction to Film
9 units (3-0-6)  | first, third terms
This course examines the historical development of film as a popular art and entertainment medium from the 1880s to the present, with a focus on the American and European contexts. Students will learn how to watch a film - they will learn how to pay attention to significant visual details and to understand the ways that films construct meaning from a language of images - and will develop the skills to write fluently about what they see. The course covers some of the most influential genres and movements from the earliest actuality films, through the French New Wave, to the Disney/Marvel Universe. Films covered may include short films from the Edison Studio and Charlie Chaplin, M, The Seven Samurai, The Battle of Algiers, Unforgiven, and Black Panther.
Instructor: Jurca
Hum/VC 51
Icons and Iconoclasm
9 units (3-0-6)  | second term
How does something - an image, a person, a thing, an idea - become iconic? Drawing from the worlds of art and film, advertising and PR, science and technology, politics and propaganda, this course explores what makes certain people, places, and things "icons." To do so, we will first deploy a range of methods for closely analyzing images as signs and symbols, including the practice art historians term "iconology." We will then examine histories of how objects have circulated through culture - from newspapers and magazines to postcards, jpegs, and memes - and thereby become ubiquitous features of everyday experience. Finally, we will consider iconoclasm, the destruction of icons, and the beliefs and logics behind powerful interdictions against visual representation. Students will leave the course with a stronger understanding of image power as well as foundational tools of visual and media literacy.
Instructor: Jacobson
Hum/VC 52
The Legacy of the Mexican School in Black and Latino Artistic Imaginaries
9 units (3-0-6)  | first term
Artists in the United States greatly admired the Mexican muralists and printmakers of the 20th century. Respected as much for their cultural politics as their artworks, the Mexican School attracted generations of Black and Latino artists who visited, studied and worked in Mexico. In the legends and practices of the Mexican School, American artists found models for generating self-defined cultural and artistic practices unavailable to them in the United States. This international exchange ultimately generated a transnational aesthetic tradition of resistance to Euro-American colonization. This course begins with an introduction to the major debates of Mexican printmaking and muralism; follows Mexican and U.S. artists as they travel between the respective countries throughout the first half of the 20th century; and concludes with the legacy of the Mexican School on contemporary Black and Latinx public art practices.
Instructor: Decemvirale
VC 53
Making Data Visual
6 units (3-0-3)  | third term
This course will explore and experiment with strategies and approaches to rendering scientific and mathematical data into visually powerful forms and experiences. Students will work towards individual pieces and a collaborative visual project that includes, critiques or presents scientific and/or quantitative data. All/any forms are encouraged: virtual/technological media, painting, performance, sculpture, poetry, public interventions, film/video, projections etc. Through the close readings and discussion of related texts, the critical examination of art that intersects with science, and independent/collaborative research experiments with various formal processes, students will gain an understanding of how the visual can: expand or constrict knowledge; pose more questions than answers; provoke extreme emotional reactions and intellectual responses; and actively involve the viewer. Taught concurrently with CS 163 and can only be taken once, as VC 53 or CS 163.
Instructor: Slavick
VC 54
Relative to You: Representing Scale in Art and Science
6 units (3-0-3)  | second term
The relationship to scale is an essential component that both artists and scientists contend with. How do we conceptualize the very, very large and the very, very small and even more challenging, how do we represent extreme scales of size or time in an understandable and meaningful way? The focus of this course explores the various ways that art and science grapple with scale and find ways to communicate that scale. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach in thinking and making to include history, theory, and the creation of artwork. Each student will use their major as the bounding point to explore what scale means in their discipline to conceptualize three key themes in the course: mapping, size, and time. In lectures, readings, and writing, students will explore the trajectory and visual histories of scale between the interconnections of art and science. The course will include regular drawing assignments as a tool to visualize thinking. Students will have the autonomy to create their projects in the medium of their choice (sculpture, painting, video, or creative use of technology to make an artwork). The course will include drawing and making demos; no previous art experience is required.
Instructor: Halloran
VC 60
Art/Media
Units to be determined by the instructor  | offered by announcement
A practice-based course taught by a visiting artist in residence. See registrar's announcement for details.
