11 - 20 of 242 results for: all courses

Most of us hold libraries of hundreds or thousands of ¿portraits¿ ¿ more or less instantly available posed images of ourselves and others. For most of human history, before the development of portable and digital cameras, portraiture was a much rarer and more deliberate social act and cultural practice, involving special materials and techniques, encounters with expert portraitists or photographers, and established settings for display. What almost all portraits, of whatever time or cultural place, have in common are presentations of social identities, roles, or persona, as well as a potential fascination and power that may be based in our neurological capacities for facial recognition and ¿mind-reading¿ through facial expressions. nn This introductory seminar will explore many aspects of this basically simple category of thing ¿ images of particular persons. Our point of departure will be from the history of art, focusing on portrait sculptures, paintings, and photographs from many eras and cultures, some of which are among the most studied and discussed of all artistic monuments. We will consider techniques and approaches of portrait making, including the conventions that underlie seemingly realistic portraits, posing, the portrait situation, and portrait genres. Our primary focus will be on the multiple purposes of portraiture, from commemoration, political glorification, and self-fashioning to making claims of social status, cultural role, and personal identity. We will also discuss the changing status of portraiture under modern states of social dislocation, technological change, and psychoanalytic interrogation, and in postmodern conditions of multi-mediated realities and distributed subjectivities. Along the way, we will see that our understandings of portraiture benefits from the approaches and insights of many fields ¿ political and social history, anthropology, neuroscience, and literary studies among others.

Writing in 1829, the French author Honoré de Balzac celebrated the acute visual attention of the flâneur, a character he closely associates with modern life: "To flâne is to take pleasure, to collect flashes of wit, to admire sublime scenes of unhappiness, of love, of joy as well as graceful or grotesque portraits, to thrust one's attention into the depths of a thousand lives." In July 2012 the Huffington Report pointed to a fact of modern life: "On city streets, in suburban parking lots and in shopping centers, there is usually someone strolling while talking on a phone, texting with his head down, listening to music, or playing a video game. The problem isn't as widely discussed as distracted driving, but the danger is real." These two very different ways of circulating in urban space suggest that a major shift in how we humans relate to our environment has occurred over the course of nearly two centuries--especially in the densely populated spaces of modern cities. Where the great spectacle of urban life was a marvel of the nineteenth century, today's inhabitants want mainly to block it out by insulating themselves in a cocoon of favorite music or personal conversation, whether by voice or text, that they risk stepping into traffic, colliding with lightposts, or bumping into others similarly self-absorbed. This seminar proposes to think about the hows and whys of that important shift from the unique perspective of art history, a field of study especially attuned to the limits and exigencies of visual acuity. We will explore the topic across a range of media, from daguerreotypes to stereoscopes, from paintings to films, from television screen to the hand-held displays of our smartphones.

Poetry and painting have often been called the "sister arts". Why? Sometimes a poem or a painting stands out to us, asking that we stay with it, that we remember it, although we cannot exactly say why. Poems have a way of making pictures in the mind, and paintings turn "rhymes" amid the people, places, and things they portray. Each is a concentrated world, inviting an exhilarating closeness of response: why does this line come first? Why does the artist include that detail? Who knows but that as we write and talk about these poems and pictures we will be doing what John Keats said a painter does: that is, arriving at a "trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty." Each week explore the kinship between a different pair of painter and poet and also focuses on a particular problem or method of interpretation. Some of the artist/poet combinations we will consider: Shakespeare and Caravaggio; Jorie Graham and (the photographer) Henri Cartier-Bresson; Alexander Pope and Thomas Gainsborough; William Wordsworth and Caspar David Friedrich; Christina Rossetti and Mary Cassatt; Walt Whitman and Thomas Eakins; Thomas Hardy and Edward Hopper.

This seminar is offered in conjunction with the annual "Arts Immersion" trip to New York that takes place over the spring break and is organized by the Stanford Arts Institute (SAI). Participation in the trip is a requirement for taking part in the seminar (and vice versa). The trip is designed to provide a group of students with the opportunity to immerse themselves in the cultural life of New York City guided by faculty and the SAI programming director. Students will experience a broad range and variety of art forms (visual arts, theater, opera, dance, etc.) and will meet with prominent arts administrators and practitioners, some of whom are Stanford alumni. For further details and updates about the trip, see http://artsinstitute.stanford.edu.

This hands-on introduction course will introduce students to formal and conceptual visual strategies in expression through a diversity of artistic mediums which may include drawing, digital media, printmaking, photography, performance and sculpture. This course is meant to give students an overview of many of the mediums and facilities that are available in the Art Practice program. Field trips, guest artists.

Though genre fiction has occasionally been castigated as a lowbrow form only pandering to the uneducated masses, this course reveals how Asian American writers transform the genre to speak to issues of racial difference and social inequality.

Introduction to the field of conservation photography and the strategic use of visual communication in addressing issues concerning the environment and conservation. Students will be introduced to basic digital photography, digital image processing, and the theory and application of photographic techniques. Case studies of conservation issues will be examined through photographs and multimedia platforms including images, video, and audio. Lectures, tutorials, demonstrations, and mandatory field trips will culminate in the production of individual and group projects.

Preference to freshmen. The science that makes transgenic plants and animals possible. Current and future applications of biotechnology and the ethical issues raised.

Animals living in the oceans experience a highly varied range of environmental stimuli. An aquatic lifestyle requires an equally rich range of sensory adaptations, including some that are totally foreign to us. In this course we will examine sensory system in marine animals from both an environmental and behavioral perspective and from the point of view of neuroscience and information systems engineering.