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    BioDesigning the Future of Food

    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.


    Designing the Absurd

    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)


    Performing Online

    This course explores the ways that we perform on and for the Internet. We’ll take a look at how artists have used social media, live-streaming, and multi-user online spaces as a site for performance. Students will conduct their own interventions with the web as a virtual stage.

    Note: Performance is a broad and amorphous term! You are encouraged to take this course even if you do not consider yourself a performer or someone who wants to be in front of a camera.


    Multisensory Storytelling in Virtual Reality and Original Flavor Reality

    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.


    Socially Engaged Art and Digital Practice

    Digital tools of all kinds are deeply embedded in how our society operates. Innovations in basic communication, data processing, image manipulation, and even financial systems have transformed our social worlds and our artistic practice. This became even clearer and more present during the global pandemic, where, during times of social isolation, digital and networked tools almost fully replaced in-person social life.

    This course will examine the ethical and esthetic implications of a digital and networked world through the lens of socially engaged art and explore how digital tools are and can be used in socially engaged art practice, where art and creative work intersect directly with people and civic life. This includes discussion of how digital and networked tools both increase and complicate physical, economic, and cultural accessibility, and the ethical and social implications of the newest technologies, including AI, Web3, and quantum computing.

    We will work on how digital tools have been used in socially engaged art and how they could be used further, guided by the understanding that working digitally with socially engaged concepts means both using digital tools within projects AND interrogating the inner workings of how digital practices operate socially and culturally. We will also have some meetings and activities in public spaces, field trips to organizations such as Eyebeam and Genspace, and guest lecturers.

    Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you have questions about taking the course, or the course content.


    Text-to-Image AIs

    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)


    Topics in ITP: The Art of Projection Mapping

    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.