We Needed This:
Art and Computation Is the Newest
Department at RISD Since 1996
We Needed This:
Art and Computation Is the Newest
Department at RISD Since 1996
Art and Computation Is the Newest
Department at RISD Since 1996
Angelina Rodgers
→BFA PT 2025
RISD hasn’t designated a new undergraduate department since 1996. That department was Furniture Design, which has become a nameable favorite among both its majors and admirers. Love for Furniture at RISD has only grown since the ’90s, and it feels indispensable to the RISD fabric. In my first year at RISD, Facetimes with my non-art friends from Florida featured brief guffaws at Furniture being a major—were they really making furniture? Is furniture even considered art? My own ideas on what Furniture majors were making, doing, and looking like were similarly naive and came from a place of admiration. Eventually, I considered taking a Furniture studio. Believe it or not, every single student at RISD has considered taking a Furniture studio. I wonder if the same will be true of Art and Computation, the newest department at RISD.
Art and Computation has been designated as a new department with classes to begin in Fall 2025. “About time,” remarked one of my professors, who is new to RISD this year, when I told them about it. There will be multiple courses offered in robotics, AI, games and immersion, and physical computing. For example, “Materializing Code,” “Critical Issues on Technology,” and “Human-Machine Interactions” are three studio courses slated for the third year of Art and Computation. The major was birthed from a concentration, or minor, with a similar area of study, called Computation, Technology, and Culture, which began in 2017. Reading the name, “Art and Computation,” in RISD’s official press release led to my rumination on the language chosen to describe the department. “Art and Computation” itself seems to be the most flexible name of all the more conceptual departments at RISD. And “Sound,” housed within Art and Computation, feels nebulous and different from the names of other majors at RISD. “Sound” describes itself in abstraction, avoiding a tangible descriptor of the action or the product. Not “Sound Design,” just “Sound.” And unlike “Sculpture,” for example, or “Printmaking,” with concise verbiage, “Sound” lets us assume and construct our own ideas about what will actually go on in its classes. In one ear I hear a clicky or noisy soundscape playing on loop in Gelman, and in the other a stereo of birdsong, then synth, then a poetry reading through multiple speakers in the Sound Studio, giving everyone goosebumps.
“Art and Computation” writes its multiplicity into its name with the inclusion of “Art,” ever-multiple, and the inextricable “and,” also present in “Film, Animation, and Video.” Similar to its use in “Computation, Technology, and Culture,” this “and” insists that it couldn’t be one or the other. “Computation” feels action-based and timeless, in a weird way, like “Culture.” The way “Culture” and “and” find their ways into RISD’s—and ubiquitously, most liberal arts colleges’—long department and class names leads one to imagine: 1) how art-world or cultural happenings are nuanced enough for these long names to be necessary; 2) the conversations leading to the careful conception of these names; and 3) the necessity for abbreviation. For reference, I’ll refer to Computation, Technology, and Culture as CTC and Art and Computation as AC (though I haven’t seen this done anywhere else yet).
While speaking with some peers, both CTC concentrators, they wondered why AC wasn’t called Media or Digital Studies. They asked, what’s actually going to be learned and made in AC? Elaborating on the choice of name more deeply, Clement Valla, interim dean of EFS, co-creator of CTC, and co-coordinator of AC, explained that AC is interested in the digital as a tool rather than a medium or an academic discourse. Computation studies are not exclusively in digital or media, but in the broader exploration of technology, creation, computers, etc. He emphasized that the broadness of the name directly reflects the multimodal and self-teaching inclinations that he already sees in all RISD students. The abstract “Art and Computation” floats in the jargony air we often want to cut through, but, to me, it also feels good and right—especially considering Valla’s earnest admiration of RISD students’ creative proclivities and his desire to make more conceptual space for that. Why define a major characterized by a realm that’s constantly shifting and updating as something historically enduring, like Painting? Or, more simply, why try to boil down something as complex and unknown as the relationship between computation and art? Undeniably, a major with a name this current and metaphysical will attract the right kind of open-minded students.
I was called to investigate RISD’s newest major for v.1, even as a senior on my way out, and it became an opportunity to reflect on the changes we get to cause and witness during our unique four years on College Hill. I, a longtime (in college time) and emboldened writer for v.1, dove into researching AC wondering what I could contribute to the conversation as a painter and Nature-Culture-Sustainability-Studies concentrator. I started by identifying who to talk to: Minkyoung Kim, Shawn Greenlee, and Clement Valla—all three accomplished artists and researchers who contributed to the planning and execution of AC. Kim, Greenlee, and Valla started the CTC concentration in 2017, the same year I tried a VR headset for the first time and seriously considered if I wanted to study Astronomy in college. Soon after, Greenlee created the Studio for Research in Sound and Technology in 15 West with a multi-speaker listening space. Since then, a consistent body of 150+ students have chosen CTC as their concentration every year. As of now, 26 first-year undergrad students have declared AC as their major. And as for current CTC concentrators in different majors, the options will only be more varied and more available. I asked Valla what surprised him about making a new department at RISD. “Everything was a surprise,” he told me, “and nothing. It was hard to be surprised with no expectations.” All he knew was that students were expressing great desire in computation at RISD. He told me that CTC classes always have overflowing waitlists and students will “bang down doors” to get a space in these classes.
