Grad Wide Electives are interdisciplinary courses that explore advanced research topics often spanning multiple fields of knowledge. Each course is situated in a home program but any graduate student is eligible to take a grad wide elective. The content of the courses options varies from semester to semester.SECTION DESCRIPTIONIn classical physics, air was often described as a “medium,” a transmitter of light and heat. While this usage might sound antiquated, our own epoch of climate crisis might ask us to reclaim it for the present day. What does it mean to think of our atmosphere as media? How might air be read and written? How does air become knowable, from the individual scale to the planetary? What are the ways in which atmosphere is measured, felt, distributed, predicted, controlled, weaponized, monetized, designed, represented? What are the political, cultural, and spatial ramifications of breath, weather, pollution, heat, and carbon?
 
Each week, we will read a different author who offers a particular vantage point on these questions, with a focus on recent literature but also including historical touchstones (of theory, of art history, and of fiction). We will visit the laboratories of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, and we will make zoom visits to pertinent library and museum collections. We will also host a series of architects and artists to discuss their work that engages atmosphere. Each student will undertake a research project—which will take written form at the midpoint of the semester, and creative form at the end of the semester—that proposes some way in which air can be (or has been) revealed, documented, and archived. As a grad-wide elective, my hope is that our collective research will cross-pollinate across mediums (art, design, drawing, film, text), and—if we’re feeling up for it when it’s all said and done—we will conclude the semester with an informal group show.

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