Spring emerges as the semester draws to a close. Our thumb drives are bursting with new files. We’ve uploaded files and planted new seeds. See our work live in this spring 2023 student exhibition featuring Art & Technology courses in the Department of Art. Watch as this work downloads and grows.
Exciting news! Ohio State University is ranked #1 in animation in Ohio, and ranked #3 among Public Animation Schools in the US in 2023.
Animation at The Ohio State University has been consistently ranked highly by the Animation Career Review, an online resource for people aspiring for careers in animation, game design, graphic design, digital art, and related fields. In 2022, OSU was ranked 4th on the list of top public animation schools nationally, and 1st in the state of Ohio.
The Department of Art offers introductory animation and moving image courses, within the Art and Technology area, that explore animation as an art form. Many students gain an introduction to animation through these courses. Additional courses in the Department of Art provide students with other fundamental skills that benefit an animation portfolio, such as life drawing and sculpture, and color theory.
Students can also take animations courses through the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD). ACCAD is a pioneering institute of collaborative interdisciplinary research in time-based digital media production, including animation and interactive media through integration of emerging arts technologies. While ACCAD does not offer a degree program, courses that ACCAD offers provide a broad range of animation techniques and practices, ranging from fundamental principles to advanced explorations of the latest technologies including interactive animation, virtual reality and motion capture.
Additionally, The Department of Theater, Film, and Media Arts features a Moving Image Production Major providing a pathway for students interested expanding their knowledge of filmmaking.
See animation works from the Art and Tech area of the Department of Art on our Vimeo page.
Friday Jan 27, 5pm
Wexner Film & Video Theater
Renowned artist, filmmaker, and writer Zach Blas will present a new performance lecture—Expositio, Iudicium, Lacrimae—as part of the Arts, Technology and Social Change Series funded by the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme. Following the performance, Blas will be joined in conversation with renowned scholar Pamela M. Lee, to discuss his new book, Unknown Ideals, released in 2022 by Sternberg Press. A reception and book signing by Blas will follow in the Wexner Center’s lower lobby.
Expositio, Iudicium, Lacrimae
In this lecture-performance, Zach Blas explores a religious-un/conscious thriving in today’s tech industry. Blas tells of a computational world of divine judgment, where artificial intelligence exists alongside corporate gods, mystical glyphs, religious icons, occult sigils, and captured bodies, and where emotional crying is a symbolic language of quantification.
Zach Blas
Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. His practice spans installation, moving image, computation, theory, and performance. Recent exhibitions include the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art; British Art Show 9; Positions #6, Van Abbemuseum; Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI at the de Young Museum; The Body Electric at the Walker Art Center; and the 12th Gwangju Biennale. His artist monograph Zach Blas: Unknown Ideals (2021) was published by Sternberg Press and edited by Edit Molnar and Marcel Schwierin.
Pamela M. Lee
Pamela M. Lee is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. Previously she held the Osgood Hooker Professorship at Stanford University. Her recent publications include Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War and the Neoliberal Present (MIT Press, 2020) and The Glen Park Library: A Fairytale of Disruption (No Place Press, 2019). Lee is an editor of the journal OCTOBER. Her essay “When the Lizard King Met the Lizard Brain: The Doors” appears in Zach Blas: Unknown Ideals (2021).
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Arts, Technology and Social Change Series
The Arts, Technology and Social Change Series is a new initiative conceived by Ohio State’s Department of History of Art, the Department of Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Translational Data Analytics Institute that aims to extend and deepen campus and community engagement around social justice issues through the lens of artistic interventions in technology. Envisioned as a series of micro-residencies, the initiative brings artists and thinkers to working at the intersection of art, data, and social justice to Ohio State for exhibitions, workshops, performances, and public events. The micro-residency program acts as a cross-department platform to engage questions of technology and virtuality in relation to civil rights, sex and gender, indigeneity, displacement, migration, genocide, and environmental justice in our contemporary moment.
