Month: October 2024

 Living Archives: Finding Stories of Peoples, Plants and Places (Topics in Media Art)

Tanika Williams | IMNY-UT.260 | Fri 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 409 Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, In-Person, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Can a plant tell the story of your people and the planet?

This course aims to facilitate student relationships to the planet through the construction of personalized genealogies from family narratives, historical migrations, and plant relationships. Plants, like people, are intelligent life forms that hold memory and transmit knowledge. Students will study edible medicinal plants (herbs) to unlock their expertise on the past, present and future of the planet and its peoples. Participants will learn how to grow medicinal plants, employ ethical research practices, and develop their family archives.

Students will begin by examining various ways plants establish communities across the planet and studying the complex chemical and social lives of plants. Next, learners will parallel postcolonial theories of plants and peoples to connect the ways plants, like humans, seeded themselves across the globe for survival. Finally, students will incorporate primary sources from the family narrative, oral history, and government archives to help students visualize botanical imprints on their ethnic, racial, and national identities.

Learners will survey the research of botanists, horticulturalists, folk medicine practitioners, and urban gardeners. The works of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Fred Moten will provide the course’s literary foundation. The art practices of Fred Wilson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Alison Janae Hamilton, and Deb Willis will create avenues for social art exploration. Importantly, students will read research from a cross section of postcolonial theorists challenging Western cartography and naming conventions of land.

About Tanika Williams: www.tanikawilliams.net

 Politics of Code (Topics in Media Art)

Joerg Blumtritt | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | Mon 09:00am to 12:00pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Current description based on NYUAD iteration of the course (https://github.com/jbenno/nyuad_politics_of_code). Please be advised this is in the process of being-updated by the instructor.

Deconstructing the design and implementation of software as a political medium and re-building functional alternatives.

Code is political. It is a means of political processes and activism. It is political inherently by the ethical choices often hidden in the black box of The Algorithm. In the course we aim to deconstruct the design, implementation, and data of software as a political medium. We will work through political applications such as simulations, ownership of intangible assets, predictive policing, algorithmic recommendations, suggestions, and filters, social networks, and the blockchain.

Along with an introduction to the related political theory and media studies, students will work on several hands-on projects to offer actual or speculative alternatives to the existing systems. To that end, this course will include several workshops in JavaScript, Python, and other tools.

Topics in Media Art: Living Archives: Finding Stories of Peoples, Plants and Places

Tanika Williams | IMNY-UT.260 | Fri 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 409 Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, In-Person, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Can a plant tell the story of your people and the planet?

This course aims to facilitate student relationships to the planet through the construction of personalized genealogies from family narratives, historical migrations, and plant relationships. Plants, like people, are intelligent life forms that hold memory and transmit knowledge. Students will study edible medicinal plants (herbs) to unlock their expertise on the past, present and future of the planet and its peoples. Participants will learn how to grow medicinal plants, employ ethical research practices, and develop their family archives.

Students will begin by examining various ways plants establish communities across the planet and studying the complex chemical and social lives of plants. Next, learners will parallel postcolonial theories of plants and peoples to connect the ways plants, like humans, seeded themselves across the globe for survival. Finally, students will incorporate primary sources from the family narrative, oral history, and government archives to help students visualize botanical imprints on their ethnic, racial, and national identities.

Learners will survey the research of botanists, horticulturalists, folk medicine practitioners, and urban gardeners. The works of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Fred Moten will provide the course’s literary foundation. The art practices of Fred Wilson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Alison Janae Hamilton, and Deb Willis will create avenues for social art exploration. Importantly, students will read research from a cross section of postcolonial theorists challenging Western cartography and naming conventions of land.

About Tanika Williams: www.tanikawilliams.net

Topics in Media Art: Politics of Code

Joerg Blumtritt | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | Mon 09:00am to 12:00pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Current description based on NYUAD iteration of the course (https://github.com/jbenno/nyuad_politics_of_code). Please be advised this is in the process of being-updated by the instructor.

Deconstructing the design and implementation of software as a political medium and re-building functional alternatives.

