This is an interactive media art class for people who want to develop creative experiences that are about something specific with a specific point of view! This sounds vague, but your projects won’t be! You’ll be provided with a step-by-step methodology for making research-driven creative and critical projects with a focus on experience design. For the first part of the semester, you’ll make a low-tech guide to a somewhat wacky random topic you’ve been assigned to. For the second part you’ll choose a topic you are passionate about and make an interactive experience that engages deeply with that topic. Skills touched upon: research methods, ideation, critique, experience design, intro-level Unity3d. Class time will consist of: creative exercises; discussion of readings, methodologies, and artworks; student presentations; critique sessions; guest artists and researchers; and a handful of demos. Why critical? In this class, critical means: discerning, eager to participate differently, cast new light on, re-examine, course-correct. Why experience? The work in this class will be looked at through the lens of its ability to change a user, participant, audience, viewer. Interactivity is one way of doing that, but through the lens of experience design, all art is temporal and embodied. A research-based art practice brings together an eccentric mixture of skills, including traditional forms of research (library and interview techniques, informal ethnographies) and experimental hands-on research (hunch-following, experimentation, systems thinking, prototyping, daily practice, user experience design, and user-testing). We’ll try ’em all!

Interactive Media Arts (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2022)

IMNY-UT 206-000 (22305)
01/24/2022 – 05/09/2022 Thu
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)
at Brooklyn Campus
Instructed by Rothberg, Sarah