Instructor: TBD
VC 70
Traditions of Japanese Art
9 units (3-0-6)  | third term
An introduction to the great traditions of Japanese art from prehistory through the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912). Students will examine major achievements of sculpture, painting, temple architecture, and ceramics as representations of each artistic tradition, whether native or adapted from foreign sources. Fundamental problems of style and form will be discussed, but aesthetic analysis will always take place within the conditions created by the culture. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructor: Wolfgram
VC 72
Data, Algorithms and Society
9 units (3-0-6) 
This course examines algorithms and data practices in fields such as machine learning, privacy, and communication networks through a social lens. We will draw upon theory and practices from art, media, computer science and technology studies to critically analyze algorithms and their implementations within society. The course includes projects, lectures, readings, and discussions. Students will learn mathematical formalisms, critical thinking and creative problem solving to connect algorithms to their practical implementations within social, cultural, economic, legal and political contexts. Enrollment by application. Taught concurrently with CS/IDS 162 and can only be taken once as VC 72 or CS/IDS 162. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructors: Mushkin, Ralph
VC/E 81
Careers in STEAM
1 unit (1-0-0)  | third term
A series of weekly seminars by practitioners in industry and academia working at the intersections of science, technology, engineering, art and design. The course can be used to learn more about the different careers in these interdisciplinary areas. Guest speakers will talk about their career trajectory, the nature of their work and the role that science, engineering and/or computing plays in their field. Speakers may include professionals in the fields of investigative science journalism, film/TV, apparel design and manufacturing, architecture, music/sound engineering and editing, art, culture and heritage exhibition and conservation, creative coding, technological art and other areas. Topics will be presented at an informal, introductory level. Graded pass/fail. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructor: Mushkin
E/VC 88
Critical Making
9 units (3-0-6)  | third term
This course examines the concepts and practices of maker culture through hands-on engagement, guest workshops, lectures, reading and discussions on the relations between technology, culture and society. Classes may include digital fabrication, physical computing, and other DIY technologies as well as traditional making. Major writings and practitioners' work may be covered from the study of maker culture, DIY culture, media, critical theory, histories of science, design and art.
Instructor: Mushkin
E/H/VC 89
New Media Arts in the 20th and 21st Centuries
9 units (3-0-6)  | second term
Prerequisites: none.
This course will examine artists' work with new technology, fabrication methods and media from the late 19th Century to the present. Major artists, exhibitions, and writings of the period will be surveyed. While considering this historical and critical context, students will create their own original new media artworks using technologies and/or fabrication methods they choose. Possible approaches to projects may involve robotics, electronics, computer programming, computer graphics, mechanics and other technologies. Students will be responsible for designing and fabricating their own projects. Topics may include systems in art, the influence of industrialism, digital art, robotics, telematics, media in performance, interactive installation art, and technology in public space. Artists studied may include Eadweard Muybridge, Marcel Duchamp, Vladmir Tatlin, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Stelarc, Survival Research Laboratories, Lynne Hershman Leeson, Edwardo Kac, Natalie Jeremenjenko, Heath Bunting, Janet Cardiff and others. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructor: Mushkin
VC 90
Reading in Visual Culture
9 units (1-0-8)  | first, second, third terms
Prerequisites: Instructor's permission.
An individual program of directed reading in Visual Culture, in areas not covered by regular courses. VC 90 is intended primarily for Visual Culture minors. Interested students should confer with a Visual Culture faculty member and agree upon a topic before registering for the course.
Instructors: Faculty, Staff
VC/H 102
Looking East/Looking West
9 units (3-0-6)  | third term
From teapots to pastries, photographs to palanquins, objects and images mediated encounters between people and helped define the "Orient" and the "Occident". This class looks at the visual and material culture produced by and consumed during encounters between European and Asian travelers, diplomats, artists, writers, and tourists since the eighteenth century.
Instructor: Clark
VC 104
French Cinema
9 units (3-0-6) 
A critical survey of major directors, genres, and movements in French cinema. Particular attention is devoted to the development of film theory and criticism in France and their relation to film production. The course may also focus on problems of transposition from literature to cinema. The course includes screenings of films by Melies, Dulac, Clair, Renoir, Carne, Pagnol, Cocteau, Bresson, Tati, Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Lelouch, Malle, Pialat, Rohmer, and Varda. Students are expected to write three 5-page critical papers. Conducted in French. Students who write papers in English may enroll in this class as VC 104, which satisfies the advanced humanities requirement.