Code is political. It is a means of political processes and activism. It is political inherently by the ethical choices often hidden in the black box of The Algorithm. In the course we aim to deconstruct the design, implementation, and data of software as a political medium. We will work through political applications such as simulations, ownership of intangible assets, predictive policing, algorithmic recommendations, suggestions, and filters, social networks, and the blockchain.

Along with an introduction to the related political theory and media studies, students will work on several hands-on projects to offer actual or speculative alternatives to the existing systems. To that end, this course will include several workshops in JavaScript, Python, and other tools.

Topics in Media Art: After Creative Coding

MK Skitka | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.281 | Mon 7:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay Street Room 450> Wed 7:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay Street Room 450 Meetings:
2 Point, Computation and Data (Old Structure), Elective, Fall 2024, New, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

This seven-week course challenges students to extend their knowledge of creative computing into the exciting realm of embodied interfaces. Building upon the fundamentals taught in Creative Computing, this course will explore the design and implementation of interactive systems that integrate the body as a controller of technology.

Going beyond the limitations of traditional mouse, keyboard, and screen interactions, we will investigate how movement, gesture, and physical interaction can be used to create engaging and meaningful user experiences. Through a combination of lectures and hands-on workshops, students will gain a deeper understanding of:

Sensor Technologies and Physical Computing: Working with sensors (e.g., accelerometers, gyroscopes) to capture and interpret human movement and environmental data.

Movement Analysis and Interpretation: Techniques for analyzing movement patterns, extracting meaningful features, and mapping them to computational processes.

Performance and Embodiment in Technology: Investigating how technology can facilitate new forms of expression and performance.

The course will culminate in one proof of concept project utilizing one of the techniques explored in class.

Prerequisites: Completion of Creative Computing or equivalent experience with Arduino and Javascript p5.

Topics in Media Art: Big Ideas in the History and Future of Technology

Theodora Rivendale | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | Tues 7:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay St, Room 413> Thur 7:00pm to 8:30pm in 370 Jay St, Room 413 Meetings:
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, New, No Tags, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
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This class will provide students with a critical perspective on contemporary issues in media technologies and discuss the history, controversies, consequences, and ethical questions in emerging media. The first half of the class charts a history of media technologies from the 1940s to the present, focusing on the idealogical and social conditions that led to the creation of the technologies that exist now. The second half examines possible futures, and the tools we can use to predict (and build) those futures.

Instructor Website: http://alden.website

Topics in Media Art: Digital Bodies

Snow Fu | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | Thur 2:00pm to 5:45pm in No Room Required Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Digital Bodies is an intermediate 3D imaging studio course that examines and explores the current technological applications and conceptual implications of post-photographic digital human simulations. We will regularly study the work that deals with digital bodies by contemporary artists and photographers such as LaTurbo Avedon, Chen Man, Quentin Deronzier, Hyphen-lab, Hayoun Kwon, and Gregory Bennett, and many digital art platforms in various categories, such as artificial human imaging, digital fashion models, and deepfake. We will be discussing the various theories relating to the idea of cyborgs and post-human conditions. Students will be learning 3D imaging skills for building, scanning, appropriating, and customizing prefabricated body models from multiple resources, exploring their movements that both imitate and go beyond the limits of reality and expanding conceptual themes. Besides the technical exercises, students are encouraged to create semester-long self-directed research and a final project using the imaging technology they’ve learned. Artist visits, field trips, and exhibition visits will also be arranged online or according to the public health safety situation. The exhibition of the student’s final projects will be arranged at the end of the semester. *The class is suitable for students with basic skills of 3D imaging in Maya.

Topics in Media Art: Electronics for Inventors

Pedro Galvao Cesar de Oliveira | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | Tues 3:40pm to 6:40pm in 370 Jay Street, Room 426 Meetings:
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, New, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Today we are no longer solely connected to the digital world through computers. The result of this push to connect the digital and the analog world is the increasing necessity for low cost, low power, and self-contained electronics.

This undergraduate course is an applications-driven introduction to electronics for inventors. Through a hands-on approach, students will learn basic concepts about analog circuits, digital devices interfaces, and low-cost code-free electronics.

Topics will include basic principles of electricity, as well as an understanding of electronics components such as resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, audio amplifiers, and timers.

