With the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter and #metoo, the field of social good advertising has rapidly expanded as brands seek social relevance, governments and nonprofits look to inform, and activists try to persuade. In this course, students will learn to plan and execute powerful social advertising campaigns, while thinking critically about the blurred lines between advertising and information, and branding and politics, in what Sarah Banet-Weiser calls “Shopping for Change.
This umbrella course focuses on specific time periods, technological developments and cultural contexts relevant to understanding the development of digital computing technology over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st. This course familiarizes students with the social forces and techno-cultural innovations that shaped the computing industry. Specific themes may include: personal computing; Cold War computing; computing and globalization; the quantified self; computational aesthetics; artificial intelligence and machine learning; computing and gender.
Through a series of lectures and weekly prompts, this hands-on course introduces a methodology that facilitates the process from thinking to making. Softness is used as both a theoretical and material framework that asks students to rethink the edges of the real and to to engage with structures, organizations, materials and relationships as malleable, fluid, and open to transformation. Students are introduced to foundational concepts through a wide range of examples and readings, and are invited to critically reflect on how these concepts inform and guide their own practice and creative journey. The weekly assignments are meant to help students become comfortable with a variety of techniques and making practices, and in a rapid, playful and experimental manner engage with ideas in an embodied and enacted way. Given that they have a week to complete each assignment, the goal is to help students delve into the core and essential properties of each concept and find ways to express and explore them in their work. The cadence of the lectures and survey of a wide range of artistic practices aims to expose students to different approaches to making, and importantly help them understand how theory and practice are not separate realms but indeed intertwined.
This interdisciplinary course combines ethnographic readings, representations, and interpretations of city and urban cultures with a video production component in which students create short documentaries on the city of Accra. The interpretative classes will run concurrently with production management, sights and sound, and post-production workshops. The course will have three objectives: (1) teach students the documentary tradition from Flaherty to Rouch; (2) use critical Cinema theory to define a document with a camera; and (3) create a short documentary film.
This interdisciplinary course combines ethnographic readings, representations, and interpretations of city and urban cultures with a video production component in which students create short documentaries on the city of Accra. The interpretative classes will run concurrently with production management, sights and sound, and post-production workshops. The course will have three objectives: (1) teach students the documentary tradition from Flaherty to Rouch; (2) use critical Cinema theory to define a document with a camera; and (3) create a short documentary film.
The foundations of Max, a powerful visual programming language for music and multimedia, will be covered in this course. We will examine how computers can be utilized to create situations for music creation, performance, and collaborative improvisation as well as applied to building interactive, generative music. In addition to learning Max’s fundamental building blocks, we will also use fundamental music theory as a tool to better understand music making. We will create programs that examine rhythm, melodies, chords, scales, and recognize other qualities of music like timbre, texture, and dynamics while taking into consideration the principles of harmony, melody, and rhythm defined in basic music theory. The final will require you to develop a collaborative piece of interactive computer music, a collaborative performance environment, or another final project that has been discussed and agreed upon together. This class does not require any prerequisite programming skills or prior music theory knowledge.
This course introduces students to the range of mechanical engineering and emphasizes the basic principles and devices for storing and using energy, directing motion and satisfying needs. Case studies look at design issues and related ethical and professional practice issues. Emphasis is on a mindset of exploration. Engineering standards and standard parts. Teams work on and present two design challenges. | Prerequisite: Only first-year students are permitted to enroll in this course.
Advanced work in studio repair and maintenance focusing on digital equipment. Students will develop practical skills tracing schematics, using test equipment, and replacing components as required daily in the studio environment.
A continuation of MPATE-UE 1010. This is an advanced & detailed study of the audio-visual production & post-production process including digital recording techniques, with special emphasis on synchronization & the interfacing of SMPTE time code. Sound design, advanced Foley topics, * creative workflow in audio post production will also be discussed.
This course focuses on three important areas in music technology: spatialization, computer aided composition, analysis & synthesis techniques. In each area, concepts & implementations will be explored in a variety of artistic & technological contexts. Students will work with the latest technologies including IRCAM Tools, Spat plugin, Max Bach library, Ambisonics, & Wave Field Synthesis. The course includes a 3-hour weekly lecture, 3-hour studio lab, & workshops at IRCAM. This course is taught in collaboration with IRCAM in Paris, one of the world leading institutions in computer music and acoustics.
Decentralization has become a buzzword in the technology space, and there is much more to decentralized technology than NFTs and cryptocurrency. In this course, we will examine the fundamental concepts of the existing internet infrastructure, work to define what decentralization means, learn about the “why” of decentralization, survey the landscape of decentralized, distributed, and p2p protocols, and develop decentralized applications. We learn about will examine the implementation of decentralized technology and throughout the course, we will look at different use cases of decentralization such as evading censorship, protecting privacy, and creating resilient applications. We will also consider ethical questions about the decentralization movement—how will it grow, who benefits from decentralization, and whether a decentralized internet is even a good solution at all. We will examine the underlying technologies that enable decentralization, as well as looking at the current implementations of decentralized protocols and apps built on top of decentralized protocols. Finally, we will touch on adjacent topics such as local networks, mesh networking, and p2p networks. While this course will cover a breadth of decentralized and self-hosted applications, we will steer away from decentralized financing and NFTs and instead focus on decentralized information sharing. The goal of the class is to challenge students to think critically about the future of the decentralized web and develop applications that leverage these technologies. Students with or without a background in networking are both highly encouraged to enroll.
