Introduction to Game Engines is a course intended for students who already have an understanding of programming fundamentals that introduces concepts, problems, and methods of developing games and interactive media using popular game engines. Game engines are no longer just used for the development of games, they have increasing gained popularity as tools for developing animations, interactives, VR experience, and new media art. Throughout the semester, students will have weekly programming assignments, using a popular game engine. There will be a final game assignment, as well as weekly quizzes and a final exam. The course assumes prior programming knowledge, if students do not have the appropriate prerequisites a placement exam may be taken. There will be an emphasis on using code in a game engine environment as a means of creative expression.
2D Art and Animation for Games is a 1-semester, 4-credit class that builds fundamental skills around the design and production of art assets for games. Through a series of individual design assignments, critiques, and exercises, students will explore concepts like art direction, color theory, animation principles, and UI design while building a working knowledge of prominent industry tools.
To be a VR creator, it’s not enough to learn the hard skills—it’s also our responsibility to prime ourselves for the human impact of our work. As a means to design VR that is both enjoyable and accountable, this class proposes we borrow design principles from Hedonomics, a branch of ergonomic science that facilitates pleasurable human-technology interaction. Through the Hedonomic Pyramid, we’re able to section our thinking off into regions (Safety, Function, Usability, Pleasure and Individuation) and map out industry-tested VR design guidance for each. The result is a hierarchical checklist of proven principles, specifications and practices—that promote a culture of inclusive and holistic design—built to serve as a quickstart guide to designing accountable VR interfaces and systems. This class, divided into units that represent each level of the Hedonomic pyramid, will unpack both technical and conceptual strategies for creating VR, from visual interface fidelity to avoiding locomotion cybersickness to designing safer social VR spaces.
Buildings produce a large percentage of the carbon emissions threatening the planet and multi-family residential buildings make up a significant portion of it. With Covid-19 changing the way we live and work, and the increasing amount of data available from buildings, a key to fighting the climate crisis will be turning this data into action. In this course, learn how to analyze interval data and explore visualizing data to motivate tenants and building operators to change their behavior to reduce energy usage at the optimal times. This will involve analyzing the data streams coming from installed sensors and building equipment, understanding how usage varies over time, and transforming raw data into visual interfaces that mobilize us all in the fight to save the planet. This course will teach basics of how time series data can be stored, how to query time series data, and how to understand energy usage from a data set. With these new skills students will design a project using time series data and their JavaScript skills to visualize this data.
In this course, we will explore how to create narratives that leverage our lesser used senses like touch, taste and smell as well as lesser-known ones like space, time, balance and scale. We will dig into the history of experiential storytelling, starting from immersive theater and Smell-O-vision to cutting-edge haptics and mind-bending illusions of proprioception. To help center this back in practical applications, we will also explore how this evolving art is commonly used in exhibition design, experiential marketing and brick and mortar retail. The class will be a healthy mixture of game theory as well as experienced based learning (meaning there will be a couple field trips and multisensory VR projects to explore). A basic knowledge of game engines is ideal but not mandatory because we will be using predesigned templates in Unreal engine to be experienced and manipulated in real-time through virtual reality hardware.
Throughout history, musicians have channeled their creativity into outrageous fashion statements and invented personas: think MF DOOM, Sun Ra, Ghostface Killah, Daft Punk, Leikeli47 and Rammellzee. By embracing their alter egos in extreme and outlandish ways, artists have found their authentic creative voices. This course will introduce participants to the art of masquerade using their resourcefulness to create costumes from found materials, and performance as an exploration in creative expression using new media and technology. Students will be introduced to ideas surrounding abstract storytelling, experimental audio video production, and A/V performance using a combination of technical and hands-on approaches.
Artists and creative practitioners are widely seen as responsible for destabilizing or critiquing dominant cultural norms and social systems; for example, in her book “Race After Technology”, Ruha Benjamin argues that artists “…can better understand and expose the many forms of discrimination embedded in and enabled by technology”. But when we talk about resistance or refusal enacted through creative means, what exactly do we mean? How does artistic work serve to resist, protest and subvert—and where does it sit in relation to the ideas it aims to critique? This class engages with the notion of “creative resistance”, unpacks the meanings and ethical stances associated with the term, and evaluates how it has been applied in both artistic and academic contexts. Students will explore theories of resistance, refusal and solidarity, and experiment with applying them to (or discussing them through) creative work. In the first half of the class, through reading, class discussion and student presentations, we will engage with scholarly and activist literature on resistance, protest and subversion, and look at examples of creative technological works that purport to achieve these goals. We will discuss commonly used strategies such as dark sousveillance (or “looking back” at the machine), speculative design, and distributed or guerrilla artmaking; examine their mechanisms of action; and debate their effectiveness in achieving their professed goals. In the second half, students will apply this thinking to their own project ideas. Students can choose to produce either a final project responding to the themes of the course, accompanied by a short written artist statement, or a more academic written piece that engages relevant literature from the class readings and beyond in service of an argument about the role of resistance in creative practice.
