This course explores Greek, Christian and Jewish responses to the problem: How does one create a good society? Central questions to be explored include: What is the best form of government? What economic system is ideal? Should the government actively promote a vision of the good life or leave it to individual to decide the good for themselves? Should the government prioritize the freedom, equality, or happiness of its inhabitants? What role should religion and nationhood play in society? What models of education should the government promote? How does gender inform these considerations? The course will focus on careful analysis of primary texts. Thinkers to be studied include: Plato, Maimonides, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Mendelssohn, Marx, Hess. Having first taken the course: Living a Good Life: Greek and Jewish Perspectives is highly desirable.
Painting is an incredibly versatile medium and its dynamic evolution across cultures and through millennia continues up until the present. The medium’s relevance and capacity for reinvention are evidenced in the work of a number of contemporary painters who have incorporated inventive materials and/or methods into their practice to both push its limits and explore contemporary concerns. In this class, students will get an introduction to the fundamental technical, formal, and conceptual principles of painting. Using watercolor, gouache, and acrylic, students will explore color theory, composition, texture, form, and surface using a wide range of techniques. Through selected readings, students will also examine the theoretical questions and historical precedents that have informed painting’s development, see how they relate to or have been challenged by the work of contemporary painters and be able to connect select concerns to their own practice. In addition to acquiring basic technical skills and conceptual know-how, students will also gain competency in art critiques and writing artist statements. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: general elective
The course is an introduction to microeconomics. It assumes no prior knowledge of the subject. The course examines the fundamentals of microeconomics needed by technologists, relying to a considerable extent upon mathematical expression and representation. The principle topics covered are price theory, production and cost theory, the theory of the firm and market theory, including the practical relevance of these to the management of technology-intensive enterprises. The role of the state and of government regulation will be considered as a special topic. Students who take this course cannot receive credit for ECON-UA 2 or FIN-UY 2003. | Prerequisite: MA-UY 1024 or MA-UY 1054 or MA-UY 1324 or an approved equivalent.
Carrasco, Heeger, Landy, Pelli. Offered every semester. 4 points. How do we construct a conception of physical reality based on sensory experience? Survey of basic facts, theories, and methods of studying sensation and perception. The major emphasis is on vision and audition, although other modalities may be covered. Represen-tative topics include receptor function and physiology; color; motion; depth; psychophysics of detection, discrimination, and appearance; perceptual constancies; adaptation, pattern recognition, and the interaction of knowledge and perception.
While traditional forms of art such as painting and sculpture only expect intellectual communication with the spectator, interactive arts consider the audience as active participants and directly involve their physical bodies and actions. Interactive art invites its audience to have a conversation with the artwork or even be part of it. Well designed interactions add new meanings to the artwork and enhance effective and memorable communication with the viewer through their magical quality. Artists have achieved interactivity in their art through different strategies based on various technologies. For example, some projects have physical interfaces such as buttons and knobs, some projects react to the audience’s presence or specific body movements, and yet others require collaborations between the audience as part of the interaction process. Some artwork involves interactions that require a long period of time for the engagement. In many of these interactive art projects, interaction methods are deeply embedded into the soul and voice of the work itself. In this class, we will explore interaction as an artistic medium. We will be looking at interactive media art history through the lens of interaction and technology to explore their potential as art making tools. Every 1-2 weeks, you will be introduced to a new interaction strategy along with a group of artists and projects. You will learn about relevant technologies and skills for the interaction strategies and build your own project to be in conversation with the artists and projects. You will also explore and discuss the future of interactions and how interactive art can contribute to innovations in interactions, and vice versa. You will also learn about how to contextualize and articulate your project in an artistic way. The assignments include reading, short writing, hands-on labs, and production assignments. Technical topics covered in class include but are not limited to: physical computing, sensing, and interaction design.
This class focuses on the art of computer graphics and image processing. We explore the concepts of pixilation, image representation and granularity and the tension between reality and image. Students are introduced to the tools and techniques of creating dynamic and interactive computer images from scratch, manipulating and processing existing images and videos, compositing and transitioning multiple images, tracking and masking live video, compositing and manipulating live video as well as manipulating depth information from Kinect. The class uses Processing and the Java language and also introduces students to shaders and the glsl language.
