Afternoon

The Art of Projection Mapping (Topics in ITP) +

Motomichi Nakamura | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2379 | Tues 3:20pm to 5:50pm in 370 Jay Street Room 450 Meetings:7-First Half
2 Point, Afternoon, All, Elective, Fall 2025, Graduate, Tuesday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

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.

Project Development Studio +

Pedro Galvao Cesar de Oliveira | ITPG-GT.2564 | Tues 3:20pm to 5:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 409 Meetings:14
4 Point, Afternoon, All, Elective, Fall 2025, Graduate, Tuesday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

This is an environment for students to work on their existing project ideas that may fall outside the topic areas of existing classes. It is basically like an independent study with more structure and the opportunity for peer learning. This particular studio is appropriate for projects in the area of interactive art, programing, physical computing and digital fabrication. There are required weekly meetings to share project development and exchange critique. Students must devise and then complete their own weekly assignments updating the class wiki regularly. They also must present to the class every few weeks. When topics of general interest emerge, a member of the class or the instructor takes class time to cover them in depth. The rest of the meeting time is spent in breakout sessions with students working individually or in groups of students working on related projects.

Multisensory Storytelling in Virtual Reality and Original Flavor Reality +

Winslow Porter | ITPG-GT.3026 | Thur 3:20pm to 5:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 409 Meetings:14
4 Point, Afternoon, All, Elective, Fall 2025, Graduate, Thursday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

In this course, we will explore how to create immersive narratives that leverage our full suite of senses like touch, taste and smell as well as lesser-known ones like space, time, balance and scale. We will dig into the history of experiential storytelling, starting from immersive theater and Smell-O-vision to cutting-edge haptics and mind-bending illusions of proprioception. To help center this back in practical applications, we will also explore how this evolving art is commonly used in exhibition design, experiential marketing and brick and mortar retail. The class will be a healthy mixture of game theory as well as experienced based learning (meaning there will be field trips and many multisensory VR projects to explore).

We will dig into the process of making the immersive experiences Forager (SXSW, NAB, SIGGRAPH) and Tree VR ( Sundance, Tribeca, WEF, TED), looking at both the project files as well as all of the work that went into ideation and pre-production. All of this will culminate with a show to exhibit all of your final projects.

A basic knowledge of Unreal Engine is extremely advantageous because it is our primary tool for both creating and experiencing projects during the class semester.

New Interfaces for Musical Expression +

David Rios | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2227 | Mon 3:20pm to 5:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407 Meetings:14
4 Point, Afternoon, All, Elective, Fall 2025, Graduate, Monday, physical, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

In this course students create digital musical instruments and do a live performance using them. Over the semester, we look at examples of current work by creators of musical interfaces, and discuss a wide range of issues facing technology-enabled performance – such as novice versus virtuoso performers, discrete versus continuous data control, and the relationship between musical performance and visual display. Readings and case studies provide background for class discussions on the theory and practice of designing controllers for musical performance. Students design and prototype a musical instrument – a complete system encompassing musical controller, algorithm for mapping input to sound, and the sound output itself. A technical framework for prototyping performance controllers is made available. Students focus on musical composition and improvisation techniques as they prepare their prototypes for live performance. The class culminates in a musical performance where students (or invited musicians) will demonstrate their instruments. Prerequisites: ITPG-GT.2233 (Introduction to Computational Media) and ITPG-GT.2301 (Physical Computing)

Prerequisite: ICM / ICM: Media (ITPG-GT 2233 / ITPG-GT 2048) & Intro to Phys. Comp. (ITPG-GT 2301)

Synthetic Identity: Building Expressible Individuality Across Mediums (Topics in ITP) +

Scarlet Dame | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2379 | Thur 3:20pm to 5:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 411 Meetings:7-Second Half
2 Point, Afternoon, All, Elective, Fall 2025, Graduate, New, No Tags, Thursday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

I hope to teach a class about synthetic identity and how the architecture, operation, and misuse of technical, social, and political systems has shaped the narratives that we use to tell the stories of who we are and what we’re meant to do. Different technologies present different perceivable surface areas of our identity and distort our presentations in way both harmful and liberating. Can we trace the ways the uniqueness of the individual leaks past the boundaries of different mediums, say handwriting, print, email, SMS, voice, video chat, and virtual reality? Can we explore generative AI not as a stepping stone to general intelligence, but as a already extant synthetic identity – full of perspective, narrative, voice, tone, history, context, presentation, etc. Can we construct a general model for the properties of synthetic identity? Can we use this to create identities that are stored within different physical and digital mediums and that are able to generate and express themselves? Can we encode and represent parts of ourselves, our environments, and the changes we wish to see in the world and place them in direct relationship with others?

Critical Objects +

Pedro Galvao Cesar de Oliveira | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2496 | Thur 3:20pm to 5:50pm in 370 Jay Street Room 450 Meetings:14
4 Point, Afternoon, All, applications, art,, body, computing, concept, crafting, critical, criticalthinking, design, development, Elective, engineering, ethics, Fall 2025, Graduate, hard, interesting, maker, No Tags, objects, pcomp, physical, physicalcomputing, politics, problemsolving, raspberrypi, social, technology, thinkoutsidethebox, Thursday, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

Art, design and experimental electronics can be great tools for inciting discussions of complex issues such as privacy, sexism, racism, economic inequality and climate change. This course aims to provoke thoughtful discussions of pressing issues through the combination of Art, Industrial Design and Embedded Electronics (sensors, actuators, Wi-Fi enabled microcontrollers – ESP32, raspberry pis). Topics will include technological disobedience, adversarial design and critical engineering.

In this 14-week class, students will combine technology, design, and critical theory to build Art Objects / Interactive Sculptures that are aesthetically intriguing while socially relevant.

This is a production heavy four-credit course, where students will learn about new-media critical theory, design and electronics. Prerequisites include an open mind, the drive to make, and physical computing.

Creative Image Generation (Topics in ITP) +

Yuguang Zhang | Syllabus | ITPG-GT.2378 | Fri 3:20pm to 5:50pm in 370 Jay St, Room 407 Meetings:14
4 Point, Afternoon, All, Elective, Fall 2025, Friday, Graduate, Yes
Last updated: March 24, 2025

Recent years have seen unprecedented advancements in text-to-image / text-to-video AI models, sparking widespread attention, discussion, and mainstream adoption of these innovative co-creative tools. This has led to a mix of reactions, ranging from excitement and curiosity to concern, anger, and even offense. Alongside this, the growth of open-source models is democratizing access to these AI tools, extending their use beyond experts, tech giants, and professional technologists.

In this 14-week course, we will go over the landscape of text-to-image / text-to-video AIs and dive deep into some of the most well known ones (such as Stable Diffusion, Flux, CogVideoX, Hunyuan, etc.), 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 comprised of three modules: Text-to-Image AIs and Tools, Model Customization, and Text-to-Video AIs. In each module, there will be a hybrid of practice + technique sessions that focus on different topics such as building good prompting practices, image synthesizing, using Python to train models for customized visuals, building workflows with ComfyUI, and creating 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.