This course will serve as an incubator to imagine a speculative product advertisement in the year 2030. In films like Blade Runner, or Her adverts fill the world and become an important aspect of exposition for the film. And in the real world, works such as Alisha Wormlsey, Alexandra Bell, and Hank Willis Thomas begin to re-imagine advertisements as an art practice in society today. Our work will begin to speculate on near-future objects in which topics such as communication, energy storage, transportation can begin to be re-imagined in the next industrial revolution. Using 3D tools, students will gain experience in speculative design thinking, industrial design modeling, product lighting, and custom post-production methods. The final project will be a product advert that will be designed to promote a speculative design entirely made from 100% Biodegradable plastics. The course will look at the ready-made objects all around us as a launching pad. We will be starting with modeling an object in detail. Using Moi 3D, Maya, Render Engine TBD, After Effects, and premiere over the course of the semester. I will go through some of the latest tools within the VFX industry and support this course with a series of artists who have re-imaged the role of cultural production. The final will be an advertisement poster and animation.
Project-based development studio incorporating dramaturgy techniques, user/audience planning, and social/contextual awareness. You bring in a project. We explore how to make it more engaging through paying close attention to medium, context, and details. Students bring existing project ideas and we investigate various methods and ways to make and direct experience within the infinite combinations of contexts of the present moment together. This particular studio is just as appropriate for projects in the areas of interactive art, programming, physical computing, XR as it is in the areas of performance, sculpture, and sound walks (everything). Everything you make is time-based the moment a user interacts with it (even a painting). All time-based work can be thought of in terms of how a user is led (or not led) through it. I call this directing. We will apply various techniques of story-telling and world-building equally to seemingly “non-narrative” projects as we do to traditional-narratively structured projects. No matter what you are working on, I believe that you are a maker / director of experience. You are making / directing with intent (whether you know it or not). Your user (audience, tester, public, patron) brings with them the entirety of their life’s experience. Your intent cannot possibly meet every user’s lived experience. It is your job as the maker / director to draw a circle that encompasses both. This is the studio’s lens. Students will be directed to make using placeholders instead of waiting for perfection to manifest. Step one will tell you what step two is. We will pay rigorous attention to detail, while holding close to the notion that art-making thrives in adaptability. We will critique using various, structured, co-facilitated methods. Let’s pay close attention. Let’s learn through failure. Let’s listen to what we are making. And let’s listen to each other. Here we go.
If social change begins in the imagination, how then can creators better envision and render the more just and beautiful worlds we want to make? Storytelling has the power to be an alchemical force for revolutionary change. Together, we seek to interrogate and apply interactive storytelling as a technology we can deploy in service of our collective liberation. In this course, we pair a study of story as liberatory praxis with a hands-on grounding in emerging tech tools that allow viewers/players to take an active role. Interactive storytelling technology in video, audio, and text powerfully situates viewers inside constructed narrative worlds. Creators in these emerging media gain the capacity to design choices and respond accordingly, propelling imagination toward agency and enhancing empathic connections between viewers/players and characters. What will it mean to use these tools to tell deeper stories that ask urgent questions about how we want to live in the world? “Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It’s really working to create something beautiful.” —Assata Shakur
What can an object tell us about the world? What can the world tell us about an object? As students and practitioners in creative media, investigating the world around us is a core part of an art/design/tech practice. This course focuses on a specific research approach for doing so: the implosion method (developed by Joseph Dumit based on Donna Haraway’s work). Over the course of this two-weekend workshop, we will individually and collectively critically examine, break down, rearrange and communicate as Haraway says, the “sticky economic, technical, political, organic, historical, mythic, and textual threads that make up [an object’s] tissues.” Students will choose an object at the beginning of the class and over the course of a week will follow the implosion method process, culminating in a presentation of findings the following weekend. The implosion methodology will be supplemented by lectures, group conversation, hands-on activities and skill building of complementary research methods. The final presentation will be to communicate findings and learnings through a multimedia or art/design/tech-based form. By working through the implosion method, students will build skill sets in methods and tools for 1) conducting research in the media studies/creative tech/art fields and 2) structuring and communicating the information they collect by creating a media-based representation. This class is for students interested in fostering, developing, starting, or deepening a research-based art practice with topical interests in how technology relates to society, social issues, and ethics.
This course aims to provide students with the analytical skills to interpret current trends, policies and problems into futuristic (5 years) product proposals and the thought leadership and communication skills to clearly articulate and pitch those ideas. Projects can range from how prolonged quarantine will impact home exercise to the future of entertainment in self driving cars. Students will research and explore an opportunity space of their choosing where they will infer future problems from current trends then create a speculative solution. They will package their product thinking into a pitch deck and present back to the class. The class format will include lecture, in-class and out-of-class design exercises that apply the concepts covered in the class lecture and a final presentation and critique.
