SIM Legacy
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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.
Sam Okerstrom-Lang or “Samo” is a Boston-based media artist and designer specializing in 3D animation, video projection design, and live visual environments. After graduating from MassArt, Samo was commissioned to create large-scale public works for the first two Illuminus Boston events. After this experience, he founded Masary Studios with Maria Finkelmeier and Ryan Edwards. Masary Studios creates unique visual and sound experiences featuring original music, performance, and video projection mapping.
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.
Nadia Orcel, Studio for Interrelated Media
“Metamorphosis” by Nadia Orcel, Film/Video, 2019
Sen Luc Miglin, Studio for Interrelated Media
Walk Sign Is On, Mixed Media, 2019
Richard Streitmatter-Tran, Studio for Interrelated Media
Fragile Matter, Photograph, 2013
Darren Cole, Adjunct Faculty, Studio for Interrelated Media
Boom (Official Video) Off FreEDOm, Video, 2017
Nick Ruhlmann, Austin Carrier, Studio for Interrelated Media
Performance for All School Show, Performance, 2015
Johnny Chanthavong, Studio for Interrelated Media
Untitled, Installation, 2016
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.
SIM BFA 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
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