Designing Club Culture

Catalog description

In the 1960’s and 70’s, club culture was a social phenomenon that introduced new forms of technologies, experiences and designs. In this course, students will study a variety of different cultures (from social, to visual to sound) from pre 1600s to present day. These learnings will realize historical patterns and psychologies displayed throughout the decades. These social investigations are generally practiced through a United States lens, but students will also be invited to explore how similarly communities were developed around the world due to a variety of parallel conditions. Relationships between counterculture movements and visual and sonic creations will be examined. Students will then experiment with audio-visuality and study how light, sound and color and other senses are used to design an experience within different spaces, particularly spaces for entertainment. Students will be invited to launch 370 Jay St's performance garage in development of their own temporary club environments. Technologies introduced in this course would then include Cinema4D, MaxMsp (and potentially Touch Designer), Ableton, and Photoshop.