This course re-conceives interactive media as a form of choreographic intervention. Instead of asking how moving bodies can control media, we will ask how interactive systems can influence movement. How do you make someone feel soft inside? How do you shake an entire room? How do you orchestrate duets between strangers? To accomplish this, the class facilitates a semester-long collaboration between ITP students and dancers from the Barnard/Columbia Dance Department. Choreographers will learn to apply computational thinking to choreography and creative coders will learn to apply choreographic thinking to computation. To whatever extent possible, we will attempt to embody code. Using computer vision and visual media, we will look at directing both how people move (quality of movement) as well as where they move (pathways and spatial relationships). We will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the various sensing technologies available to us today. How wide is the gulf between what we can see and feel (strength, hardness, contortion) and what a computer can see and interpret (locations, contours, velocity, acceleration)? Class time will be split between movement exercises, playing with examples and deconstructing code. The class will culminate in a final showing of student work. All classes will take place at NYU with a separate weekly technical lab for ITP students.
Rules of play shape competitive games from checkers to football. But how do rules of interaction shape everyday life? And what happens when there are no established conventions and the rules are being made up as we go along as they have been for the past 6 months of living almost exclusively online? In this course, we will explore, code and test design strategies for playful, serious and bizarre group interactions while at the same time interrogating both what it means to play and how individual identities and group behaviors emerge. (The interactions we create in this class will be designed specifically for synchronous, in-person, embodied experiences.) Some of the questions we will ask and attempt to answer: What motivates participation? What hinders it? When does participation become oppressive? What’s the difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness? Who has power? Who doesn’t? Are leaders necessary? What’s the difference between taking turns and engaging in conversation? What happens when the slowest person sets the pace? And most importantly, what happens when there are no rules? Interaction inputs we will play with will include: mouse, keyboard, mobile device sensors, and microphone. Outputs can include visuals, text and sound. We will use p5, websockets and node.js for real-time interaction. Class time will be split between group improvisation exercises, playing with and critiquing examples and translating design strategies into code and logic.
A site for IMA NY Students to find equivalent courses outside of IMA NY
For most students joining IMA in Fall 2022 and beyond, there is a new program structure that affects the categorization of courses on this site:
Any class in any IMA major elective category (ie "Art & Design") refers to the IMA program structure previous to those entering in Fall 2022. If you are in the class of 2026 (most entering Fall 2022 or later), any course in an IMA elective category are generic IMA electives in the new structure.