Projection Mapping (Topics in Media Art)

CHIKA | Syllabus | IMNY-UT 260 | Tues 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 410 Meetings:14
Last updated: July 3, 2025
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We, humans, have been fascinated by beautiful light for centuries. How can we transform light into Art and Technology? Are we able to discover and express ourselves through the process of making? 

“Projection Mapping 101” is a unique hands-on class building skills to create a projection mapping project and learn the evolution of Light Art and Technology. 

The students will identify their concepts and audience engagement through project exercises: Origami Mapping, Graffiti Mapping, International Projection Mapping Contest, etc. We will discuss a conceptual process, creating a prototype to complete their project. The goal is to develop students’ unique voices through this artistic process. They are encouraged to expand a larger project and incorporate new techniques they learn from other classes.

Immersive Experiences

Thomas Martinez | Syllabus | IMNY-UT 282 | Fri 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 409 Meetings:14
Prerequisites: Creative Computing or permission of the instructor |
Last updated: July 3, 2025
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This course is designed to provide students with hands-on experience creating immersive experiences, with a focus on designing artistic, meaningful worlds for virtual reality headsets. The class will also touch on related technologies, methods, and fields including experience design, virtual painting, augmented reality, interactive installation, and 360 video/audio. The course materials will also include readings and discussions on prior art/relevant critical texts. This class uses VR as a lens for understanding experience design in general. Some basic familiarity with programming, image-making, and time-based media is a plus, but not required.

Communications Lab: Hypercinema or equivalent experience.

The Code of Music

Luisa Pereira | Syllabus | IMNY-UT 222 | Mon 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 409 Meetings:14
Last updated: July 3, 2025
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In this course, students learn how to create musical systems –pieces that incorporate randomness, interact with their listeners, or evolve over time, in the browser.

We will start by creating audiovisual instruments and sample-based interactive songs, as students review their p5.js skills and are introduced to the Tone.js music library. Then, we will turn to a structured exploration of the elements of music, focusing on rhythm, melody, timbre, and harmony. For each, we will hold listening sessions, represent and manipulate the element in code, and interact with it via a range of existing interfaces. Students will explore the possibilities that computation and interactivity open up by designing and implementing a series of interactive studies.

The last few weeks of the semester will be dedicated to introducing algorithmic composition techniques such as Markov Chains and Neural Networks. During this time, students will also develop their final project: an interactive/generative musical piece that builds on their previous classwork.

Throughout the course, students are encouraged to bring in their musical tastes and interests into the classroom. This class is a good fit for students who are interested in:
– Creating interactive music pieces and digital instruments.
– Deepening their understanding of how music works. All musically-curious students are welcome: previous experience with music and audio will be useful, but is not required.
– Continuing to develop coding skills. Creative Coding or equivalent programming experience is required.

About Luisa Hors: www.luisapereira.net/

Prerequisite: Creative Computing (IMNY-UT 101)

Networked Media

Sam Heckle | Syllabus | IMNY-UT 223 | Tues 12:20pm to 1:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 412> Thur 12:20pm to 1:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 412 Meetings:14
Last updated: July 3, 2025
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The network is a fundamental medium for interactivity. It makes possible our interaction with machines, data, and, most importantly, other people. Though the base interaction it supports is simple, a client sends a request to a server, which replies; an incredible variety of systems can be and have been built on top of it. An equally impressive body of media theory has also arisen around its use.

This hybrid theory and technology course will be 50% project driven technical work and 50% theory and discussion. The technical work will utilize JavaScript as both a client and server side programming language to build creative systems on the web. Technical topics will include server and client web frameworks, such as Express, HTML, CSS, templating, and databases. The theory portion of the course will include reading and discussion of past and current media theory texts that relate to the networks of today.

**** it is HIGHLY recommended you take Front End Web Development (or have equivalent front end web development experience) to get the most out of this course. We will be going over fundamentals of HTML/CSS but it would be useful to have prior knowledge ***

Prerequisite: Creative Computing or equivalent programming experience.

Useless Machines

Blair Simmons | Syllabus | IMNY-UT 272 | Mon 12:20pm to 1:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 410> Wed 12:20pm to 1:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 410 Meetings:14
Last updated: July 3, 2025
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Useless Machines is about redefining “usefulness.” Through making, we will explore what it means, on an ideological, political and historical level, to create something ‘useful’ or ‘useless.’ We will play with these definitions and explore how these objects serve to be humorous, critical, disruptive and at times… useful. We will study ‘useless’ machines throughout history, which will provoke conversations and disagreements around the implications of existing and emerging technologies. The students will design ‘useless’ machines for their final project.  Examples of ‘useless’ machines are drawn from Kenji Kawakami’s The Big Bento Box of Unuseless Japanese Inventions, Dunne & Raby’s Speculative Everything, Stephanie Dinkins’ Conversations with Bina 48, esoteric.codes/, CW&T, Mimi Ọnụọha’s  Missing Data, Jacques Carelman’s Catalog of Impossible Objects, viral videos/objects and much more.

Communications and Technology

Shawn Van Every | IMNY-UT 273 | Tues 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407 Meetings:14
Last updated: July 3, 2025
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From alphabets to virtual realities, this course will explore the development, reaction, and long term impact of various communication technologies. How have these technologies, such as writing, printing, the telegraph, television, radio, the internet and beyond, transformed society? And what changes can be observed both today and tomorrow? After students look closely at past and current inventions, students will speculate on the future of communication in a connected world by proposing their own transformative technology. Readings and discussion will cover communication theory, technical processes, creative applications, and critical investigation. Writing assignments will be paired with practical assignments where students will be challenged to bring their analysis and ideas to life. The web will also be utilized as a test bed for experiencing and experimenting with various forms of communication both old and new.

This course will be part seminar and part studio. In the seminar portion of the class, time will be spent engaging in short lectures, critical discussions, and reviews of both reading and writing assignments. In the studio portions, students will participate in hands-on creative and technical activities, share and evaluate project ideas, and present practical assignment work. Throughout the class, students will be encouraged to learn through play, experimentation, collaboration, and exploration. Both individual and group work will be assigned.

Anatomy of Truth (Topics in Design)

Yuliya Parshina-Kottas | IMNY-UT 271 | Fri 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:7-First Half
Last updated: July 3, 2025
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This course will explore current and historical misinformation, disinformation and propaganda campaigns in the global media landscape through the lens of visual information design. Students will identify misleading and malignant visual content in online and broadcast media and analyze it using a design framework grounded in information design principles, visual storytelling concepts, user research practices and journalistic ethics. Working in groups, students will apply the same design framework to create a media literacy campaign addressing a specific misinformation, disinformation or propaganda trend.

Content Strategy (Topics in Media Art)

Art Kleiner | Syllabus | IMNY-UT 260 | Thur 12:20pm to 3:20pm in 370 Jay St, Room 408 Meetings:14
Last updated: July 3, 2025
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This is a course about how to develop an idea and bring it to the world, using a variety of digital media. Students will create 3-4 pieces of work that relate to each other and form a portfolio of content — communicating effectively with real audiences using real media platforms. The curriculum covers content strategy, basic narrative, and translating that narrative into multimedia. We’ll look at successful (and unsuccessful) examples of content strategy, often based on headlines of the day or deeper themes, and show how to emulate the best of it.  By and large we will be working with digital formats with which students are already familiar, but this class should help bring their skills to another level of impact. We’ll work in teams, starting with students’ own ideas. Students will craft a portfolio of complementary short pieces, some in text and some in multimedia, that can build awareness. We will also cover how to judge effectiveness and impact.