“What capabilities does computational media have for depicting and conveying the experience of our minds? In this course we will start out using 3D graphics to depict the conventional physical reality that appears before us. Then we will turn inward to reflect the multidimensional reality of our minds, using artificial neural networks. Finally we return to embodied interfaces connected with cloud networking and databases to share with other people. The class will operate at a conceptual level, inviting students’ empirical psychological and philosophical investigations of the nature of their experience and how to convey it with art and story. It will ask students to look critically at existing computational media’s tendencies to bore, divide or inflame its users. But this is also very much a coding class where students will prototype their own ideas for new media first with 3D graphics using the threejs library, and then with machine learning models like Stable Diffusion using Huggingface APIs or Colab notebooks and finally with networking and databases using Firebase or P5 Live Media. Students can substitute other coding tools but game engines will not work for this class. The coding is in javascript, with a possible touch of python, and is a natural sequel to Introduction to Computational Media.” Prerequisite: ICM / ICM: Media (ITPG-GT 2233 / ITPG-GT 2048)
How do we make things move, produce sounds, or maybe even emit light without batteries? Through this course, each student will design their own purely mechanical automaton. We will learn how to use simple materials and tools to hand prototype mechanisms in their early stages. CAD software will be used to refine the designs and then a series of traditional and digital fabrication tools (various wood shop tools, laser cutter, CNC, 3D printers, etc.) will be used to produce the final pieces. We will learn how to work iteratively in the shop through weekly exercises, and a midterm and final project.
This course introduces students to modalities for creating site-specific and immersive art and performance. Assignments will examine the work of artists who challenge the limitations of the physical, psychological and transactional spaces that have come to define conventional production models. Students will regularly receive prompts from which collaborative work will be workshopped, generated and presented. The sites and practices explored will de-center script/text as spine, institutional space as gathering place, linear storytelling as narrative, and separation between audience and artist as social contract. Through group performance projects and presentations, students will investigate how Site evokes Narrative and Event differently in brick & mortar, virtual, historic, liminal, dead, found, contested, democratized and community spaces. Our work will unpack the challenges and opportunities presented when we relinquish creative control of such unfixed elements as serendipity, impermanence, improvisation, audience agency, public space, weather, and pandemic.
For centuries, food production practices such as permaculture fostered ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient, while producing nutrient-dense food. Modern farming has introduced harmful monoculture practices proven to cause collateral destruction of biodiversity and seasonal harvesting, distancing us from our food ecosystems. The future of food can be regenerative or continue to contribute to massive health and environmental issues. How can we challenge ourselves to regain connection to our food system? How might we use innovation, personal prowess, design, and biotechnology to reimagine healthier ecosystems? This course examines the historical context of the food ecosystems and encourages students to identify with these systems that we (in urban settings) are disconnected with. Students will build a project around exploring innovative approaches to the future of food and our relationships with it. These projects will incorporate design, technology, science, and research elements.
A programming course where we’ll explore various techniques and solutions for tracking and sensing people or objects in space. Students will get familiar with the terminology and algorithms behind many sensing topics such as computer vision, depth cameras, positional tracking, and coordinate mapping. As these subjects are explored, we will also dig into communication, and how this information can be transmitted from one tool to another, for example using OSC, Spout/Syphon, MIDI, DMX/ArtNet. The goal being to use the right tool for the job and not limit ourselves to a particular piece of software.
Our users have senses that they use to perceive information in different ways. Some perceive best through sight, some through hearing, others through touch. Designers often prioritize visual information, excluding those who benefit from other sensory modalities. In this class, we’ll take a multisensory approach to design that makes interfaces more accessible to disabled and nondisabled users. Students will learn how to design for the senses (think tactile controls combined with atmospheric sounds and olfactory or taste experiences), while gaining an understanding of the assumptions we make about our users’ sensory preferences. Students should come with prior experience with physical computing and fabrication techniques and can expect to learn technical processes for the user research, usability testing, and iterative design of multisensory interfaces. Over the course of 14 weeks, students will design an interface for the 5 senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell), culminating in one final project that includes at least 3 sensory modalities.
“As game and interaction designers we create systems and choices that can either prey upon our psychological foibles or help us avoid decision pitfalls. It is our responsibility to understand how we decide, to consider the ethics of the systems we create and to practice designing systems in a purposeful manner. Game Design & The Psychology of Choice will provide interaction and game designers with an understanding of the factors that influence behavior and decision-making by looking at the intertwining of cognitive psychology and economics through the development of behavioral economics. These disciplines study behavior on the individual and group level, often revealing some of the why behind the rules of thumb and folk wisdom that game designers come to intuitively. But understanding the why—why we fall into decision traps; why certain tradeoffs tax our brain more than others; why we are overconfident about our abilities; why certain decisions make us uncomfortable—allows us to more purposefully apply our design craft, both in and out of games. Finally, as a class, we will take what we learn about how we think and create series of game experiences based around key cognitive science concepts. Assignments may include: •Mod a cognitive science experiment into a game or experience •Analyze and present a game through the lens of cognitive science and behavioral economics •Create game or experience based around a particular insight from cognitive science or behavioral economics”
“How can motion capture (MoCap) be used to archive, preserve, and share intangible heritage forms, such as performing arts, rituals, and other social practices and traditions? This course approaches motion capture through the lens of ethnography — drawing on techniques of observation, participation, and qualitative design research. This class will offer an overview of different motion capture technologies, such as 2D-3D pose estimation and depth mapping, with a practical focus on learning the OptiTrack system at ITP. We will start by covering the basics of OptiTrack and build up to other workflows and techniques used across animation, game design, and virtual production (e.g. OptiTrack to Unreal Engine or Unity).” Prerequisite: CL: Hypercinema (ITPG-GT 2004)