The goal of the first half of the course is to build a basic understanding of how information about traits is encoded in our genes, how this “blueprint” is interpreted by cellular machinery to build a complex human being, and how our heredity has resulted in our evolution. In the senond half of the course, we will continue the exploration of how environment, experience and random errors affect the process of building our traits, what happens when these processes fail, and the promise and possible peril of genetic technologies for human life. Fulfillment: CORE ED (with CCEX-SHU 137)
This course is an introduction to the problems and methods of contemporary philosophy. Topics may include: 1. What is the relationship between mind and body? 2. Can belief in the existence of the external world be justified? 3. Are there any good arguments for the existence of God? 4. Can we act freely if everything that we do is determined by laws of nature? 5. Is there a theory of how we ought to live? Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Foundational/Introductory Courses (18-19: Critical Concepts).
This course explores the Art of Character Creation using the powerful digital sculpting program ZBRUSH. Students will learn the ins and outs of the program to create their own 3d characters from scratch. Sculpting, detailing, Polypainting, rendering and compositing in Photoshop will all be covered. The class will encourage learning while doing as I find it’s the best way to learn a new art. Zbrush is a unique program that allows users to manipulate 3D shapes in a quick fashion without having to model polygons like other 3D programs such as Maya. In effect you are using “digital clay” in Zbrush to push and pull primitive forms into fantastic creatures and characters. Zbrush is the perfect tool for traditional artists to transition to artmaking in the digital realm. Zbrush is an extremely feature-rich piece of software, with a unique interface unlike any other computer graphics program. While the interface may seem quite intimidating at first, rest assured we will explore the interface together and learn all the most important tools to get started and having fun with organic character creation! Some benefits of using Zbrush for Character and Creature Design over other computer design software: -The ability to quickly create concepts as if you were manipulating real clay -Great for rough character concepts or more finished painted renders -Transition is much smoother from practical to digital art using Zbrush because it feels like you are using an artistic tool rather than a technical tool – Zbrush offers such a deep diverse toolset, you can create stylized cartoon-like characters, realistic animals and humans! The possibilities are endless. You can use it for everything from organic characters to hard surface robots and props! -Once you learn the interface and tools, you can simply sculpt without worrying as much about technical aspects like polygons, faces, points and edges like other traditional polygon modelling programs
This course aims to train students to think philosophically about our rapidly changing—and ever more intimate—relationship with machines. We focus in particular on the following subjects: artificial intelligence, robots, cyborgs, automation and science fiction speculation. Prerequisite: Global Perspectives on Society (GPS) Fulfillment: CORE STS; Humanities Interdisciplinary or Advanced course; IMA/IMB elective.
Introduces students to the skills and concepts they will need in order to develop a meaningful engagement with the visual arts and art history as a global discipline. Rather than providing a chronological survey of great works, it covers examples and perspectives from a wide array of regions, periods, and societies. Topics include materials and techniques of production; formal analysis; subject matter and iconography; historical and cultural contexts; the social role and formation of artists; and the history of art history as a discipline. Pitched for students who have little or no background in the study of art and architecture, this course provides a rigorous introduction to the foundations of the discipline. It is required of all art history majors.
One of the most transformative consumer products in history, the iPhone remains the standard bearer for great design and user experience. With the latest versions of iOS and iPhone, Apple puts depth sensing and augmented reality in our pockets. How do we take advantage of this incredible platform to produce our own compelling experiences? This course will be a hands-on workshop where we explore the world beyond generic apps and push the boundaries of what’s possible on iOS hardware. Each week, you’ll be asked to complete a programming exercise meant to foster your understanding of iOS application development. We’ll leverage existing open source libraries to quickly build out your app with features such as real time communication and cloud storage. We aim to create distributed instruments for computed expression. Full-time access to an iOS device and a Mac laptop computer running the latest operating system and development tools are required. Prereq: Some programming experience (such as ICM) and willingness to learn Apple’s Swift programming language.
“Since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, the touchscreen has become the dominant manner for navigating Mobile devices. UX pattern best practices are enshrined in documents such as Apple’s ‘HIG’ (Human Interface Guidelines) or Google’s more recent Material Design. ‘No Screens Allowed’ is a class that challenges this ’Touchscreen first’ interaction approach. Taught in the Kotlin language, students will prototype solutions in response to Instructor directed assignments. The various projects structured to interrogate mobile device capabilities such as: Voice Recognition, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and built in sensors. Students will be provided with identical hardware: Pixel 3 phones running Android, the chosen development platform for the class. Successful completion of Introduction to Computational Media and Introduction to Physical Computing are required for entry into class. “
Quantum technologies are the next frontier of electronics and computing. Quantum Computers, Quantum Sensors, Quantum Materials are just beginning to emerge from laboratories and enter the realm of practical application. The course introduces the underlying principles of quantum physics, and reviews emerging capabilities of quantum computers and related technologies. Coursework will include programming quantum algorithms on a simulator, and running programs on actual cloud-based quantum computing hardware. The topics will be highly technical and will require the study of scientific principles and experimental apparatus. We will cover some basic mathematical operations in linear algebra, and we’ll be encountering some equations from physics and computer science.
