2 Point

Today, digital technology seems to always reify political and financial power structures—but that’s not how it has to be. This course explores works (“art” and “not art”) that employ digital technology to enact ideological or political protest and disturb the status quo. From DDoS attacks, to data poisoning, DIY servers, radical archiving, today’s Luddite movement, protest machines, and much more: code in this class both disturbs and, as a medium with imperialist roots, is disturbed. We borrow the word “disturb” from the Electronic Disturbance Theater to describe political action that takes unexpected forms, causes discomfort, and endures. Students gain a robust theoretical framework via lecture and 5-10 pages of reading per week. As a final project, students come together as a group (with the option of anonymity) and mobilize their wide range of expertise to produce and inventively distribute a digital-political education resource on a topic of their choosing.

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.

Your web browser is a digital canvas for 21st-century artists. While being one of the most common mediums today, web space has infinite possibilities for new aesthetics. This course covers Three.js fundamentals, providing students with the skills and insights to create arts in web 3D.

This course requires ICM or equivalent coding experience.

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

On Becoming is a two-part professional development course. Finding Your Artist Voice (part one) filters your fears and apprehensions so you can declare your creative process and practice courageously. The seven-week system will help you proclaim your artistic identity, theoretical underpinnings, and trajectory with clarity, precision, and commanding written language. Students will build personalized masterplans and workflows to facilitate measurable professional growth while learning to catalog and archive their work. Students will develop a working artist biography, artist statement, and fully documented work samples. For the final project, students will be supported in selecting and submitting a post-graduate fellowship, residency, grant, or open call!

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.

How can motion capture (MoCap) be used to archive, preserve, and share intangible heritage forms, such as performing arts, rituals, and other social practices and traditions? This course approaches motion capture through the lens of ethnography — drawing on techniques of observation, participation, and qualitative design research. This class will offer an overview of different motion capture technologies, such as 2D-3D pose estimation and depth mapping, with a practical focus on learning the OptiTrack system at ITP. We will start by covering the basics of OptiTrack and build up to other workflows and techniques used across animation, game design, and virtual production (e.g. OptiTrack to Unreal Engine or Unity).

Prerequisite: CL: Hypercinema (ITPG-GT 2004)

What is the medium of memory? In this 14-week studio class, we will dig into this question through creative storytelling. Starting from a lens-based practice, this class will introduce traditional and bleeding-edge documentary methods to inform our own varied approaches to activating archival material. Through weekly “readings” (articles, podcasts, films), written reflections, and creative assignments, we’ll explore:

• how technology has impacted our relationship to memory;
• how visual interventions can can surface alternative narratives;
• how to make under- and unrecorded histories visible, and call into question the power dynamics embedded in “official” records; and
• how we might recast objects and sites of memory-keeping, like heirlooms, journals, and memorials, as a mode of engaged preservation.

Mid-way through the course, students will identify either personal or collective histories to open up to their own individual creative reexamination, memorialization, or transformation––each producing a final project with the technology and approaches of their choosing that serves to answer the question we started with––what is the medium of memory?

Our users have senses that they use to perceive information in different ways. Some perceive best through sight, some through hearing, others through touch. Designers often prioritize visual information, excluding those who benefit from other sensory modalities. In this class, we’ll take a multisensory approach to design that makes interfaces more accessible to disabled and nondisabled users. Students will learn how to design for the senses (think tactile controls combined with atmospheric sounds and olfactory or taste experiences), while gaining an understanding of the assumptions we make about our users’ sensory preferences. Students should come with prior experience with physical computing and fabrication techniques and can expect to learn technical processes for the user research, usability testing, and iterative design of multisensory interfaces. Over the course of 14 weeks, students will design an interface for the 5 senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell), culminating in one final project that includes at least 3 sensory modalities.

This intensive 7-week workshop introduces ITP students to biofabrication through syringe-based and embedded (FRESH) fabrication techniques for working with soft matter. Students will convert off-the-shelf 3D printers into direct-write systems and learn repeatable protocols to formulate, tune, and test a wide range of soft materials, including hydrogels (alginate, gelatin, agar), rheology-modified support baths, silicone and elastomeric systems, and composite soft materials. Through hands-on experimentation, students calibrate material behavior such as flow, shape retention, flexibility, and durability, enabling structures not achievable with FFF/FDM or resin printing. Applications may include soft interfaces, squishy buttons and sensors, skin-contact components, edible and food-safe gels, soft robotics elements, and sculptural or installation-scale forms. Conducted in a workshop environment (no living cells), the course emphasizes material literacy, open-source workflows, and exploratory making for interaction, fabrication, and research-driven practices at ITP.

This 2-pt course aims to provide students with the critical thinking and practical skills for creating effective and compelling interfaces. We will dissect what a compelling user experience is, apply proven research techniques for approaching and defining UX problems and apply design frameworks including mapping and testing techniques. The class format will include lectures, discussion, in-class design exercises and a final project. 

Week 1: what is UX
Week 2: inclusive research methods
Week 3: frameworks for defining a problem
Week 4: understanding behavior and motivation
Week 5: mapping flow and visual strategies, final project intro 
Week 6: testing methods and future UX
Week 7: final projects