This course traces along the scholarship of Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway, and Animist and Perspectivist cosmologies to study and consider our positions within multispecies relations via material exploration and interspecies storytelling. This is a hands-on course engaging in communal growing and fabrication using biomaterials such as bacterial cellulose, mycelium, lactobacilli, yeast, and more. During the course students will participate in guided somatic exercises and writing as a generative pathway to create their own multispecies allegories and exploratory projects. We will look over and talk about the work by artists such as: Natalie Jeremijenko, CAConrad, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anicka Yi, Bo Zheng, Una Chaudhuri, Agnieszka Kurant and Ernst Karel.
Live streaming is so seamlessly embedded into our online experience. We lay in bed, on our phones watching hearts flicker across the screen as the person we’re watching greets all of the competing messages in the chat, asking for birthday shout outs and follow-backs. While the ability to live stream feels more accessible than ever, it feels very tied to corporate structures, branding and self promotion. How can we push the concept of a live stream in a new direction and rethink what a live stream can be?
Narrative holds a place in discourses of health, illness, caregiving, and disability, carrying and conveying the densely detailed, nuanced, and complex threads of personal emotion, social experience, and cultural meaning that accompany all instances of these subjects. Narrative also plays a growing role in clinical practice, research, and health education, as increasingly registered in the burgeoning field of Medical Humanities. This course introduces students to texts, practices and major works in the emergent fields of Graphic Medicine and Narrative Medicine, using traditional humanities methods of critical reading and analysis as well as experimental and creative methods including field observation and art-making in a variety of media. Building upon a series of practice-based assignments throughout the semester, students will complete a final project that exemplifies some of the ways narrative and graphic design foster understanding and knowledge in contexts of illness.
A new world is emerging at the intersections of machine learning and physical computation that will offer wide-scale access to bringing intelligence to everyday devices and spaces at extremely low costs. In this course, students are offered the opportunity to become pioneers in a new field of hardware machine learning as they are introduced to the most used machine learning platform in the world (TensorFlow) that has been embedded into an incredibly small microcontroller, called TinyML. Students will learn about building with machine learning, the ethics and societal impacts of ML, and how to start realizing creative computation through ML-based physical computing.
For most of its brief history, the domain of “smart cities” has belonged to large corporate vendors who promise and offer ubiquitous, citywide intelligence that utilizes their proprietary systems. More recently, an increasing number of startups have developed solutions which can make the technology somewhat more accessible. Unfortunately for municipalities, working with product vendors can be a heavy lift and the commitments involve lengthy procurement and contracting processes. In the past five years or so, the access to connected technology has increased and the hobbyist or “maker” movement has seen an uptick in offerings related to IoT. From the Arduino IoT Cloud and Adafruit.io software, to the Raspberry Pi and Particle hardware, building connected IoT devices has become easier than ever before. Through platforms like Google Coral and Nvidia Jetson, even edge computing and AI has become available to those with coding skills and a modest budget. What this course aims to explore is what happens when low-cost, readily available electronics platforms address the data needs of municipal governments. Rather than thinking of smart cities as large scale, big data projects that provide intelligence across a city, we will look at targeted applications that would be too small or costly to pursue as a conventional IoT procurement. What intelligence can be gathered in a short period of time with a small budget? During this course, we will examine successful and troubled smart cities projects, discuss the ethics of public technology projects, and review the prevailing best practices and guidelines relating to the Internet of Things in government use. Thinking in terms of “rapid IoT” and “little big data,” students will partner with NYC agency representatives* to uncover insights about a particular issue related to their work. Students will undertake a semester-long project, working to understand the agency’s data needs and develop an IoT solution to gather data for analysis that could inform the agency on planning, policy, or operational issues. The course will cover current connected microcontroller platforms and connectivity options like WiFi, Cellular, and LoRaWAN as well as the software tools needed to store and present data in user-friendly dashboards.
So much of life is circumstance, being in the right place at the right moment in time. Can we shape a life or at least a few brief moments of one by designing a space for it to inhabit? In this course, we will treat space as a time-based medium and ask how experiential spaces can generate narratives that are lived rather than told. We will look to a broad range of storytelling traditions to interrogate four so-called “space-narrative” forms: Wandering The Desert, Processions, Circles and Territories. Through play, discussion and technical and conceptual workshops, we will ask and attempt to answer some of the following questions: What constitutes a space? How do we experience a space over time? How does space shape our experience of time? How can space shape both a personal and collective narrative? We will build spaces with lighting, projection, sound and physical objects. Class time will be split between group improvisation exercises, playing-testing and critiquing projects. The class will culminate in a showing of work at the end of the semester.
Is it a plaything? Sculpture? Nostalgia? A Product? Art toys exist at the center of a unique Venn diagram. Each student in this class will develop an original limited edition art toy. We will cover toy fabrication, character design, material selection, packaging design, and art toy culture. The class will be fabrication heavy, there will be weekly assignments, and a final project.