Instructor: Orcel
En/VC 108
Volcanoes
9 units (3-0-6)  | first term
Long before torrents of lava cascaded down Los Angeles streets in the 1997 film Volcano, volcanic disaster narratives erupted across 19th-century British pages, stages, and screens. This class will examine the enduring fascination with volcanoes in literary and visual culture and the socio-political tensions that disaster narratives expose. Students will analyze Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Tambora's infamous 1815 eruption, James Pain's 1880s pyrotechnic adaptation of Vesuvius's 79AD eruption, and paintings of global sunsets after Krakatoa's 1883 eruption. Additional literary and visual texts may include works by: Felicia Hemans, Isabella Bird, M.P. Shiel, Charles Dickens, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and J. M. W. Turner. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructor: Sullivan
L/VC 109
Introduction to French Cinema from Its Beginning to the Present
9 units (3-0-6)  | first term
This course will introduce students to the artistic style and the social, historical, and political content of French films, starting with Melies and the Lumiere brothers and working through surrealism and impressionism, 1930s poetic realism, the Occupation, the New Wave, the Cinema du look, and the contemporary cinema. The class will teach students to look at film as a medium with its own techniques and formal principles. Conducted in English.
Instructor: Orcel
En/VC 110
Sinners, Saints, and Sexuality in Premodern Literature
9 units (3-0-6)  | first term
This class explores the history of sexuality and gender across the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Exploring both literary texts and visual representation, it considers how previous eras and cultures understood embodiment, sexuality, and gender and asks how we, as modern readers and viewers, approach these questions across the distance of centuries. We will read across a wide range of literature, including theology, philosophy, fiction, romance, and spiritual biography, and examine manuscript illustrations and other early visual media. Questions we will take up include the following: how did writers and artists construct the "naturalness" or "unnaturalness" of particular bodies and bodily acts? How did individuals understand the relationship between their own bodies and those of others? In what ways did writing and art authorize, scrutinize, or otherwise parse the boundaries of the licit and illicit? Finally, how have modern critics framed these questions? How do we approach and make use of earlier theories of sex and gender?
Instructor: Jahner
En/VC 117
Picturing the Universe
9 units (3-0-6)  | first term
Whether you are a physicist, photographer, or bibliophile, grab a warm jacket. The night sky beckons. In addition to observing and photographing our own starry skies, we will study 19th-century literary, artistic, and scientific responses to new understandings of the universe as dynamic, decentered, and limitless. In Victorian England, picturing the universe in literature and recording celestial light in photographs defied the physiological limitations of human observation and fueled larger debates about objective evidence and subjective documentation. Authors studied may include: Anna Laetitia Aikin, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Hardy, Agnes Clerke, E. E. Barnard, Tracy Smith, and Dava Sobel.
Instructor: Sullivan
VC 120
Landscape, Representation and Society
6 units (2-2-2)  | third term
This course examines historical and contemporary representations of the natural world in art and science through a social lens. We will draw upon theory and practices from art, science, geography and landscape studies to critically analyze how artists, explorers, speculators, scientists, military strategists, and local inhabitants use environmental imagery for diverse purposes with sometimes conflicting interests. The course includes projects, lectures, readings, discussions and a 2-day field trip. Students will learn to think critically while developing creative, culturally complex approaches to observing, recording and representing the natural world. Students hoping to combine their course work with a research paper may sign up for a separate independent study and conduct research concurrently, with instructor approval. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructor: Mushkin
En/VC 129
Literature/Photography/Facticity
9 units (3-0-6)  | third term
"It is the picture of life contrasted with the fact of life, the ideal contrasted with the real, which makes criticism possible," insists Frederick Douglass. This course will take an historical approach to the relationship between literature and photography by examining what Douglass refers to as the contrast between "picture" and "fact" from the advent of photography in the nineteenth century to our present moment. Together, we will think about how each medium creates images, invites different ways of reading or viewing, and makes forms of individual, collective, and political representation possible. We will also examine the ways in which photography and literature shape our understanding of temporality, truth, memory, and history. In addition to our experience of literary and photographic works, theoretical texts on photography will inform the ways of reading and ways of seeing we will develop in this course. Readings may include Boucicault, Douglass, Dunbar, Hartmann, Barthes, Lorde, and Rankine.
Instructor: Hill
VC 130
Surveillance
9 units (3-0-6)  | first term
This course examines surveillance, one of the defining features of twenty-first-century life, with wide-ranging implications (from intelligence gathering and biometrics to social media and contemporary art), and a key point of intersection between modern technology and visual culture. Though it applies more broadly, the concept of "surveillance," from the Latin vigilare ("to watch") and the French surveiller ("to watch over"), originated in practices of looking and observation that still define many of its most significant practices today. Building on these etymological roots, we will treat surveillance as, first and foremost, a visual practice and survey the longer history of surveillance (and counter-surveillance) techniques as well as the theories that have emerged to describe its social effects, moral and ethical stakes, and changing legal status.