Prerequisites
Prerequisites include an open mind, interest for electronics, the drive to make, and Physical Computing.

Topics in Media Art: Real-Time Social Spaces

Aidan Nelson | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | Wed 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay Street Room 450 Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Over the past 18 months, we have seen many aspects of our lives thrust online.  Increasingly, we are working, learning, socializing with family and friends, attending live performances and more through 2D grids of video feeds on platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet. These communication tools have become essential for remote communities to connect, yet fail to replicate many of the most engaging, messy and human aspects of our in-person experience. What happens when we break out of this grid and explore new forms of real-time social interactions online using webcam video and audio?  

Some recent explorations in this realm (including gather.town, topia.io and ITP/IMA’s own YORB.itp.io) have shown the promise of spatial metaphors in creating engaging real-time social interactions online. In this course, students will create their own series of experimental social spaces that explore these questions: how does the shape and nature of our environment affect the way we communicate?  What unique forms of real-time expression and sharing might be possible online (and only online)? How might we design experiences for the unique social dynamics we want to support?

Students will be exposed to principles of spatial design as well as a series of open source Javascript tools for arranging live webcam video and audio in the browser.  They will use p5.js and p5LiveMedia to create a series of playful and experimental video chat applications in 2D and 3D environments.

Topics in Media Art: Video Art

Motomichi Nakamura | IMNY-UT.260 | Thur 3:40pm to 6:40pm in 370 Jay St, Room 412 Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Video art is a time based media art form which emerged during the late 1960’s as video cameras and recorders became available to the general public.

Video art is a time based media art form which emerged during the late
1960’s as video cameras and recorders became available to the general
public. In this class we will look at both the history of video art as
well as new ways of implementing video and time based media
installation today. The course will cover topics of projection,
augmented reality, video sculpture, public art and interactive
installation through a series of lectures and workshops. How do we
create video artworks that are emotionally engaging with the audience
while they truly represent who you are as an artist? What is a
harmonious balance between art and the technologies we use? Through a
series of weekly experiments and assignments, students will work with
projection, video mapping and combine with various media to hack time
based media into meaningful works of art. Class will be divided
between lectures, guest speakers and critical discussion/presentation
of work.

Topics in Physical Computing: DIY Energy

Jeffrey Feddersen | IMNY-UT.240 | Tues 10:40am to 12:10pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407> Thur 10:40am to 12:10pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407 Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Physical Computing (New Structure), Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Energy is in everything, from the most ephemeral thought, to the rise and fall of civilizations and the evolution of the universe. Energy is the “universal currency” (Vaclav Smil) but also “a very subtle concept… very, very difficult to get right” (physicist Richard Feynman). It is precisely this combination of significance and subtlety that motivates the Energy class.

Understanding energy is useful, important, and fun. This class will help you see energy quantitatively and intuitively, and use that knowledge to make art, get your projects working better, and interpret the world around you.

How? Building on skills introduced in Creative Computing, we will generate and measure electricity hands-on in order to see and feel energy in its various forms. We will turn kinetic and solar energy into electrical energy, store that in batteries and capacitors, and use it to power projects. We will develop knowledge useful in a variety of areas, from citizen-science to off-grid installations, and address topics such as climate change and infrastructure access through the lens of energy. Students will build a final project using skills learned in the class.
Prerequisites: Creative Computing

Topics in Physical Computing: Large Scale Kinetic Installation

Phil Caridi | IMNY-UT.240 | Mon 12:20pm to 1:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 409> Wed 12:20pm to 1:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 409 Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Have you ever wanted to make something bigger than a tabletop? Do you like art that physically moves? Well if you answered yes to those questions then this is the class for you. Working in large site-specific formats is always an enticing proposition, this course is designed to bring students through the process of scaling a concept into a large-scale kinetic installation. Working individually at first and then moving into group work this class also teaches how to collaborate, communicate, and compromise to reach a common goal. Students will engage in a hands-on approach to designing, budgeting, and building an installation.

