Immersive Web +

Staff | Syllabus | IMALR-UT.XXXX | TBD Meetings:
Last updated: November 5, 2024

In Immersive Web, students break out beyond the confines of static 2D web pages and explore the affordances created by 3D. This course hopes to introduce new avenues for creative expression and experimentation via the web and promote practical web development skills through experiential learning. Students use libraries such as Three.js, A-Frame, Theatre.js, GSAP, Lenis, and more to create dynamic and immersive web-based experiences that push the boundaries of what is possible online. While there are no course prerequisites for this course, students are expected to have some familiarity with web development principles and technologies, specifically HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Data Storytelling for Memory Making and Social Resilience (Topics in ITP) +

John Henry Thompson | Shindy Johnson | ITPG-GT.2379 | Mon 3:20pm to 5:50pm in Meetings:7-Second Half
Last updated: October 11, 2024

This course will use the open source The COVID-19 Impact Project as an entry point to explore humanizing data on systemic inequity and injustice on a global and local scale.

In this course we will:

● Explore and invent creative uses of data for advocacy and change.
● Discover how data flows from public github repositories and tools needed to visualize the data.
● Review other data-centric open source projects for the public good and discuss the questions they are trying to answer or problems they are trying to solve.
● Examine and draw inspiration from historical and contemporary data visualizations developed by advocates for social justice and the public good.
● Use data visualization as a scaffold to explore ways to support community driven mourning and memorialization after mass death events.

Students can choose to participate as creatives, artists, javascript coders, p5js explorers, UI/UX designers, citizen journalists, data science explorers or social justice advocates.

Course Outline
● Open Source Projects for the Public Good
● Data: Sourcing, Humanizing and Creating Visual Narratives from Data
● Storytelling with and from Data
● Data storytelling as a scaffold to support grief, ritual and memorialization after mass death events

** Students wishing to pursue their final projects beyond the class will be provided with information about resources at NYU for supporting student projects that amplify underrepresented narratives.

** Students wishing to continue their participation in The COVID-19 Impact Project after the course ends should notify us as we are seeking grant funding to implement viable concepts.

Designing the Absurd +

Pedro Galvao Cesar de Oliveira | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2052 | Thur 3:20pm to 5:50pm in Meetings:14
Last updated: March 7, 2024

Inspired by the Japanese art of Chindōgu, this class will introduce a playful and whimsical approach to learn industrial design.

In this 14-week studio format class, students will develop gadgets, inventions, and electronic devices that present absurd solutions to problems, while learning concepts and techniques of design ideation, prototyping, model making, CMF (color, material, and finishes), and manufacturing.

This is a production heavy four-credit course, where students will learn about industrial design and tangible interactions.

Prerequisite: Intro to Phys. Comp. (ITPG-GT 2301)

BioDesigning the Future of Food +

Nikita Huggins | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3030 | Fri 3:20pm to 5:50pm in Meetings:14
Last updated: March 7, 2024

For centuries, food production practices such as permaculture fostered ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient, while producing nutrient-dense food. Modern farming has introduced harmful monoculture practices proven to cause collateral destruction of biodiversity and seasonal harvesting, distancing us from our food ecosystems. The future of food can be regenerative or continue to contribute to massive health and environmental issues. How can we challenge ourselves to regain connection to our food system? How might we use innovation, personal prowess, design, and biotechnology to reimagine healthier ecosystems? This course examines the historical context of the food ecosystems and encourages students to identify with these systems that we (in urban settings) are disconnected with. Students will build a project around exploring innovative approaches to the future of food and our relationships with it. These projects will incorporate design, technology, science, and research elements.

Topics in ITP: Innovation at Speed +

Melissa Jackson-Parsey | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2379 | Mon 6:00pm to 8:30pm in Meetings:7-Second Half
Last updated: March 7, 2024

How do you get more teens to participate in sport? Ensure that generative AI tools don’t perpetuate bias? Or make the process of renting a car suck less? These are some the big, broad questions you’ll tackle as part of this course. 

The format: Each week you’ll be tasked with a new, real-world challenge to address as part of a team. To help you, subject-matter experts in research, strategy and design will share valuable, relevant knowledge and frameworks for you to pressure-test. Your team will be expected to use these frameworks to break-down the problem, ideate quickly and present-back solutions. The form and shape of these solutions is for you to define. The only limitation is time. 