This introductory course will focus on giving students a practical understanding of how to make ‘serious’ video games. That is, games that challenge the player to think and learn. This is a class where we will be ideating and producing playable games each week over 7 weeks using the open-source Godot game engine. By the end of the course, you’ll have a small portfolio of ‘serious’ games to show and build upon. Throughout the course, students will become familiar with concepts such as iterative design, play testing, object-oriented programming, user-interface design, animation and basic art for 2D games. They will take a design-based approach to content creation, developing a proficiency in the Godot game engine and the overall indie-game development pipeline.
This1-pt course examines the evolving paradigm of “Blockchain Aesthetics” using an interdisciplinary Art History and Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective. Students will learn and discuss the dominant methods, concepts, and strategies of applied blockchain technology in contemporary digital art, and together attempt to analyze and theorize the potential affordances and harms of this new artistic medium as it intervenes in established visual art institutions and communities (e.g., from museums and galleries to auction houses, social media and the decentralized web). The class will also look backwards in history to situate “Blockchain Aesthetics,” and the wide artistic realm of “Crypto Art,” in a broad cultural and technological history beyond NFTs, highlighting how ideas around cryptography, contracts, reproducibility, decentralization, scarcity and financialization developed in modern and contemporary art. Approaching the blockchain as a novel artistic tool and a technology of power, this course considers recent aesthetic evaluations of Crypto Art against its sociopolitical, infrastructural, and ecological impact, centering its contested potential for—and negation of—equity.
Where does healing reside in media-making? How do we approach creating artistic processes and tools that move towards minimizing harm, supporting collective care, and understanding what healing means for ourselves and with one another? This course examines socially-engaged artistic processes and frameworks that reconstruct, reclaim, and decolonize ‘healing.’ Together, we will gather embodied data from our bodyminds, build language through readings, and map out artists in the field exploring disability, racial trauma, queerness, and diaspora within media and performing arts. Subsequently, we will develop our own processes as our final project: weaving together storytelling, embodied strategies, tool-making, performances, and/ or space-making.
Computational simulation and videogame engines offer thinkers and makers a new way to reflect on the question “If I can make a world, what would it be like?” In Worldmaking with Unity, students will be exposed to various theories and approaches of worldmaking, and realize their own creative visions by constructing an original, conceptual, and playfully simulated world with indie game development engine Unity. This seven-week seminar/studio course will include a gentle introduction to computer programming, 3D modeling, character and scene design, and rendering techniques with Unity, as well as related production tools such as Blender. Projects may address system, agency, narrative, generative design, critical computing, and more. Student projects created in Unity can be compatible with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). This course is designed as an intro-level game design and development course. There is no prerequisite. More advanced production techniques such as shader language and AI might be introduced as optional topics only. More information at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UppRjSyFlMpGPNLMowqKmP7wwq29s5Oexnpvrj4Gubs/edit?usp=sharing
Cooking programs with an image based language is a fundamental skill in the production and design of modern digital processes. Visual programming is not only an alternative way to code, but a solution to approach generative and interactive media. This class reviews the past, present and future of visual programming languages used to procedurally generate and manipulate media such as Max/MSP(Nato.0 55 3d), Isadora, Quartz composer, Touch designer, Houdini, cables.gl and Unreal Engine among others. The core of this course is the study of Unreal Engine’s Blueprint Visual Scripting system as a way to produce an interactive program in an executable form using only Visual Programing. We will study how to create actors, functions, interfaces and how they communicate with each other. We will also take a look into 2 other visual editors, The material/shader editor for the creation of HLSL like shaders and visuals and the new Metasound editor for the manipulation, generation and sequence of sound within the engine. A general understanding of Unreal Engine is a prerequisite for this class. Students will learn how to use blueprints to produce an interactive program that can be a video game, an installation or a Real Time digital Performance.
This course will use the open source COVID-19 Impact Dashboard as a basis to explore ways to humanize the unfolding data on the coronavirus pandemic. Students are invited to collaborate on the COVID-19 Impact Project. Students will discover how data flows from public github repositories and tools needed to visualize the data. We will review other data-centric open source projects related to COVID-19 and discuss the questions they are trying to answer or problems they are trying to solve. We will examine historical and contemporary data visualizations. Using data visualization as a scaffold, we will explore ways to support community driven mourning and memorialization. Students can choose to participate as javascript coders, p5js explorers, UI/UX designers, citizen journalists, or data science explorers.
