Students work independently on self-initiated projects under the guidance of professors and visiting artists.

Spring 2026, FA-384A, Projects, D Adams

Spring 2026, FA-384B, Projects: Change the Register, C Lehyt:

This course will make evident that there are inquiries set within institutions and other set outside of them. The class will create space so that students can make installations that move people around, through different ways of perceiving: coding and recoding, being differently affected, placed, and displaced. The switching of registers in the students' work will be emphasized because layered apprehension can produce new knowledges. Group critiques, lectures, readings, and class discussion will provide alternative ways of locating personal investments in the making of art pieces.  

Fall 2025, FA-384-1A, Projects, D Adams

Fall 2025, FA-384-1B, Projects: Black secret Technology, f harrington:

This course explores the intersections of contemporary art, sonic technologies, performance, and the social responsibility of science, with a critical focus on the ethical dimensions of empiricism, genetic surveillance, and histories of quantification. We will examine how 19th-century systems of knowledge—emerging alongside industrial capitalism—produced categories of difference through accounting mechanisms that determined what counted as material reality. These theoretical assumptions continue to shape human biomonitoring and genetic sampling, where the bodies of workers have served as chemical sensing devices for polluted environments and sites of extraction. The metabolic entanglement of human populations with their surroundings reveals how biotechnologies function not only as tools of environmental assessment but also as mechanisms of control and surveillance under the guise of objectivity.

Against these structures, we ask: What are the moral and political implications of these empirical systems? How do plantocratic logics persist within contemporary scientific and technological frameworks? Can the racializing assumptions embedded in these methodologies be interrupted by a poetics of science? Black Secret Technology, an album by A Guy Called Gerald, offers one possible counterpoint—a coded system of knowledge that, like alchemy, demands processes of decoding and distillation. This course embraces interdisciplinarity by thinking across the natural sciences, technoscience, media geologies, Black Studies, aesthetics, and bioethics. We will engage with the works of Moor Mother, Butch Morris (“Conduction”), Aki Sasamoto, mayfield brooks, and artists employing DNA and biotechnical processes. Readings will include texts by Ramon Amaro, Katherine McKittrick, Stuart Hall, Lorraine Daston, Jussi Parikka, and others. 

The course includes weekly project exercises, class discussions and a culminating project that invites students to develop an artistic practice or work informed by these ideas.

Fall 2025, FA-384-1D, Projects: Exhibitions: Design and Practice, J Kuronen and M Caron:

This practical studio course will design and produce exhibitions. We will explore critical theory and histories only to the extent that they enable this practice. The function and habits of the contemporary museum and its supporting partner, the commercial gallery, are under tremendous critical and social pressure. Vital interventions by artists into the appearance and function of these institutions have proved to be explosively important to what art can and could do.  The course proposes that architectural space, catalogs, signage, and archives are opportunities for the public presentation of artistic invention. Students will be encouraged to approach public display beyond the containment of single practices, authors, or disciplines. Transfigured by formal arrangement, the conditions of an exhibition's ability to address consciousness, community, education, and social reality will be our subject.   Students will use the exhibition spaces, archives, and histories of the Cooper Union as well as sites and contexts beyond campus, when possible.