The goal is to help you hone your skills through rapid, practical application, while also exposing you to new methodologies and expertise that can elevate your craft. Innovation is a practice, not just a process, and at the end of 7 weeks we hope you’ll be more confident approaching ambiguous questions and working with others to shape new, unexpected solutions. 

We can’t predict the future, but we know the questions we’ll need to collectively solve will only become bigger, and more urgent. This is a bootcamp for everyone and anyone who’s up for taking them on.

Topics in ITP: Music Design and Discovery +

Elliot Cole | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2379 | Mon 12:10pm to 2:40pm in Meetings:7-Second Half
Last updated: March 7, 2024

Students will gain competency in the music production and performance software Ableton Live through a series of creative exercises. These exercises are heuristics in the sense that they’re designed to help students find well-formed musical solutions quickly and improvisationally, without presupposing a background in musical theory or performance.

I’ll introduce these technical topics alongside their artistic applications: audio editing (collage), midi (rhythm/melody/harmony), synthesis and effects (sound design), randomness (generative systems design), recording, and interfacing with external sensors, controllers and data (instrument design).

Weekly assignments will solidify skills explored in class.

Topics in ITP: Outside The Box: Site-Specific + Immersive Explorations +

Mia Rovegno | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2379 | Mon 6:00pm to 8:30pm in Meetings:7-First Half
Last updated: March 7, 2024

This course introduces students to modalities for creating site-specific and immersive art and performance. Assignments will examine the work of artists who challenge the limitations of the physical, psychological and transactional spaces that have come to define conventional production models. Students will regularly receive prompts from which collaborative work will be workshopped, generated and presented. The sites and practices explored will de-center script/text as spine, institutional space as gathering place, linear storytelling as narrative, and separation between audience and artist as social contract. Through group performance projects and presentations, students will investigate how Site evokes Narrative and Event differently in brick & mortar, virtual, historic, liminal, dead, found, contested, democratized and community spaces. Our work will unpack the challenges and opportunities presented when we relinquish creative control of such unfixed elements as serendipity, impermanence, improvisation, audience agency, public space, weather, and pandemic.

Topics in ITP: The Art of Projection Mapping +

Motomichi Nakamura | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2379 | Tues 3:20pm to 5:50pm in Meetings:7-First Half
Last updated: March 7, 2024

The course aims to teach the technical and artistic aspects of
Projection Mapping, enabling the creation of immersive and
experiential art installations. The focus extends beyond acquiring the
necessary technical skills for producing Projection Mapping works; it
also emphasizes the effective use of the medium to bring concepts to
life. Encompassing various types of projection mapping, such as
outdoor mobile projection, interactive wall, and holographic
projection, the curriculum encourages students to experiment with the
medium as much as possible. The goal is to produce work that
authentically represents each artist and achieves a harmonious balance
between art and the technologies they employ.

Topics in ITP: Real World Client Centered Design Studio +

Phil Caridi | Noah Pivnick | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2378 | Fri 12:10pm to 2:40pm in Meetings:14
Last updated: March 7, 2024

At its most wondrous, ITP is a lavish imaginarium rich with abundant opportunity for individual creative expression. But outside the walls of 370 Jay, reality awaits. Post graduation most creative engagements will be work for hire compounded by the unique wants, needs, and desires of multiple parties, not least of which: the client.

This is a production-focused class predicated on satisfying a brief from a real-world client. The brief will likely come with its own set of specific, prescriptive requirements. As a collective, we will be tasked with the design and fabrication of an experiential interactive the scale and depth of which warrants a life of its own beyond the confines of ITP. Together, we will engage in a semester-long exercise in project planning, resource allocation, project management, and client relations born of concrete expectations and deliverables. We’re putting the Professional back into Master of Professional Studies.

This class is open to 2nd year graduate students only. To be considered you must submit an application. Students will interview and submit a portfolio for review. Ideal candidates are multidisciplinary; the sum of their contribution to the class will be a function of more than one kind of work. Resource scheduling and allocation are a significant part of this exercise, ensuring the load is distributed equitably across all class members. We’re targeting 2nd year students and running the class in the fall so as to give students an opportunity to develop skills and practices that hold them in good stead once thesis transitions to production in the spring.

