This class asks students to think about thinking. Based on first person introspection, meditation and readings in psychology, students will examine the experience of their minds. Then we look at how computation, in particular recent developments in AI, can better work as a medium to capture and share that experience. Class time is evenly divided between conceptual discussions around the psychology of media, looking at student work, and then learning coding skills for the following week. The early course materials direct students towards developing and implementing multi-user web apps to improve our society\u2019s social media ecosystem but final projects often take different directions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the technical side, the class gently picks up from any introductory javascript coding class.\u00a0 Compared to Creative Computing it moves away from the p5.js in favor of vanilla javascript in an environment like Visual Studio Code assisted by AI.\u00a0 The class encourages students to find a healthy balance of using \u201cvibe coding\u201d while maintaining the ability to specify overall architecture and debug individual lines of code. In particular the technologies covered are Replicate.com\u2019s API\u2019s for Machine Learning Models for generation and relation of text and images, Firebase tools for server based databases, realtime sharing, storage and authentication. Libraries like UMAP for dimension reductions, Three.js for realtime rendering, P5LiveMedia for Audio and Video sharing, and Colab for running python notebooks.<\/p>\n
Each week students will post a quick sketch experimenting with the technology as well a short written response to a prompt based on a short reading or video.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"