Artwork by Qian Sun, "The Suspended", 2013, acrylic, Chinese ink and resin on wood panel, 26.5" x 69"
If you have any questions about courses please contact:
- Brett Roberts (519-888-4567 x40372), the Administrative Coordinator for Undergraduate Studies
Fine Arts courses overview
A list of Studio courses and their descriptions can be found in the Undergraduate Studies Academic Calendar coded as FINE.
Information about Visual Culture courses offered in Fine Arts can be found under both FINE and Visual Culture (VCULT). For Visual Culture courses offered outside of the Fine Arts department, please see the Undergraduate Calendar (Honours Fine Arts – Visual Culture, Three-year General – Visual Culture, Visual Culture in a Global Context Minor).
To find out which courses are currently offered and when, please search FINE or VCULT on the Schedule of Classes.
(Please note that students enrolled in studio should expect material costs to range between $60 and $200 per course.)
Read more information regarding Course Overrides and Waitlists in other departments.
Course offerings for Spring 2026
FINE 204: The Peripatetic Studio: Soft Coding
Soft Coding is a studio-seminar exploring Net Art, where the network is the studio. Students learn to create rule-based art and use HTML/CSS* as artistic media to create web-native artworks like hypertext narratives and digital poetry. We trace a lineage from rule-based practices (Oulipo, Fluxus) to born-digital art, framing "soft coding" as the creation of open, participatory instructions, both in computation and social exchange, that embrace interpretation and change. The course culminates in a speculative project engaging with a solar-powered web server project funded by FOA, considering energy, slowness, and accessibility.
This course requires the use of computer hardware and software. For technical workshops, students must use their own laptops (not tablets). If a student does not have access to a laptop due to extenuating circumstances, a limited supply of laptops is available for borrowing from our digital media technician (ECH), Timothy Walker <timothy.walker@uwaterloo.ca>. These laptops can be borrowed for a duration of two days at a time. You must sign them out and finish the software set up before each class starts.