Experiments on the Embodied Web +

Lisa M Jamhoury | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3013 | Sat 11:40am to 6:10pm in > Sun 12:10pm to 6:10pm in Meetings:S-Special
Last updated: March 7, 2024

Today’s internet, made up of mostly text documents and two-dimensional images and videos, is the result of historical limitations in bandwidth, graphics processing and input devices. These limitations have made the internet a place where the mind goes, but the body cannot follow. Recent advances in motion capture devices, graphics processing, machine learning, bandwidth and browsers, however, are paving the way for the body to find its place online. Experiments on the Embodied Web will explore the new realm of embodied interactions in the browser across networks. The course will include discussion of influential works in the development of online embodied interaction, including the works of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Susan Kozel, and Laurie Anderson. Together we’ll explore pose detection across webRTC peer connections in p5.js and Three.js. Experience with Node, HTML and JavaScript is helpful but not required. ICM level programming experience is required.

Prerequisite: ICM / ICM: Media (ITPG-GT 2233 / ITPG-GT 2048)

Programming from A to Z +

This course is a survey of programming strategies and techniques for the procedural analysis and generation of text-based data. Topics include analyzing text based on its statistical properties, automated text production using probabilistic methods, and text visualization. Students will learn server-side and client-side JavaScript programming and build single-page web applications as well as bots for social media networks. Additionally, this course will also include examples on how to interface with the latest open-source and commercial machine learning models for text and image generation. The writing of this course description may or may not have been assisted by one of these so-called “AI” models The course will include weekly homework coding exercises and an open-ended final project.

Programming with Data +

Allison Parrish | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3049 | Mon 6:00pm to 8:30pm in Meetings:14
Last updated: March 7, 2024

Data is the means by which we turn experience into something that can be published, compared, and analyzed. Data can facilitate the production of new knowledge about the world—but it can also be used as a method of control and exploitation. As such, the ability to understand and work with data is indispensable both for those who want to uncover truth, and those who want to hold power to account. This intensive course serves as an introduction to essential computational tools and techniques for working with data. The course is designed for artists, designers, and researchers in the humanities who have no previous programming experience. Covered topics include: the Python programming language, Jupyter Notebook, data formats, regular expressions, Pandas, web scraping, relational database concepts, simple data visualization and data-driven text generation. Weekly technical tutorials and short readings culminate in a self-directed final project.

Prerequisite: ICM / ICM: Media (ITPG-GT 2233 / ITPG-GT 2048)

Text-to-Image AIs +

Yuguang Zhang | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.3020 | Fri 3:20pm to 5:50pm in Meetings:14
Last updated: March 7, 2024

Over the past few years, the unprecedented advancement in text-to-image artificial intelligence models has sparked widespread attention, discussion, and mainstream adoption of these innovative co-creative interfaces, which has resulted in novelty, excitement, and curiosity, as well as concern, anger, and insult. Alongside this, the booming open-sourced text-to-image model development contributes to expanding access to working with AI tools beyond experts, tech giants, and professional technologists.

In this 14-week course, we will go over the landscape of text-to-image AIs and dive deep into some of the most well known ones (such as Stable Diffusion and its variants), to see what potential they have in terms of exploring new modes of content creation and helping us re-examine our language pattern. This will be a practice + technique course – in the first half, we’ll focus on building good prompting practices, and in the second half, we’ll explore different image synthesis skills related to text-to-image AIs, use Python to train our own models to create customized visuals, and create animations from text. We’ll also discuss how such tools could intervene in the workflows of artists and technologists, what they can provide for researchers, and what are the caveats and things we should look out for when we’re creating with these AIs.

Pre-requisites: Introduction to Computational Media (ICM) or the equivalent.

Prerequisite: ICM / ICM: Media (ITPG-GT 2233 / ITPG-GT 2048)

Masquerade +

Ziv Schneider | ITPG-GT.2044 | Sat 12:10pm to 6:25pm in > Sun 12:10pm to 6:25pm in Meetings:S-Special
Last updated: March 7, 2024

Masks have been used around the world since antiquity for ceremonial and practical purposes, as devices for protection, disguise, entertainment and bodily transformation, made to be worn or displayed. Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about the everyday life as a masked theatrical performance. The performative aspect of our lives today is ever so present in our use of social media, where we present a curated version ourselves for the immediate visual consumption of others. In our `Selfies`, we can assume a multitude of identities and characters. Recent tools and platforms have evolved social media portraiture to an art form and have created new opportunities for artists to create and distribute interactive augmentations, forming new relationships between artists and viewers. This class explores the developing language of social media portraiture enhanced by Augmented Reality. Students will: – review masks in art history, leading up to today – ideate, design and develop an interactive mask (AKA effects/lenses/filters) – learn to use the Meta Spark software to create AR effects.

This course requires CL: Hypercinema or equivalent experience.