Art and Computation writes its multiplicity into its name with the inclusion of “Art, ever-multiple, and the inextricable “and,” also present in Film, Animation, and Video.
A growing beast, CTC seems to be a microcosm of RISD students’ historical and ultra-present hunger to be first in line to new areas of study. RISD itself codifies students’ natural tendencies toward innovation as its pillar of success, preparing students, per its mission, to “make lasting contributions to a global society through critical thinking, scholarship, and innovation.” Recent advances in technology and computation are perhaps reflected in RISD’s identity transmutation from a special kind of department-by-department anarchy to a corporatized brand with a made-for-the-screen, pixelated serif typeface (RISD Serif) in black, white, and a signature computer blue. The lack of student input in RISD’s 2022 rebrand was one of the many reasons fueling schoolwide critique of a shift toward clarity and cohesion. In real life, RISD’s actions toward making space for the unknown often falter. When students push boundaries—through installation, subversion, or resistance—the school responds with verbose communication, bureaucratic removal, or silence. From mine and my peers’ experience, RISD has proven that independent action is unwelcome when it disrupts the institution’s curated image. But when the right people come together to create the rare and conceptual spaces for experimentation with new ideas, like the creators of AC, students naturally jump at the chance to be a part of it. Despite early expressions of surprise and speculations on the weirdness of AC at RISD, and even despite my winding commentary, I truly believe this will be a good thing for RISD students looking to make (non)sense of art in the digital age. Amongst all these unsavory changes (or rebrands, updates, revealing acts of pro-empire censorship, out-of-touch programming, or...) at RISD, AC could bring so many possibilities for good change, free expression, and informed critique, working from the inside (of the institution) out.
Whether watching IG reels or seeing ads on the train, the culture of fast and abundant images now pervades our collective consumption of news, art, and humor. We all engage in image culture to some degree, and we all have thoughts. To comment intelligently about technology doesn’t require a college major or a thesis paper. Valla, in our conversation, asked, “How might [AC] rebuild reality with a consciousness of image culture?” It’s a vast ambition to rebuild culture, but what if image algorithms went away? As a Painting student, his next thought felt poignant: he said, “If we didn’t see photos all the time, we’d paint very differently.” But then, while I print out screenshots and text fragments to collage and pin up, I’m grateful to fast image culture for being so influential in my choices of reference and inspiration. I’m also grateful that social media is bad enough that I am reminded to actually pick up a book or go look at leaves up close. The internet is here now, and I am working with it in progressively more conscious ways while also falling into terrible doomscrolls. Technology and digital reality affect all artists—so what happens when we let that fact shape our art-making perspective rather than assigning digital exploration to a pre-existing medium? Are we all doomed to make art about or with the internet and its containers regardless of our intentions? Or, instead, can we still fixate on canonical art and design history, letting that determine what we make, reference, and talk about? In the current era, that which Marisa Olsen calls “Postinternet,” propter hoc ergo post hoc, it is not even possible to do one without the other, or to do anything at all without precedent.
Questions, like those above, will likely come up in AC critiques. I imagine there will be misunderstanding as students funnel into their niches, like in any major. At the same time, AC will definitely change the way RISD students suffer through learning, making, and critiquing. Valla stated that AC will uniquely be a department with “both no majors and multiple majors.” AC will offer more flexible electives and pathways and a less siloed RISD experience. In this new flexible container, students will likely make work with such varying mediums and processes that traditional critique models won’t suffice in the effort to understand and learn from each other. There will have to be a willing and collective effort towards changing the critique model. Will AC students go to each other's shows and say how it really made them feel? Will color-perverting projector screens finally be reimagined? Will there be games, and will they be played together? As a senior in Painting, having endured many-a-misunderstood crit wall, I am eager to pass this challenge along to the next generation of RISD students. To you all: support each other’s early phases of research, be honest when something falls into too many layers of obscurity, and lean into the anomalies.