Instructor: Jacobson
En/VC 135
Dickens's London
9 units (3-0-6)  | third term
Charles Dickens and London have perhaps the most famous relationship of any writer and city in English. In this course, we will investigate both the London Dickens knew, and the portrait of the city that he painted, by reading one of Dickens's great mid-career novels alongside a selection of contemporary texts and images and secondary historical sources. We will think about the gap-or overlap- between history and fiction, the idea of the novelist as alternative historian, and the idea of the novel as historical document. Historical topics covered may include: the development of the Victorian police force; plague and public health; Victorian poverty; colonialism and imperialism; Dickens and his illustrators; Victorian exhibition and museum culture; and marriage and the cult of domesticity, among others. Students will practice both textual and visual analysis skills. In addition to written work, students should expect to be responsible for making a short research presentation at some point in the term. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructor: Gilmore
VC 150
Art Museum Futures
9 units (3-0-6)  | second term
The late 1960s saw the beginning of a movement in which several generations of artists investigated and deconstructed the customs and institutions of art. Institutional critique, as it would come to be known, challenged the promises and putative neutrality of public art museums. Following several decades of criticism the question remains unanswered: can the public art museum become a democratic institution? This course explores the ongoing debates around race, ethnicity, objectivity, subjectivity and cultural authority in contemporary museology. We will begin with the Enlightenment origins of the European art museum and its deployment within the United States; we will consider the artistic interventions that exposed its biases and eurocentrism, as well as the emergence of culturally-specific arts institutions and contemporary efforts at decolonization. Relying on decolonial and ethnic studies scholars, we will develop a critical framework for understanding the historical pathways that led to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the upcoming Latino Smithsonian Museum. We will conclude with a deep dive into a radical museum model: Noah Purifoy's "Outdoor Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Sculpture".
Instructor: Decemvirale
L/VC 153
Refugees and Migrants' Visual and Textual Representations
9 units (3-0-6)  | second term
This course focuses on the refugees and migrants' images in documentaries, narrative films, graphic novels, fictional texts, poetic works, and autobiographical narratives. It investigates how these representations participate in the development and strengthening of political discourse. Works by authors such as Hannah Arendt, Antje Ellermann, Achille Mbembe, Martin A. Schain, and Sasha Polakow-Suransky will provide some context to our analysis. Topics discussed in class include the historical and economic relationships of Europe with the refugees and migrants' countries of origin, the rise of anti-immigrant politics and its significance for the future of the European Union, but also its impact on social peace, in France in particular. This course is taught in English. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructor: Orcel
VC 159
Los Angeles As Artwork
9 units (3-0-6)  | second term
This survey introduces students to the history of Los Angeles' creative practices. Covering a broad range of environments and visual cultures, we will begin in the period before European colonization and conclude in contemporary Los Angeles. Reading the city as artwork will introduce students to an expanded field of creativity and analysis beyond the art object. To do so, we will consider enacted environments, expressive objects, urban landscapes, maps, monuments, murals and photographs. The class will give special attention to how colonialism continues to haunt and form the city, as well as explore the role creative practices have played in resisting the European colonization of space, time and being. We will cover topics including civil rights, hybridization, modernity, public space, and the outstanding role race has played in shaping the city. Students will learn to analyze evidence within its historical and cultural context, as well as write about how space and personal experience inform both artistic production and analysis.
Instructor: Decemvirale
En/VC 160 ab
Classical Hollywood Cinema
9 units (3-0-6)  | first term
This course introduces students to Hollywood films and filmmaking during the classical period, from the coming of sound through the '50s. Students will develop the techniques and vocabulary appropriate to the distinct formal properties of film. Topics include the rise and collapse of the studio system, technical transformations (sound, color, deep focus), genre (the musical, the melodrama), cultural contexts (the Depression, World War II, the Cold War), audience responses, and the economic history of the film corporations. Terms may be taken independently. Part a covers the period 1927-1940. Part b covers 1941-1960. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructor: Jurca
En/VC 161
The New Hollywood
9 units (3-0-6)  | third term
This course examines the post-classical era of Hollywood filmmaking with a focus on the late 1960s through the 1970s, a period of significant formal and thematic experimentation. We will study American culture and politics as well as film in this era, as we consider the relation between broader social transformations and the development of new narrative conventions and cinematic techniques. We will pay particular attention to the changing film industry and its influence on this body of work. Films covered may include Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and Jaws.
Instructor: Jurca
VC/H/HPS 163
Science on Screen
9 units (3-0-6)  | second term
Many of our ideas about who scientists are and what they do have been formed through media consumption - especially from the movies. This course examines how our ideas about science have been constructed at the movies and on television, and how science and cinema, their histories, philosophies, and visual cultures, are interconnected.
