Interface

In this introductory course, students will design and fabricate interactive and kinetic artwork. Through a series of projects students will learn to implement hybrid art systems that can use computers or circuits to interface with sensors, motors, video, sound, pneumatics, and lights. Students will gain basic skills in: electronics, mechanical fabrication, and computer programming. These skill sets will enable students to imbue dynamic characteristics to their artwork. Field trips to industrial salvage yards as well as artists visits will augment technical instruction, lab time, and theoretical discourse. Topics include: the nature of interfaces, narration in random-access environments, the poetic potential in electromechanical devices, interactivity and isolation, and integrating video and audio into sculptural environments and objects.

This course will concentrate on the dynamics of media presentation and interaction. The objective is to create generative, recombining media systems that evolve and mutate, reacting to internal and external stimuli. The environment, the body, and the internet will be explored for their potential as remote control/stimuli. Students will research and implement hybrid acquisition and delivery systems. Surveillance cameras, compounded desktops, projection systems, and myriad sensors will be mined for their potential as alternate means for media creation and narrative recombination. Topics include generative and iterative structures, autonomous interactions, physical computing, and artificial behavior. Students will learn how to manipulate media with Max/MSP/Jitter and how to connect electronics to the computer via the Make Controllers.

In this course students will develop advanced skill sets central to the creation of dynamic installation and sculpture. We will focus on advanced fabrication and programming for actuation, control, and feedback. The objective is to create kinetic art that can manifest complex variable motion and behaviors with mechanical precision. We will explore both industrial and consumer solutions to this problem.

Learned skills or strategies will include basic metalworking and fabrication techniques, power-transmission design, and mechanical movement and mechanical component construction. The incorporation of found elements will be explored with off-site visits to salvage yards.

Students will learn how to program and control kinetic art while working with sophisticated motors and sensors. Learned skills in this arena will include programming stepper and servo motors, interfacing these systems with Max/MSP/Jitter (a graphic programming environment), scavenging for these systems, designing and implementing feedback for orientation and position, designing and implementing electronic circuits that condition and amplify sensor signals, and performing complex behavioral emulation.

This class will explore the dynamics of collaboration. Students will build their own projects, then combine them together into a massive chain reaction. Kinetic sculpture, media projections, dynamic architecture, sound, or any media that has interactive sensibilities will be arranged so that when activated, a domino effect will ensue. The catalytic agents could range from the primordial to the digital. Water, fire, and air could be dispensed by electromechanical devices and interleaved with data packets and algorithms to induce a society of reactive agents. The governing principles or group behavior will be decided through class collaboration and informed by research into such topics: as swarm intelligence, missile guidance, alchemy, dominos, and artificial life. The resulting chain reaction could resemble an exquisite corpse, an anarchist wet dream, ant colonies, the Mouse Trap game, or a premeditated sequence of events that would of made Hitchcock green with envy.

Introduction to Interaction Design

Interaction designers design and build meaningful and innovative experiences in all realms of work, lifestyle, and play. This introduction course will take a studio-based, collaborative, playful approach to learning about the Interaction Design major. We will explore investigative research, systemic thinking, creative prototyping, and hands-on building. Our class projects will create through a number of different interactive canvases such as mobile, desktop, car, game console, kiosk, and apps. We will also investigate how interaction design plays an increasing role in adjacent design disciplines such as industrial, graphic, fashion, film, sculpture, gaming and architecture.

In this class students will learn to apply math towards the creation of time based media. They will learn to author their own programs that analyze, convert, affect, and manipulate real time video and audio streams towards their own ends. Music is made, video is sequenced and stories are told through the use of algorithms, conditionals, and operators. Media production is now firmly located in the digital domain and math has become an essential and flexible creative tool. Whereas, packaged digital programs are designed around preconceived tasks, in this class artists pick up the equivalent of a stick, cram it in the digital morass and turn history on its ear. The proof of this mathematics is in the making of media.

This class will use Max/MSP/Jitter a graphically based authoring program that allows one to program in a visual environment. In addition to real time video and audio processing students will learn to create 2D and 3D graphics and imbue them with interactive behaviors.