Prerequisites: Intro to Fab or Intro to DigiFab

Topics in Media Art: Comics

Tracy White | IMNY-UT.281 | Tues 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 410 Meetings:7-First Half
2 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, In-Person, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Open to anyone who wants to create comics regardless of drawing experience. Drawing experience UNNECESSARY! In this course students will learn the building blocks of comics – the myriad ways to pair words and images, panels, borders and color – by doing weekly assignments, in class drawing exercises and studying specific graphic novels, comics books and digital/interactive comics.

The last two weeks of class will be devoted to a specific project that can be combined with work in another class. Comics are a powerful medium to tell personal stories, narrative medicine stories, as a tool for advocacy, and for producing a riveting tale of your choosing. We will discuss how comics can be used for entertainment as well as a tool for change. Mostly we will MAKE COMICS.

Please bring:

A notebook of your choosing to class.
A uni ball black pen, fine tip.

Topics in Media Art: Interactive Multi-Screen Experiences

John Henry Thompson | IMNY-UT.281 | Thur 09:00am to 12:00pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:
2 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

We experience screens daily in many forms: in our hands, on our desktops, on walls and public installations as we travel. This course will explore the creative possibilities of real-time interactive and reactive art on screens in various forms. Using the recently developed p5VideoKit we will create standalone installations. p5VideoKit is a new library of live video effects – building on p5js – presented as a dashboard for mixing video in the browser. This library allows the user to apply visual effects to live video from connected cameras and sensors or streaming from devices on the internet. p5VideoKit is open source and can be extended with the user’s p5js code for a plethora of visual effects and interactivity. One possible application of p5Videokit would be a public facing installation allowing anonymous people on the street to use their hand held devices to interact with large street facing screens, thereby collaborating on real time creation of “digital graffiti”.

Building on ICM, students will learn how to adapt simple sketches into components of p5VideoKit so that algorithms can be quickly composited and orchestrated into more complex works. Students will also learn how to edit and share code beyond the p5js editor, use nodejs/javascript to automate deployment of installations, and remotely configure dedicated computers with long running installations. Several dedicated computers and screens will be available to preview installations on the floor and street facing areas of the 370 Jay Street campus.

Prerequisites: ICM or equivalent coding experience.

About John Henry Thompson: http://johnhenrythompson.com

Topics in Media Art: Alter Egos

Ali Santana | IMNY-UT.260 | Tues 09:00am to 12:00pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, In-Person, Media Arts (New Structure), Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Alter Egos is a course that embraces abstract storytelling, improvisation, resourcefulness, ritual, performance and self-expression through art and technology. Students will develop original characters based on a series of stream of conscious exercises around identity. They will explore various creative techniques, including costuming, sound design, and multimedia collage while experimenting with unique methods of self expression via audio/visual performance. 

Students will assemble recycled materials, field recordings, emerging tech and textiles into costumes, props and digital worlds that embody their invented personas. This course will culminate as a live event showcasing audiovisual performances by participants in costume as their Alter Egos.

Class discussions will examine notions of identity, technology, community, health, privacy and encourage participants to venture outside of their comfort zone to radically imagine new approaches to creative expression.

Prerequisites: Communications Lab: Hypercinema
Instructor Website: http://www.alisantana.com

Topics in Media Art: Computational Image Deconstruction

Alan Winslow | IMNY-UT.260 | Thur 5:20pm to 8:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407 Meetings:7-Second Half
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

This class explores how as creatives, we can take the wealth of data that each still image contains and re-purpose it. In the first few weeks of the course, students will develop an understanding of technical and creative photographic techniques through lectures, hands-on assignments, and critiques. As the class progresses, students will develop a series on a particular topic of interest (portraits, architecture, street photography). Using p5js we will explore simple scripts to extract information or manipulate the images (what are the most represented colors in the photos? What are the RGB values that make up the image? Can we add movement to the picture?). At the end of the course, students will present their series.

