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Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM)

BFA Program

SIM students form a highly collaborative community that fosters unparalleled creativity and experimentation, unbound by medium or discipline.

The Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) celebrates idea-centered experimentation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and self-directed education. SIM students may be anti-establishment and rebellious, hyper-focused or renaissance thinkers, community organizers and entrepreneurs. All SIM students are eager to discover their full potential as they redefine what art can be, right here, right now.

SIM art overlaps and intersects with many other disciplines to encourage students to develop experimental art forms, new directions, and unusual contexts. Students work with sound, light, motion, digital and experimental media, live performance, public practice, interactive installations, print and spoken word, and event production.

SIM offers a highly individualized educational path through a non-hierarchical program where Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors are in the same class every semester for all three years. The weekly SIM Major Studio course is community-powered under faculty guidance. Additional course offerings include: web art and digital distribution; video editing and production; interactive media and computer-controlled installations; dance techniques, choreography and improvisation; performance art and spoken word; art and science; theater production and stage lighting; sound performance, composition, recording, and editing; and event production. Every cohort shares the final challenge of redesigning the studio as a model for an alternative future. 

SIM students gain hands-on experience curating, designing, and producing, and hold internships and jobs that leverage the wide skill set they acquire at MassArt. 

Alumni

Alumni of the SIM department have careers as live event producers, tech and stagehands; gallery owners and curators; educators, tattoo artists, lawyers, chefs, clowns, entrepreneurs, game developers, choreographers and writers.

BFA Learning Outcomes

Students who complete the SIM BFA program are expected to be able to demonstrate the following learning outcomes.

  • Exercise critical thinking through making and analyzing the work’s role in contemporary contexts
  • Acquire the ability to think conceptually across many disciplines
  • Acquire the ability to collaborate
  • Learn how to articulate artistic goals and concepts, and translate them into actualized projects
  • Practice self-study in the skills or topics that the student requires to meet their project goals
  • Acquire the ability to respond creatively when the parameters in a given project change
  • Use descriptive critique techniques (learn how to ask and formulate questions that will help the artist move forward and how to verbalize one’s perceptions)
  • Practice speaking and presenting to the public, whether or not public speaking is an avenue of expression
  • Acquire hands-on skills in audio/visual technology, curatorial practice, community building, and interdisciplinary practice
  • Learn to connect one’s artistic practice to a wide range of artistic mediums, ideas and practice
  • Engage in the cross-pollination of ideas and views in a diverse community
  • Mentor and be mentored among students from different cohorts
  • Identify one’s strongest interests and seek out opportunities for pursuing them
  • Demonstrate a high level of self-motivation, educational agency, and self-imposed standards
  • Participate in self-governance
  • Engage in the process of deconstructing assumptions about educational systems and work towards making change
  • Learn to use the experience of failure as an educative tool
SIM Legacy

Founded in 1969 to launch performance art as a genre, SIM remains at the cutting edge of artistic experimentation today.

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621 Huntington Ave,
Boston, MA 02115

(617) 879-7000