This course will explore the history and meaning of the ubiquitous concept of “cursed” media, and provide students with a survey of digital art tools for the creation of their own cursed animation, video, photography, music, and web art. Many people were first introduced to the concept of cursed media when it exploded into mainstream internet discourse in 2016 with the @cursedimages Twitter account, which posted found photos bound by their unsettling effect on the viewer. Cursed media predates this account, however, stretching back to medieval notions of cursed objects. We will demonstrate how throughout time, cursed media has functioned like a slip of the tongue that provides a window into the cultural unconscious, where we encounter uncensored thoughts and feelings about race, gender, class, and what it means to be human. From Amazon Muzak generators to Artbreeder’s GAN tools for image creation, from machine learning text generators to robots who work at Walmart, cursed media and tools for its creation bring into view the ways that that culture reacts to tension between the increasingly precarious position of human beings in the capitalist 21st century and the threat of human erasure by the powerful forces of nature. Students will be introduced to digital art tools for creating music, manipulating photography and video, working with 3d animation, and building web art. Students will attempt to create their own cursed media, and in the process will gain a deeper understanding of the unconscious biases and ethical implications of contemporary digital creation tools.
On October 8th, 2015, a team in Ecuador identified 431 species of birds – the world record for number counted in a single day. Earlier that year in Myanmar, a scientist counted one Jerdon’s babbler, the first in nearly eight decades. In December of 2019, eBird announced that its database held over 737 million bird observations. This morning, in Brooklyn Bridge park, I counted 38 house sparrows, 4 black-and-white warblers and an ovenbird. This course will consider birding as a practice, and will dive deep into the processes by which observations become data. As a collective, we will investigate how crowd-sourced data is transforming ornithology, and will explore ways to tell stories about the natural world through visualization and more radical forms of data representation.
Listening is not something we do through hearing alone. Engaging with multiple perspectives, from Deaf studies and critiques of ableist hearing ideologies, to the possibilities and pitfalls presented through machine listening and imaginative sonic speculation, we will playfully deconstruct and question what it means to listen at all. Each week, readings will be assigned and students are asked to respond to prompts in the form of light-weight exercises that will orient most of our in-class discussion. Time will be spent discussing readings, presenting, and providing critique for each other’s projects in order to help draw connections between theory and practice. Through in-class presentations, we will encounter works by Christine Sun Kim, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros and read from Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Tina Campt, and François Bonnet. The class has no technical prerequisites, and students are welcome to respond with works using tools and techniques from other classes (audio/video presentation, programming and physical computing, installation and fabrication, etc.). Through this work, we will unpack how the way in which we attend to the physical world and its inhabitants through our listening has real consequences. In much the same way our interpretation of the world is informed and influenced by factors outside of ourselves, our capacity to listen is conditioned through societal, political, economic, historical, and racial dimensions. We will disentangle listening from hearing and consider listening as a practice that begins not with how we hear sounds but how it allows us to (or prevents us from) interfacing and relating to our exteriors (and interiors). By the end of the class we will attempt to converge and coalesce our own ideas and perspective of what it means to listen.
This course provides critical and curatorial insight into global art practices and interactive technologies from a post colonial perspective. Designed to provide a critique of imperialism the course is underpinned by ideas pertaining to the rise of the Global South, decoupling, indigenous knowledge and ancient and contemporary innovation through contemporary art, emergent technologies, new media and exhibition practices. Students will also investigate the role of shifting digital landscapes and conservation of new media coupled with museum collecting practices, from both a deconstructive and ethical lens, providing regular opportunities to reflect upon their own respective practices. Presented as a combination of presentations/ critiques, seminars, readings, virtual field trips as well as special guest visits with noted experts, the course presents a compact and timely overview of globalization, and the effects of rapid interactive and technological innovative, in lieu with ideating towards a more equitable and diverse art and technological ecosystem.
The class will focus on the many overlooked aspects of paper, and how it can be used as a three-dimensional material. We will learn the disciplines of making Pop-Ups, Origami, Paper Crafting, and Visual Design. Using these methods as a starting point, students will build prototypes to explore new ways to tell stories, inform, interact, play with, engage, and challenge a younger audience. Most classes are hands – on. The rest, dedicated to criticism (including from children), analysis, and refinement, technical and conceptual. We will discuss how they could be mass produced and distributed. Students will build three prototypes, during the semester. From these, each student will select a favorite to fully develop as the final.
Language is more than just words and meanings: it’s paper and ink, pixels and screens, fingertips on keyboards, voices speaking out loud. Language is, in a word, material. In this course, students will gain an understanding of how the material of language is represented digitally, and learn computational techniques for manipulating this material in order to create speculative technologies that challenge conventional reading and writing practices. Topics include asemic writing, concrete poetry, markup languages, keyboard layouts, interactive and generative typography, printing technologies and bots (alongside other forms of radical publishing). Students will complete a series of weekly readings and production-oriented assignments leading up to a final project. In addition to critique, sessions will feature lectures, class discussions and technical tutorials. Prerequisites: Introduction to Computational Media or equivalent programming experience.