As I think about how to make critique more human, I consider how humanness creates and relates to computation. Valla noted that computation doesn’t have to involve computers, but he emphasizes that AC is interested in what computers are doing. Having seen Black Mirror, I’m versed in what an AI takeover could look like, but Valla asserts that humans being replaced by AI “is not an interesting argument”(!). I believe that AI is human in being made by humans—sum ergo facio. Valla also remarked that “the relationship between humans and our technology could be more fruitful than a competition,” and that AC will include a course on human-machine interactions. A peer commented that “AI pushes people to think more about what makes us human and what only humans can do.” With so many different kinds of AI surveilling, teaching, and outwitting us, we’re training a system to become more human by using it for everything. If artists are using AI to create our poetry, are we wasting energy by encouraging human-like inefficiency? Short answer, yes, and the only immediate, small-scale solution to the AI energy problem seems to be abstinence, or perhaps, switching to DuckDuckGo, or including curse words in Google searches to bypass AI Overview (idea courtesy Reddit u/Find_Time). RISD is aware of AI usage, and, in its values, urges students to “critically reflect on the interests [that emerging and evolving] technologies serve and the impact they have on diverse peoples, communities, and the planet.” Once RISD students learn how to make AI work for them, what will they do about the carbon footprint of their AI projects? Is that footprint comparable to the one made from using oil-based paint or throwing away projects at the end of the year? Could RISD students, as the anticipated pioneers of computational art, use their art practices and platforms to reorient AI as a force for positive change? Stewardship? Education? I think putting AI to use in poetry, art, and activism could create more opportunities for us to relate to computation and technology. And AC is making space for us to work toward human-tech relatability. I don’t mean we should all do ChatGPT therapy. I’m still writing poems on paper, straight from my emotional instincts, but I hope that if we feed AI the right information, it might surprise us. Valla said, and we can all agree, that it is not environmentally responsible to “consume entire rivers to get more relevant ads.” But it is our responsibility to take leadership in AI, computation, and technology if we’re to change the rhetoric around them. Clever artists and designers often find ways to solve problems by using the problem itself.
In conversation with a couple CTC-concentrating peers, I was curious how involved faculty had been in their concentration endeavors. One friend, a fellow senior painter, confided that they chose CTC as an accessory to Painting to stay aware of new and relevant technologies. They also wanted to be able to continuously learn new skills, which was seemingly not as fruitful an aspiration in the Painting department. They said it took a long time to bridge the gap between mediums, but now near the end of their degree, they’ve found 3D rendering and digital worldbuilding practices have become their main thing over time. Another peer said they would have chosen AC over Textiles if the option had been available to them, but only with hindsight for what they’ve learned now. They shared that they’d even consider a graduate program in computational studies after RISD. Aligned with RISD’s enduring priority for innovation, these two students make work unlike any I’ve ever seen before, building interactive games and responsive materials. Of course, as CTC concentrators, they taught themselves a lot of the mechanics. They both agreed that the most important skill they learned in CTC was how to self-teach, also giving ample credit to YouTube, some to AI. I asked them if they felt there was any generational disconnect between teacher and student in classes teaching “new” media. They answered that we all experience the internet uniquely, and expressed how much we can learn from people with different internet perspectives. Older teachers getting the internet later in life creates space for us to reflect on what growing up online means, and to remember what it’s like to be new to something. Sometimes computational problems require creative solutions, and we need teachers knowledgeable in both digital and analog processes for those solutions. AC teachers have the opportunity to dismantle the generational walls between them and their students, learning from each other in the bell hooks Engaged Pedagogy kind of way. AC could make the student-peer-teacher paradigm actually, tangibly, fundamentally different—more collaborative, humble, and mutually educational. Valla asks himself and other educators in art and technology: How do we support students when they already know where they want to go? I ask myself and other students: How do we honor the spaces made for us to explore art and culture while we do our own thing? How do we express more intentional gratitude for our teachers when they open new pathways for us, or even affirm that what we’re doing is good when it is?
In this new flexible container, students will likely make work with such varying mediums and processes that traditional critique models won’t suffice in the effort to understand and learn from each other.
As a lifelong student, with the end of undergrad in plain sight, I’m over doing assignments. But I know that without prompts and deadlines, I’d let myself make easy work. RISD, if anything, taught me when to notice when something I made is good. No teacher’s input could shake the truth of that feeling when it is true. And when I’m hobbling out of the studio, defeated by a small failure, I do remember the scaffolding that this institution was for my art practice structure—ugly at times, but necessary for growth. I continue to make successful work because of my teachers, my peers, the labor, and all the schooooooooool.
AC has the potential to build a kind of structural support system for students that RISD hasn’t seen before. I hope the pathways truly are more flexible in AC—I did not suffer through RISD to enforce that suffering on those coming after me. I wish the Class of 2028 an undergrad journey with rewarding discoveries tied up with finished projects, profusely positive testimonials, liberated practices, and plans (, plans, plans) that come to fruition. I hope you all find even cooler and even more accessible foundries and co-ops after RISD with lots of funding and technologies and safe studio spaces. I hope if you don’t find them, that you can make your own. I wish you all the freedom to make selfish work and the wisdom to make activist work and the ability to speak honestly about it all. I wish all this for every artist reading this, working with computation or technology or anything. Art and Computation at RISD is certainly a step forward, and to keep going forward, we must imagine that starting something new will not only warrant an “about time,” but also lead up to a “we really needed this.”
In case you missed it, please peruse v.1’s first all-digital issue from this past Winter for a taste of what we’re already doing with our computers: https://wintersession-2025.volume-1.org/
Angelina Rodgers most often mistypes their name as angekuna odgers.