Basic Electronics

Electronics is increasingly becoming an important skill for artists, designers, and architects. Artists are embedding circuits into their work to create interactive art or kinetic sculpture. Architects are designing smart buildings that can adapt and change to environmental conditions. Designers are embedding electronics into products, fashion, and interactive displays to enhance the daily quality of our lives. This course is an introduction to electronics for use in art and design. It will concentrate on applications of basic electronic fundamentals and techniques with the aim to design and build your own circuit device. Topics include power supplies, diodes, resistance and capacitance in different circuit composition, sensors, switches, simple circuits and transistor amplifiers. Lectures, demonstrations and critical discussion of work will be the mode for this course. Some models and theories will be presented as they relate to the subject of discussion.

Flash Art

Through the very simple statement "open/close" students learn the Adobe Flash 9 application. A weekly playful canvas is set up to familiarize students step by step with the program, exploring timeline functions (basic animation principles such as keyframe, interpolation, etc), vector-based design, buttons and movie-clips symbols, and ActionScript. Course after course, students complete various assignments and develop their own "open/close" project, including overlapping timelines working in conjunction with each other, similar to the principle of Russian dolls. This class will also provide a short introduction into html for web-based projects as well as a lesson on web and animation imaging in Photoshop (formats, script, etc), the project being prepared for broadcast over internet.

New Media

This intermediate to advanced course will cover a broad range of current topics in the field of experimental media. The class will be taught by a faculty member who will specifically determine the course content.

Processing

This class is an introduction to Processing, a powerful programming language developed by artists for artists. One of their objectives is to make programming more transparent and easy to use. They want to demystify programming by creating an environment that simplifies and in some cases hides the brain numbing minutia that can be so intimidating. Their reasoning is simple and compelling. Coding or programming gives artists a cutting-edge palette of tools to create new and advanced art work. Processing can be used to create interactive or generative projects for the web. It can be used to visualize data, create animations, and manipulate images in real time. This class will cover the fundamentals of programming as well as explore how computation can be used as an expressive medium. There will be reading assignments that illuminate the terminology used above as well as providing a historical context for software art. Processing is open source and free to download. It works on all major platforms including Linux. There will one text book that will be used extensively. It contains concise explanations and example code. It will prove invaluable in this class and for future research. It should be emphasized that this is an entry level class. The only requirements are that you're not intimidated by computers and are eager to be challenged by new concepts and ideas.

Intro to Max Signal Processing

The class will introduce students to basic programming techniques in the audio software MAX-MSP, a digital audio software for the creation of audio in real-time. Critical listening will be developed through an understanding of the physics of sound, looking at a select group of audio artists, and gaining an understanding of the evolution of audio art during the past 50 years.The goal of the class is to enable the creation of individualized systems for live electronic performance and sound installations within the critical framework of contemporary sound art. Students are expected to create sound pieces throughout the semester which focus on the themes and techniques introduced in the class.

Reconstructing Video

Jitter is a highly customizable software environment that offers Media Artists the chance to explore digital video and photography from a more fundamental perspective than other software. As one of the few video-based software's without a timeline, Jitter erases many of the preconceived ideas of content and meaning that are built into traditional timeline-based tools. This course will cover Jitter both as a platform to be integrated into a more regular video production workflow (i.e. Final Cut, Photoshop, AfterEffects) and as a programming language for media-based installations and live performances. Our main topic will be video as a data stream and how it can be manipulated, for example: building dynamic ("living") editing systems, listening to video, splitting color planes, re-mapping video information with alternate data, voice-controlled video, live animations, video as a sensor and various other interrelated topics. Some prior exposure to the Max/MSP programming environment is required.

postLAB

All too often interactive work is cloistered in galleries, museums, and labs. This class will challenge this orientation by creating projects that intervene in public places. Of particular interest is the membrane that separates Media Arts from the rest of the campus. It's this juncture that will be engaged, transmuted, and activated. Each student will design and instigate an interactive or just plain reactive installation that will be "contained" in the new Media Arts exhibition space at the main entrance of Founders Hall. Projects will also have a parallel existence as data streams that will be accessible on the web. The method will be to emulate the artist as executive or director model currently in vogue. Everyone will take turns leading a team of collaborators, implementing an intervention that transforms the space into a media hotspot. In turn everyone will exercise their specialty or learn new ones towards the director's project.