Creative Computing
Category: Foundation
IMNY-UT.101 - 1 pt - 14 weeks
The course begins with Physical Computing, which allows you to break free from both the limitations of mouse, keyboard & monitor interfaces and stationary locations at home or the office. We begin by exploring the expressive capabilities of the human body and how we experience our physical environment. The platform for the class is a microcontroller (Arduino brand), a very small inexpensive single-chip computer that can be embedded anywhere and sense and make things happen in the physical world. The core technical concepts include digital, analog and serial input and output.This course combines two powerful areas of technology that will enable you to leap from being just a user of technology to becoming a creator with it: Physical Computing and Programming.
The second portion of the course focuses on fundamentals of computer programming (variables, conditionals, iteration, functions & objects) as well as more advanced techniques such as data parsing, image processing, networking, computer vision. The Javascript ‘p5’ programming environment is the primary vehicle. P5 is more oriented towards visual displays on desktops, laptops, tablets or smartphones but can also connect back to the physical sensor & actuators from the first part of the class.
The course is designed for computer programming novices but the project-centered pedagogy will allow more experienced programmers the opportunity to go further with their project ideas and collaborate with other students. What can computation add to human communication? You will gain a deeper understanding of the possibilities of computation–– possibilities that will augment and enhance the perspectives, abilities and knowledge you bring from your field of study (e.g. art, design, humanities, sciences, engineering). At first it may feel foreign, as foreign as learning a new language or way of thinking. But soon, once you get some basic skills under your belt, you’ll be able to make projects that reflect your own interests and passions.
Communications Lab
Category: Foundation
IMNY-UT.102 – 4pt – 14 Weeks
An introductory course designed to provide students with hands-on experience using various technologies including time based media, video production, digital imaging, audio, video and animation. The forms and uses of new communications technologies are explored in a laboratory context of experimentation and discussion. The technologies are examined as tools that can be employed in a variety of situations and experiences. Principles of interpersonal communications, media theory, and human factors are introduced. Weekly assignments, team and independent projects, and project reports are required
Quick Introduction to Physical Computing
Category: Foundation
Prerequisite: Prior classwork or experience programming – Must not have or be taking Creative Computing (IMNY-UT 101).
IMNY-UT.103.1 1 point – 4 Weeks
Physical Computing is an approach to learning how humans communicate through computers that starts by considering how humans express themselves physically. In this course, we take the human body as a given, and attempt to design computing applications within the limits of its expression.
To realize this goal, you’ll learn how a computer converts the changes in energy given off by our bodies (in the form of sound, light, motion, and other forms) into changing electronic signals that it can read and interpret. You’ll learn about the sensors that do this, and about simple computers called microcontrollers that read sensors and convert their output into data. In the other direction you will learn how to actual physical things in the world with devices like speakers, lights and motors. Finally, you’ll learn how microcontrollers communicate with other computers.
To learn this, you’ll watch people and build devices. You will spend a lot of time building circuits, soldering, writing programs, building structures to hold sensors and controls, and figuring out how best to make all of these things relate to a person’s body.
Note: This course is for students who have not taken Creative Computing (IMNY-UT 101) but who have prior classwork or experience programming. Taking this course enables the waiving of Creative Computing (IMNY-UT 101) in order to take higher level courses in Physical Computing and Experimental Interfaces which otherwise have Creative Computing (IMNY-UT 101) as a prerequisite.
Design Fundamentals
Category: Art and Design
IMNY-UT.261.001 – 4pt – 14 weeks – Katherine Dillon
This class aims to provide students with the critical thinking and practical skills to explore and communicate ideas visually. This foundational course is a combination of lecture and studio format that will introduce the fundamental principles of design including typography, color, composition, branding and product design, and offer hands-on application of those principles through both in-class exercises and weekly assignments. The course will serve as a solid foundation of skills relevant to pursuing a degree in Interactive Media Arts and expose students to the myriad of opportunities a grounding in design principles opens up for them.
The format is a once per week 3-hour class. The structure of the class time will include the introduction of a topic each week including an in-class exercise, the introduction of a related assignment, followed by in-class presentations/discussion/critique of student work.
