University-Wide Art Studies has been discontinued and will no longer be offering a course curriculum beyond the 2022 spring semester. This site will remain active as an archive of the rich programming developed through UWAS over the past five years. We wish to thank you all in the Aalto community for participating in and contributing to the courses and events offered through UWAS during that time. Our hope is that the legacy of UWAS will endure in future initiatives developed at Aalto and beyond.
University-Wide Art Studies offers all Aalto students an opportunity to explore critical practices and processes beyond disciplinary boundaries.
Grounded in art and design, UWAS offers university-wide elective courses for students and faculty across the university to engage in a unique opportunity for cultivating transdisciplinary criticality and critical creativity in higher education. The instructors of UWAS courses meet high standards in pedagogy and transdisciplinary fields of practice.
University-Wide Art Studies (UWAS) offers all Aalto students an opportunity to explore art-based practices and processes beyond disciplinary boundaries. Its course portfolio consists of thematically focused and carefully curated courses where art, design, and architecture facilitate transdisciplinary encounters between students from various backgrounds. Basing its curriculum in experimentation, curiosity, and creativity, UWAS invites both students and teachers to explore the world from multiple angles and learn from each other.
UWAS
Whom are the UWAS courses aimed at?
The courses are designed for all Aalto students that want to challenge their own thinking and routines, and they help students observe themselves and society from different perspectives. Discussions and transdisciplinary encounters feed collaborative learning.
UWAS courses are not traditional basic courses in art and design, and previous knowledge or skills in arts are not required. By applying the creative methods and tools, the participants will learn about creative thinking.
Students can choose from 30 different UWAS courses annually. Thematically focused, these experimental art and design courses facilitate encounters between students from various backgrounds.
UWAS aims to ensure that Aalto University graduates understand how art and creative practices shape and define the world around us and that they will have a wide range of skills and capacities to engage with complex issues both locally and globally.
Awarded creative experimentation in higher education
Since its initiation in 2016, UWAS has offered courses on topics such as sound technology, creative writing, site-specific art and design, visual culture theory, mathematical art, and arts-based material studies. All courses are specifically planned for UWAS and scheduled so that they are available for students in every Aalto school.
For Aalto faculty, UWAS offers a possibility to develop their curriculum and teaching practice either by helping to design new courses for study programs or reassessing existing ones. For more information about this opportunity, please contact the UWAS Team.
In 2017, Aalto University’s student union AYY gave UWAS the Seal of Approval award for the development of university-wide art education in Aalto. UWAS also received Dean’s Award of Excellence the same year.
The virtual gallery of this Film, Work and Anthropocene exhibition (Spring 2021 and Spring 2022) presents the insights and visions of students who chose to share their perspectives on current and future relationships between work, professions and the Anthropocene.
The course goes through the greatest utopias of modern technological, societal, cultural and economical planning to gain familiarity with cosmic scale stupidities and the possible strategies available for human civilisations to keep on going.
Decolonize your studies is an introduction to decolonial thinking and practice where students will develop a critical lens to look at norms and power structures within their own disciplines.
The Right to the City course is based on insights and research I have conducted in the last 20 years, as well as relevant experiences that go further back in time.
During the course the students studied their environment through an artistic and experimental approach. The emphasis of the course was on the mechanism of pressure systems in our urban environment and on the concrete and circumstantial influence they have on our actions.
Today moving images with sounds are used widely in different formats and platforms: YouTube-videos, Instagram Stories, online meetings, commercials, TV, films, video art, installations, scientific visualizations… You name it! The AV Club is an excursion to the realm of moving images. During the spring of 2021 the club has been looking and discussing different kinds of works from different contexts.
Film, Work and Anthropocene exhibition presents the insights and visions of students for current and future relationships between work, professions and the anthropocene.
Katariina Korolainen studies second year Information technology at the School of Science. Her studies are quite multidisciplinar but she chose to have UWAS-studies from the School of Arts, Design and Architecture already at the earlty period of her studies.