Do you want to MAKE THINGS with your computer? Are you an artist, engineer, designer, sculptor or architect? Are you a few of those things? How are 3D scanning and 3D modeling different? What materials should I be using? Should I be 3D printing or CNC-ing this CAD file? What is a Boolean operation and why is it my new best friend? This class will answer all of your questions. Don’t know what any of these things are? This class will answer those questions also. By the end of this course, you will be familiar with all that digital fabrication has to offer. We will cover everything from laser to 3D to CNC. You will learn how to identify which digital fabrication technique works best for your projects. But more than that, you will learn what kinds of questions you should be asking in order to complete a project from start to finish. As technology advances at rapid speeds, digital making machines and software are changing just as fast. So instead of just being taught about the machines of today, you will also be given the tools to teach yourself the machines of tomorrow. Emphasis will be put on learning how to ask the right kind of questions to successfully finish a project. What do you want to make? Let’s make it.
What are all the ways that you saw or made a photograph this week? How are those ways similar and different? How do those pictures function in your life and in society? What is a photograph? This course repeatedly asks these questions by using emerging computational tools to design alternative forms of making and interacting with photographs. The forms and applications of these tools, such as those for creative coding, physical computing, and machine learning, are explored weekly in technical tutorials and hands-on workshops. These are informed by discussions of critical debates in photography and various practitioners working with photographs, past and present. The homework includes readings, short writing responses, and photography assignments. Prerequisites: Comm Lab: HyperCinema (or similar coursework exploring communication and storytelling with digital tools) and New York’s IMA Creative Computing (or similar coursework with creative coding using the p5.js JavaScript library and programming for physical computing using Arduino microcontrollers). Note that prior experience with physical computing using the Arduino platform is required for this course. Please feel free to contact the instructor if you have any questions about the course.
“Critical Experience is an experiential journey through a research driven art practice rooted in care, community, and somatic inquiry. This class is based on the premise that there are many ways to know things and we can draw upon these ways of knowing and our desire to know in order to nurture a creative practice grounded in research, clear intention, and a critical lens. Critical here means: discerning, eager to participate differently, cast new light on, re-examine, course-correct. You will be guided through traditional research methods (library and interview techniques, citations, informal ethnographies) and experience design while also being asked to cultivate intentional awareness of your own positionalities, communities, personal strengths, emotions, and desires through experimentation, hunch following, rituals, and contemplative practices.This class was created for or artists/designers who are interested in participation/interaction and its relationship to social practice, critical design, and change-making as well as individuals curious about knowing what moves them. Why experience? The work in this class will be looked at through the lens of its ability to transform (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.”
This two-point workshop is centered on the examination and creation of collective storytelling environments. We will examine a wide-range of storytelling spaces including participatory and user-generated environments, site-specific works, community based arts practices, and transmedia storytelling. Weekly assignments, field trips, and student presentations.
Beginning with the invention of paper, the paper craft movement has roots on all continents. This course is divided into several subject areas: the history of paper and paper making, paper folding, paper cutting, paper engineering, paper automata, and the contemporary DIY electronics and paper craft moment. Each subject area has associated readings, a short research presentation on international traditions and forms, several hands-on mechanical exercises, and one individual creative exercise.
If so much of life is circumstance, being in a certain place at a certain moment in time… Can we shape a life or at least a few brief moments of a life by designing the circumstances in which that life inhabits a space? In this course, we will treat space as a time-based medium and ask how interactive spaces can generate narratives that are lived rather than told. We will do so by interrogating four so-called “space-narrative” forms: Wandering The Desert, Processions, Circles and Territories. Through play, discussion and hands-on workshopping of both technical topics and ideas 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 form a personal narrative? Media outputs we will employ include: lights, projection and sound. Interaction input sources will come from cameras and microphones. We will use p5.js, 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.
This course aims to provide students with the means to understand immersive media experiences, and conduct experiments from both a practical and a theoretical perspective. The course consists of lectures, research, discussion and studio-based practice. Students will learn to produce stereoscopic – 3D images and photogrammetric 3D models, utilize multi-channel video and sound systems, and be introduced to the Unity game engine and VR hardware. For the final project, students produce VR environments in experimental and meaningful ways. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: IMA/IMB elective.