Prerequisite: Creative Computing
About Alan Winslow: www.alanwinslow.com

Topics in Media Art: Design Skills for Responsible Media

Art Kleiner | Juliette Powell | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | Tues 12:20pm to 1:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407> Thur 12:20pm to 1:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407 Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Generative AI and other digital media affect people in unexpected
ways. This is a course in the skills of responsible design and development of all forms of
media covered by IMA and ITP. We will look critically at the belief systems that affect
design, and will build skills for assessing the unexpected implications and consequences
of any new digital project, including generative AI projects. Together, we will create
personal and group processes to bring these issues safely to the surface, and create
standards and guardrails (a “calculus of intentional risk”) that you can apply to your own
work and to work you do in the future.
This course is structured around three comprehensive group assignments:
1. Group project: Produce a case study of an ethical dilemma in a real-world tech
company, based on news reports and other sources. How did this dilemma come
about? How did the company respond? What could they have done differently?
We will discuss these cases, and others, in class.
2. Group or solo project: Produce work in any format [not too elaborate] that brings
an ethical issue to light.
3. Solo project: Propose a design practicum – a set of ethical standard – that would
help you evaluate the impact of one or more pieces of your own work (or
someone else’s you know well). Use this “calculus of intentional risk” to explore
how you would change the design and use of these projects.
The class lectures will cover themes related to these three assignments, drawing on the
instructors’ extensive research in the fields of organizational and technological ethics and
responsibility. The recently published book, The AI Dilemma: The 7 Principles of
Responsible Technology, will be one resource for the class. We will also draw on work
on responsible technology going on elsewhere throughout NYU.

Topics in Media Art: IRL/URL Performing Hybrid Systems

Tiri Kananuruk | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | Wed 1:30pm to 4:30pm in Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

This course is a unique collaboration between the Collaborative Arts and IMA Tisch departments, and CultureHub based at La Mama. During the pandemic many performing artists moved their work online, leading to an increasing acceptance of experimental practices that their predecessors developed in on-line work for the past 30 years. In Experiments in Hybrid (IRL/URL) Performance, students will have the opportunity to design, prototype, and present collaborative projects that build on this tradition, blending both physical and virtual elements. Over the course of the semester, students will have the opportunity to study at the CultureHub studio where they will be introduced to video, lighting, sound, and cueing systems. In addition, students will learn creative coding fundamentals allowing them to network multiple softwares and devices generating real-time feedback systems. The class will culminate with a final showing that will be presented online and broadcast from the CultureHub studio.

Modeled as an accelerated intensive on methods of collaboration, students will work together in groups of 4 to produce new performance work to be presented to an invited in person and online audience. Participation in class discussions and in-class movement workshops are mandatory, and always based on each student’s physical ability. All body types and abilities are welcome and needed for this course to be successful.

Topics in Media Art: Stories of Illness: Graphic and Narrative Medicine

Daniel Ryan Johnston | IMNY-UT.260 | Thur 3:40pm to 6:40pm in 370 Jay Street, Room 316C Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Narrative holds a central role in the discourse of health, illness, caregiving, and disability. It also holds an increasingly growing role in clinical practice, research, and health education. This course examines its role in both Graphic Medicine and Narrative Medicine. Students will interrogate health culture through readings, observational exercises, and weekly creative practice. Additionally, students will create a final project, in any medium, communicating stories about health, medicine, and the experience of illness.

Topics in Media Art: Open Call

Blair Simmons | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | Mon 10:40am to 12:10pm in > Wed 10:40am to 12:10pm in Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

This class is for students interested in making, displaying and installing art for interactive media art exhibitions. This class will prepare you to apply for and develop work for open calls and everything else that happens after you are selected. The class will have an opportunity to exhibit a group show in a real NYC gallery towards the end of the semester. The students will collaborate to title, describe and document the works in the show. They will also have an opportunity to do a public talk back about their work, organize a reception and add a piece to their portfolio.

Topics in Media Art: Living Archives: Finding Stories of Peoples, Plants and Places

Tanika Williams | IMNY-UT.260 | Fri 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 409 Meetings:14
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, In-Person, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Can a plant tell the story of your people and the planet?

This course aims to facilitate student relationships to the planet through the construction of personalized genealogies from family narratives, historical migrations, and plant relationships. Plants, like people, are intelligent life forms that hold memory and transmit knowledge. Students will study edible medicinal plants (herbs) to unlock their expertise on the past, present and future of the planet and its peoples. Participants will learn how to grow medicinal plants, employ ethical research practices, and develop their family archives.

