SYLLABUS

DESMA 130
Experiments in Virtuality


Fall 2025 
University of California, Los Angeles 
School of the Arts & Architecture
Department of Design Media Arts

Monday + Wednesday 
9:00 – 11:50 AM
Broad Art Center | Room 4230

Instructor: Breanna Browning
Office Hrs: By appointment
Email: bbrowning@ucla.edu

TA: Aidan Strong
Email: aidanstrong@ucla.edu 

OVERVIEW SCHEDULE 
CLASS MATERIALS
RESOURCES

I will continue to update and add to this page as the semester progresses. Check back for new links.

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DISCORD

• Class Discord: https://discord.gg/ctbx35Xfkj

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READINGS

• Donna Haraway “Staying with the Trouble”
• Hito Styrl “In Defense of the Poor Image”
  

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AI TOOLS (Chat + LLMs) 

• ChatGPT
• Anthropic Claude
• Google Gemini
• More advnaced generation OpenAI Playground
  
• Guide for Prompt Engineering
  
• Guide for Prompt Engineering from OpenAI directly

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GENRATIVE IMAGE (basic)

• ChatGPT - automatically runs Dall-e + others  
• Midjourney - use via Discord or WebUI (see the Midjouney prompting guide)
• Dall-e-2 (older) 
  
• Gemini
  
• Meta AI
  
• Dream Studio by Stablility.ai 
  
• Adobe Firefly - best if you have a reference photo 
  
• UI for running Stable Diffusion

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GENERATIVE VIDEO

• Runway.ml 
  
• Veo3 by Google 
• OpenAI Sora 
  
• RunwayML
  
• Kling AI
  
• Adobe Firefly Video 
  
• Pika Labs 
  
• Moonvalley AI 
  
• Invideo AI 
  
• More coming soon... 
  

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AI CODE EDITORS

• Cursor

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OTHER

• PureRef - super clean platform for collecting reference images (not collaborative) 
  
• More to come... 

© Breanna Browning 2025