It’s the end of the semester. Put down your pencils and pass in your work. Turn off your computer, the Machines are Done Learning. We’ve trained the machines on our new ideas, our rough drafts, our revisions. Here’s the final result. Artwork can be seen in Hopkins Hall 146, 156, 167, and throughout the first floor hallway, as well as online. The exhibition features work from Digital Imaging, 3D Modeling, Moving Image, Internet Art, New Media Robotics, and Studio Practice courses.
Matthew Derksen is an Academy Award winning animation artist who works as Head of Rigging at Industrial Light and Magic, on feature film and television projects. He previously worked at Rhythm & Hues as the rigging supervisor on films such as Life of Pi, The Hunger Games, and Hellboy and he has also worked as a visual effects artist for many other popular films. He is an alumnus of the Ohio State University’s Art & Technology area in the Department of Art (1997, BFA and 2004, MFA).
Learn about Derksen’s career working in the animation/film industry. He will also answer questions you might have about getting started in this field. All are welcome!
Poster:
The Ohio State University is now offering free Adobe Creative Cloud access for all students!
Check out how to download apps here: https://it.osu.edu/adobe
Help downloading: https://it.osu.edu/get-started-adobe-creative-cloud
For students that want to access the full Adobe software on an iPad or Chromebook – check out the Virtual Desktop Interface – Using the Citrix app you can run a remote desktop that has access to the Adobe software. A bluetooth keyboard and mouse for an iPad is recommended.
This course investigates the generation of visual content as impacted by its transitions between and across form, time, and space. Students will learn and employ various traditional and technological means of production to create and experience immersive spaces consisting of both physically tangible and virtual arrangements. A wide range of multi-disciplinary projects will encourage students to (A) conceptualize and visualize material and explore software possibilities (B) integrate cross-pollinations between physical and virtual forms of presentation (C) consider the social, cultural, political, and art historical influences that define contemporary art practices. The pedagogic methodology of this class employs studio sessions, lectures, critiques, and workshops. We will also study a field of precedents including artworks, practices, readings, and films which work with intersections between the physical and virtual to create dynamic new ways of seeing, thinking, and creating.
Multidisciplinary production means explored in this class include computer animation, virtual reality, photography, videography, 3D modeling, 3D scanning, 2D production, projection mapping, and physical fabrication. Anticipated software and practices employed in this class include Autodesk Maya, Adobe Suite, Substance Painter, Gravity Sketch, Tilt Brush, Z-Brush Mini, Madmapper, Lightform Creator, as well as traditional painting, drawing, clay/foam modeling, woodshop/metal shop fabrication.
This course is ideal for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in studio-based, lab-based, and performance-based disciplines such as Art, Dance, Performance, Music, Architecture, and Landscape Architecture. Humanities majors motivated to explore the visual representation of their critical ideas are welcomed as well. While not necessary, prior experience with visual (physical or computer) production is encouraged. Students will be responsible for the potential expenses (estimate $50-$100/semester) of their project fabrication.
Poster image credit: Meriem Bannani: Fly Photo by Derek Schultz
We welcome emerging artist Illya Mousavijad as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Art and Technology at The Ohio State University. He recently completed his MFA from the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Working across varied media, including installation, painting, video, and computer animation, his art practice investigates the limits and extents of exile, border and identity politics, Middle Eastern history, exile literature, US and Iran relations.
Currently, I am following the incredible and indescribable currents unfolding in the Middle East following the fall of Afghanistan. What has already and will continue to produce great numbers of exiles. Displacement, instability, and inaccessibility are increasing. I am in the process of expanding on my investigation of virtual production, including but not limited to computer animation and virtual reality, as the means to understand and articulate the profoundly liminal experience of exile.
In my classes too, I am seriously encouraging critical thinking about what it means to move through and to occupy a space, as well as the experience of time in sophisticated ways beyond its often linearly rendered convictions. My students are experiencing the process of creating computer animation with an internal collision with the realities and unrealities of the software used. They are learning to generate movement, time, and space on both individual and collective levels. Many incredible learning moments are unfolding for all of us, myself included. –Illya Mousavijad