An introductory course to machine learning aimed at a hands-on engagement and development of an intuitive understanding of related techniques and effects. The course uses the JavaScript language, and the ml5.js and p5.js frameworks to introduce the theory and application of machine learning algorithms. In exercises and assignments, students will experiment with building, using and critiquing machine learning models and datasets. Readings and discussions will cover relevant issues and frame the practice. This course builds on an existing practice of computer programming. Weekly assignments are required. Prerequisite: INTM-SHU 103 Creative Coding Lab Fulfillment: IMA/IMB elective.
In this course we combine both analytic and embodied learning about human movement practices. We will learn selected computational and physical movement sensing techniques (webcam-based, wearable-based, and commercial motion capture technologies). We will combine guest and student-led presentations and activities that involve us in movement while learning structures and history of selected movement practices such as dance and circus arts. We will do four sprint projects of approximately one week in length (each semester projects differ, but may include examples such as PoseNet/MoveNet, Creating a Fitness Tracker, Rhythm Game, Non-humanoid MoCap avatars), alternating with work on a class choreographic project and individual research and writing of a paper on a movement practice. Prerequisite: Creative Coding Lab or equivalent programming experience. Fulfillment: IMA/B Elective.
Electronic Textiles spans the worlds of craft, electronics, and computing. We will build skills in the often surprising world of using soft, stretchy or low tech materials where one might have expected hard, dimensionally stable, or high tech materials and vice versa. Weekly projects will have requirements for craftsmanship and design, and will build skills in integrating electronics and computing with soft items and wearables, making sensors and displays, tailoring and costuming, and creating your own materials. You will gain familiarity with materials and with hand and machine crafting skills. Weekly readings for discussion will be required, and presentations and guest speakers will offer you ideas and critical challenges. Pre-req: None. Fulfillment: IMA/B Elective
In this course, students focus on the study and development of responsive environments, framed within a contextual and critical exploration of the architectural space as a cultural, social and technological phenomenon, and also on the application of practical scenarios for interaction, sentience, and intelligence. Through the making of creative media designs and physical prototypes, students aim to demonstrate how our habitats/spaces/architectures can facilitate novel frameworks for experiencing and living. Prereq for INTM-SHU 138 is Creative Coding Lab OR Interaction Lab OR Application Lab OR Media Architecture Fulfillment: IMA/IMB Elective
Technology is allowing us to see our clothing as an extension of our body. An extension acting as a system that reacts, collects information, and augments our modes of interactions with spaces and people. Historically, what we wear has been used to express our identity as well as complex issues related to class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Leila Brillson states: “”What you wear is a part of your identity, and identity is, well, pretty darn political””. Interested in fashion as a form of expression, artists, designers, and architects are now crossing disciplines to explore the realm of fashion. Utilizing computation design, digital fabrication, and electronics they are proposing new wearables to speculate on the future of human existence by exploring the limits of the body. In this course, students will research and work with soft electronics and robotics integrated into textiles to make it possible to add controlled behavior and interactivity with their immediate environment. They will study nature and design wearables, understanding them like a second skin, as well as a soft interface able to gather information and transform itself. Students will also explore the complex geometries and designs allowed by digital design and manufacturing. Furthermore, this course will engage with both theory and practice, and introduce students to a specific design sensibility and methodology in order to design wearables reflecting on religious, social, and political issues. Prerequisite: INTM-SHU 101 Interaction Lab or INTM-SHU 103 Creative Coding Lab. Fulfillment: IMA/IMB Elective
This course investigates and illuminates the concepts and the aesthetics of kinetic sculpture and installation art in various forms from creative and historical perspectives. Students will learn to regard sound and performance as part of a sculptural form and learn to work with space. Students will gain woodworking and digital fabrication skills to expand on their physical computing skills to create moving sculpture and installation. The course consists of lectures, readings, and hands-on studio work.
This course surveys the implications of globalization for the production, circulation, and consumption of media. In this course, we will look across both analog and digital media (radio, TV, film, video, pop music, podcast, etc) in relation to a series of questions: How do media (and media industry) represents localities for a global audience? How can media practices create a feeling of belonging to the world/community? How may global media tell us about different material infrastructure, social imagination, and political desires? Students will explore media phenomena and critically examine media texts often beyond North American experiences. By the end of the class, students will be able to articulate how media connects to global flow of finance, cultural product, labor, and social aspirations.