ARI 327P / ARC 391P / ARC 327P / ARI 391P
Tues 3:30 – 6:30pm, WMB 5.112
Open to all ARC students, all ARI students, and non-SOA students
Clay Odom: clayodom@utexas.edu
PRODUCTIONS investigates spatial design practices and projects that center and engage atmosphere as a condition generated through the calibrated interplay between objects and subjects. The course examines sensorial, formal, and material effects as intentional outcomes of design, positioning the production of atmosphere as both a theoretical construct and spatial design practice. “We often design fictions as a way to come to terms with conditions that reality struggles to grasp…we have always imagined alternative worlds as a way of understanding our own world in new ways.” — Liam Young Through the study of contemporary methods and manifestations of atmosphere-producing work across cultural, built, and natural environments, students will develop a theoretically grounded position while cultivating the ability to generate spatial and formal effects.
The seminar encourages the synthesis of conceptual thinking with methodologies from interior design and architecture, combined with techniques drawn from film and theater—such as world-building and the use of practical and special effects—to create small-scale experiments that explore atmosphere as a relational and perceptual condition. Production-oriented projects span interior design, architecture, film, theater, and installation art as well as being influenced by natural systems, optics, and the study of light. Emphasis will be placed on the exploration of interior environments, yet the course extends to broader disciplinary contexts for design. Ideas and precedents are examined through discussion, readings, and precedent research, as well as through iterative design explorations. Students will engage a range of analog and computational tools—including modeling, simulation, digital fabrication, and cinematic or mixed-reality techniques—to test relationships between form, surface, pattern, and assembly in relation to ephemeral effects of light, projection, and sound.
The semester culminates in the design and fabrication of a production set that contains an object concealing an interior world. Using fabrication and image-based methods, students will explore how spatial conditions, representations, and audiences co-produce the experience of atmosphere.