Students will begin by examining various ways plants establish communities across the planet and studying the complex chemical and social lives of plants. Next, learners will parallel postcolonial theories of plants and peoples to connect the ways plants, like humans, seeded themselves across the globe for survival. Finally, students will incorporate primary sources from the family narrative, oral history, and government archives to help students visualize botanical imprints on their ethnic, racial, and national identities.

Learners will survey the research of botanists, horticulturalists, folk medicine practitioners, and urban gardeners. The works of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Fred Moten will provide the course’s literary foundation. The art practices of Fred Wilson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Alison Janae Hamilton, and Deb Willis will create avenues for social art exploration. Importantly, students will read research from a cross section of postcolonial theorists challenging Western cartography and naming conventions of land.

About Tanika Williams: www.tanikawilliams.net

Topics in Media Art: Politics of Code

Joerg Blumtritt | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | Mon 09:00am to 12:00pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 11, 2024
Show Course Description

Current description based on NYUAD iteration of the course (https://github.com/jbenno/nyuad_politics_of_code). Please be advised this is in the process of being-updated by the instructor.

Deconstructing the design and implementation of software as a political medium and re-building functional alternatives.

Code is political. It is a means of political processes and activism. It is political inherently by the ethical choices often hidden in the black box of The Algorithm. In the course we aim to deconstruct the design, implementation, and data of software as a political medium. We will work through political applications such as simulations, ownership of intangible assets, predictive policing, algorithmic recommendations, suggestions, and filters, social networks, and the blockchain.

Along with an introduction to the related political theory and media studies, students will work on several hands-on projects to offer actual or speculative alternatives to the existing systems. To that end, this course will include several workshops in JavaScript, Python, and other tools.

Screen Experiences (Topics in Media Art: Interactive Multi)

John Henry Thompson | IMNY-UT.281 | TBD Meetings:
2 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 10, 2024
Show Course Description

We experience screens daily in many forms: in our hands, on our desktops, on walls and public installations as we travel. This course will explore the creative possibilities of real-time interactive and reactive art on screens in various forms. Using the recently developed p5VideoKit we will create standalone installations. p5VideoKit is a new library of live video effects – building on p5js – presented as a dashboard for mixing video in the browser. This library allows the user to apply visual effects to live video from connected cameras and sensors or streaming from devices on the internet. p5VideoKit is open source and can be extended with the user’s p5js code for a plethora of visual effects and interactivity. One possible application of p5Videokit would be a public facing installation allowing anonymous people on the street to use their hand held devices to interact with large street facing screens, thereby collaborating on real time creation of “digital graffiti”.

Building on ICM, students will learn how to adapt simple sketches into components of p5VideoKit so that algorithms can be quickly composited and orchestrated into more complex works. Students will also learn how to edit and share code beyond the p5js editor, use nodejs/javascript to automate deployment of installations, and remotely configure dedicated computers with long running installations. Several dedicated computers and screens will be available to preview installations on the floor and street facing areas of the 370 Jay Street campus.

Prerequisites: ICM or equivalent coding experience.

About John Henry Thompson: http://johnhenrythompson.com

 Politics of Code (Topics in Media Art)

Joerg Blumtritt | Syllabus | IMNY-UT.260 | TBD Meetings:
4 Point, Elective, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
Last updated: October 10, 2024
Show Course Description

Current description based on NYUAD iteration of the course (https://github.com/jbenno/nyuad_politics_of_code). Please be advised this is in the process of being-updated by the instructor.

Deconstructing the design and implementation of software as a political medium and re-building functional alternatives.

Code is political. It is a means of political processes and activism. It is political inherently by the ethical choices often hidden in the black box of The Algorithm. In the course we aim to deconstruct the design, implementation, and data of software as a political medium. We will work through political applications such as simulations, ownership of intangible assets, predictive policing, algorithmic recommendations, suggestions, and filters, social networks, and the blockchain.

Along with an introduction to the related political theory and media studies, students will work on several hands-on projects to offer actual or speculative alternatives to the existing systems. To that end, this course will include several workshops in JavaScript, Python, and other tools.