Pratt Integrative Courses – Spring 2026
300s: At the Vangarde!
- PIC 300: Focus: Expand.
- Section 1: MON 5-7:50. Chelsea Limbird.
- Section 2: FRI 9-11:50. Laurel Voss.
- PIC 303: Bold/Rogue. Amir Parsa.
- Section 1: WED 5-7:50.
- Section 2: THURS 10-12:50.
320s: Making Culture/Culture Making
- PIC 326: Archive Fever. WED 2-4:50. Juan Jofre Lora.
330s: Alt-Fuse
- PIC 330: The Art of Scent. Alexis Karl.
- Section 1: THURS 2-4:50.
- Section 2: FRI 10-12:50.
- Section 3: FRI 2-4:50.
- PIC 333: NeoNomads. THURS 5-7:50. Ashley Bales.
- PIC 335: Environment Perception. Alex Goldberg.
- Section 1: TUE 10-12:50.
- Section 2: TUE 2-4:50.
- PIC 336: The Alchemical Imagination. Eliza Swann.
- Section 1: THURS 10-12:50.
- Section 2: THURS 2-4:50.
- Section 3: FRI 2-4:50.
340s: Around Creativity
- PIC 341: Visionary Creativity. TUES 5-7:50. Luke Degnan & John Lobell.
- PIC 343: Rapid Prototypes. THURS 10-12:50. Birgit Rathsmann.
- PIC 345: Games, Glitches, and Creativity. WED 5-7:50. Luke Degnan.
- PIC 346: Unboxed: Subversion Strategies. TUES 10-12:50. Maria Baker.
390s: New Worlds, New Futures
- PIC 391: Another Earth
- Section 1: TUE 5-7:50. Maria Baker.
- Section 2: MON 10-12:50. Lauren Abrams.
- Section 3: MON 2-4:50. Lauren Abrams.
- PIC 395: After the Internet. Johnny Stanish.
- Section 1: MON 10-12:50.
- Section 2: MON 2-4:50.
Course Descriptions
PIC 300:
Focus: Expand
Section 1 – Chelsea Limbird
Section 2 – Laurel Voss
This course focuses on the development of integrative capacities through students’ own prior work, personal experiences, and future interests. Through exercises, activities, the examination of case studies, and projects that engage students in collaborative work and individualized and directed learning, students revisit their own aesthetics and connect their life experiences to academic work. They also examine connections across disciplines while engaging in extended reflection on their own learning.
PIC 303
Bold/Rogue
Amir Parsa
This course invites students to shake up their work, create new genres and forms, fuse disciplines, take aesthetic and stylistic risks, and balance individual work with collaborations and interventions. Through the study and making of avant-garde pieces, the questioning of canons, the cultivation of idleness (that’s right, doing nothing) and other radical actions, the class guides students to envision innovative paths for their future studies and projects. Go rogue. Be bold. And create groundbreaking work!
PIC 326
Archive Fever
Juan Jofre Lora
Social Media! Libraries! Museums! Artistic repositories! They all collect, construct meaning, erase meaning, and generate archives! But how?! And to what end?! Archive Fever uses an interdisciplinary lens to explore how individuals, groups, and institutions make and mobilize archives. Students will produce their own archives, visit various collections, investigate fervent accumulation (i.e., archive fever), and creatively respond to multiple archive forms.
PIC 330
The Art of Scent
Alexis Karl
Art and scent are linked together in time and space, speaking of memory, emotion, and the spirit of artistic invention. This class explores fragrance as an artistic medium, using notes like dragon’s blood, ambergris, rare flowers, and 35-million-year-old amber. Joined with fine and performing arts, scent will be an immersive means of communication, challenging artistic-olfactory perceptions, translating memory into art and experience, and storytelling through multidisciplinary installation.
PIC 333
NeoNomads
Ashley Bales
Travel! Move! Make! Write! This class is all about making and writing in creative ways, while moving and traveling in a world where transportation, communication, connection, and creation all provide radical possibilities. In addition to creative risk-taking, the course also engages critically with traditional disciplines and practices (journalism, ethnography, documentary film) as well as newer spheres (social media) that involve travel and making/writing. The creations, the readings, and the critiques will allow an examination of works from different cultures, different time periods, and different genres and languages.
PIC 335
Environment Perception
Alex Goldberg
This course draws on design theory, the students’ individual creative practices, and an interdisciplinary lens to develop methods for understanding individual and collective relationships with people and one’s surroundings. Through analytical exercises and various making projects, students will heighten their observation skills and their understanding of the subtleties that enhance and shift perception. For the culmination project, students will create an “environment” that represents their spatial identity and nurtures their creative practice.
PIC 336
The Alchemical Imagination
Eliza Swann
Alchemists refer to their combined practices as “The Great Art”. In this course, we will use metaphors derived from ancient alchemy to elucidate deep structures in the creative imagination, using alchemical symbolism as a springboard to expand our own capacities as thinkers and makers. Together, we will perform in-class experiments and trace the philosophies of alchemy through its applications in early mathematics, proto-chemistry, healing arts, psychology, visual art, and literature to develop the tools to arrive at our own “Great Art”.
PIC 341
Visionary Creativity
Luke Degnan, John Lobell
Creativity is defining to Pratt’s mission, but what exactly do we mean by creativity? After distinguishing between mastery, innovation, and ordinary creativity, this course looks at Visionary Creativity. Visionary Creativity comes about in the context of its culture and at the same time changes its culture. This course helps each student think about their own creativity in the context of their field and in relationship to the larger culture.
PIC 343
Rapid Prototypes
Birgit Rathsmann
Improve your approach to creating image-text art! Learn how to use improvisation and recuperative strategies! Make better multi-genre art-and expand your creative capacities in the process!
PIC 345
Games, Glitches, and Creativity
Luke Degnan
How can technology impact creativity? How can we gamify our creative practice? What happens when we amplify our mistakes or magnify our missteps? In this course we will examine different technologies and how they affect creativity in practice, through games, visual art, writing, and other processes. Students will create work that is disrupted, enhanced, glitched, flipped, or obfuscated by technology and explore concepts and tools such as augmented realities, chatbots, electronic literature, non-linear narrative, and writing for video games.
PIC 346
Unboxed: Subversion Strategies
Maria Baker
“Think outside the box!” We’ve all heard that before. Defying the box seems to be at the core of creativity and innovation. But what exactly is this box?! In this course, we’ll consider the box as the limits imposed by our ways of cataloging thoughts and perceptions-the binaries, hierarchies, and narratives we create to structure our world. We’ll consult examples from art and design, pop culture and philosophy (from TV’s “Shark Tank” to Derrida), and complete creative assignments based on strategies innovators employ to escape their boxes.
PIC 391
Another Earth
Section 1 – Maria Baker
Sections 2 & 3 – Loney Abrams
Another Earth will explore the design of imaginary worlds. We will study examples of worlds built in literature, graphic novels, and visual art and our studio work will combine these mediums. Each student will create written and visual art to flesh out a setting of their own design. Our goal will be to develop an imaginary place that feels substantive and reflects our real world in ways that help us both understand and escape from it.
PIC 395
After the Internet
Johnny Stanish
You probably get a lot of feedback inside the studio. But how do you get your work out of the studio and into the world? In this course, students will make artworks and creative projects that leverage the power of social media and online networks (informed by media theory and post-internet discourse) to reach new audiences and make connections outside of Pratt. This work will culminate in an online and IRL exhibition open to the public.