Instructor: Shell
VC/H/HPS 164
Fashion and Waste
9 units (3-0-6)  | second term
Before the Industrial Revolution, new clothes were few and far between. By the early 1800s, new industrial recycling processes enabled wool rags to be reprocessed into new suits, and for the first time the working class gained access to 'Sunday finery.' Dressing better meant a chance at increased social mobility. Today we take for granted fast fashion and disposable clothing. This course examines the complex interrelationship among history, technology, and the ways in which we construct our own identities through clothing; visual, textile and other material culture sources will be front and center. Students will dig into their own closets, memories, and dreams. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructor: Shell
VC 169
The Arts of Dynastic China
9 units (3-0-6)  | third term
A survey of the development of Chinese art in which the major achievements in architecture, sculpture, painting, calligraphy, and ceramics will be studied in their cultural contexts from prehistory through the Manchu domination of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Emphasis will be placed on the aesthetic appreciation of Chinese art as molded by the philosophies, religions, and history of China. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructor: Wolfgram
VC 170
Special Topics in Visual Culture
9 units (3-0-6)  | offered by announcement
An advanced humanities course on a special topic in visual culture. Topics may include art history, film, digital and print media, architecture, photography or cartography. It is usually taught by new or visiting faculty. The course may be re-taken for credit except as noted in the course announcement. Limited to 15 students. See registrar's announcement for details.
Instructor: Staff
VC 171
Arts of Buddhism
9 units (3-0-6)  | third term
An examination of the impact of Buddhism on the arts and cultures of India, Southeast Asia, China, Korea, and Japan from its earliest imagery in the 4th century B.C.E. India through various doctrinal transformations to the Zen revival of 18th-century Japan. Select monuments of Buddhist art, including architecture, painting, sculpture, and ritual objects, will serve as focal points for discussions on their aesthetic principles and for explorations into the religious, social, and cultural contexts that underlie their creation.
Instructor: Wolfgram
VC 172
Heritage and Its Discontents: Historic Conservation and the Battlegrounds of Memory
9 units (3-0-6)  | first term
What makes an old building, artifact, or custom "historic"? Which historic things are worth preserving? This course explores the aesthetic, political, social, and environmental dimensions of heritage culture. Moving from local conservation efforts to comparative frameworks of national and global heritage, we will examine the management of built and natural environments as it pertains to questions of narrative, values, standards of beauty, and justice. From Caltech's own campus to the Watts Towers and the National Park Service, to UNESCO and the architectural legacies of the Atlantic slave trade, our class will grapple with the theories, practices, and debates of heritage conservation as they determine what gets preserved and which stories get told. Readings/viewings will be supplemented with field trips to heritage sites in Pasadena and Los Angeles.
Instructors: Hori, Jurca
VC 175
The Art of Science
9 units (3-0-6)  | second term
This course examines the frequent and significant encounters between what chemist/novelist C.P. Snow famously dubbed the "two cultures"-the sciences and the humanities-with an emphasis on forms and practices of visual culture that blur the boundaries between science, technology, and art. What role, we will ask, have visual culture and visuality played in the construction of scientific knowledge? Taking a broad historical and geographical approach, we will explore topics including representations of science and technology in the arts and popular culture; the use of photography, illustration, and visualization in the sciences; histories of visuality and visual devices; and the everyday visual practices of scientific inquiry.
Instructor: Jacobson
H/HPS/VC 185
Angels and Monsters: Cosmology, Anthropology, and the Ends of the World
9 units (3-0-6)  | second term
This course explores late medieval European understandings of the origins, structure, and workings of the cosmos in the realms of theology, physics, astronomy, astrology, magic, and medicine. Attention is given to the position of humans as cultural creatures at the intersection of nature and spirit; as well as to the place of Christian Europeans in relation to non-Christians and other categories of outsiders within and beyond Europe. We will examine the knowledge system that anticipated racializing theories in the West.
Instructor: Wey-Gomez
H/HPS/VC 186
From Plato to Pluto: Maps, Exploration and Culture from Antiquity to the Present
9 units (3-0-6)  | second term
This course covers a broad range of topics in the history of maps and exploration from Antiquity to the present. These topics range from the earliest visualizations of earth and space in the Classical world to contemporary techniques in interplanetary navigation. By way of maps, students will explore various ways in which different cultures have conceptualized and navigated earth and space. While maps emulate the world as perceived by the human eye, they, in fact, comprise a set of observations and perceptions of the relationship between bodies in space and time. Thus, students will study maps, and the exploration they enable, as windows to the cultures that have produced them, not only as scientific and technical artifacts to measure and navigate our world. Not offered 2021-2022.
Instructors: Ceva, Wey-Gomez