Fairy Tales for the 21st Century
Category: Entertainment and Media
IMNY-UT.283 – 2pt – 7 Weeks (second half of semester) – Marianne Petit
Fairy tales, myths, and stories of magic have always served as a way for both children and adults to make sense of the unpredictabilities of the world around them. How do these stories serve us today? How do new technologies allow us to reinterpret them so that they have new meaning for our times? Through readings, weekly exercises, and a final project, students in this course will explore the historic role and structure of fairy tales as well as the potential contemporary frameworks that allow us to entertain the impossible. Students will work with stories of their choosing however we will examine their implementation through traditional material and book art techniques, as well as projection mapping, 3D and VR (using Unreal Engine.)
Internet Famous
Category: Studies/Seminar
4pt – 14 Weeks – Zoe Fraade-Blanar
How does someone become famous on the internet? What does it take to capture our digital attention? While movie stars, rock gods, and other mainstream A-listers struggle to find their place in a sea of emerging technologies and platforms, a new swarm of micro celebrities and influencers has coasted into the cultural space they once filled. Riding a wave of viral content and memes, the newly-famous rule an internet where anyone can have adoring fans… for a price. They are nimble, niche, obnoxious, empowering, and sometimes disturbing.
This class explores what happens when fame is freed from the traditional intermediaries of print, television, and radio, when social media provides everyone with the tools to be their own marketing studio and PR department. It examines the transformation of celebrity, from a 19th century sales gimmick to the formidable cultural, social, and technological force it is today. Students will study a wide array of fame-related topics, from the privacy effects of trolling to the class implications of selfies. And we will engage in practices and exercises that produce real-world instances of celebrity in case we, too, wish to join the ranks of the internet famous.
Introduction to 3D Printing
Category: Physical Computing and Experimental Interfaces
IMNY-UT.244.001 – 2pt – 7 Weeks – Xuedi Chen
3D environments and objects are powerful prototyping tools. This class will introduce the basics of 3D modeling techniques in Rhino and students will learn to create assets for prototyping and 3D printing. The class will take an industrial design approach to design and build with specifications and materials in mind. Students will learn to think, plan, design, and produce well thought out objects to fit their specific needs. (examples: motor mounts, enclosures, wearables etc.)
Introduction to Machine Learning for the Arts
Category: Programming and Data
IMNY-UT.224.001 – 4pt – 14 Weeks – Daniel Shiffman
An introductory course designed to provide students with hands-on experience developing creative coding projects with machine learning. The history, theory, and application of machine learning algorithms and related datasets are explored in a laboratory context of experimentation and discussion. Examples and exercises will be demonstrated in JavaScript using the p5.js, ml5.js, and TensorFlow.js libraries. In addition, students will learn to work with open source pre-trained models in the cloud using Runway. Principles of data collection and ethics are introduced. Weekly assignments, team and independent projects, and project reports are required.
Project Development Studio
IMNY-UT.902 – 2pt – 7 Weeks (full semester – meets every other week) – Luisa Pereira Hors
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 and music, programming and physical computing. 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.
Reading Writing Electronic Text
Category: Programming and Data
IMNY-UT.221 – 4pt – 14 Weeks – Allison Parrish
This course introduces the Python programming language as a tool for reading and writing digital text. This course is specifically geared to serve as a general-purpose introduction to programming in Python, but will be of special interest to students interested in poetics, language, creative writing and text analysis. Weekly programming exercises work toward a midterm project and culminate in a final project. Poetics/text analysis topics covered include: the history of computer-generated writing in arts and literature; plain text transcription and character encodings; ethics and authorship in the context of computer-mediated language; poetic structure and sound symbolism; performance and publishing. Programming topics covered include: data structures (lists, sets, dictionaries); strategies for making code reusable (functions and modules); natural language processing; grammar-based text generation; predictive models of text (Markov chains and recurrent neural networks); and working with structured data and text corpora.
Real-Time Media
Category: Media and Entertainment
IMNY-UT.285 – 4pt – 14 Weeks – Matt Romein
Real-Time Media is a 4 credit class using MaxMSPJitter to survey how real-time and reactive media can be used for art installation and performance. Classes will be a mix of coding labs, surveys and lectures on historical examples of the medium, guest artists talking about their practice, class field trips, and in-class performances and critique. While the primary focus will be on video and sound there will also be attention given to sensors, electronics, web APIs, and more. The class has coding assignments building to solo video and audio performances and final group installation project.
Topics in Design: Information Design
Category: Art and Design
IMNY-UT.271 – 2pt – 7 Weeks – Katherine Dillon
The goal of this course is to develop the skills to translate information from its clinical definition of ‘facts provided’ to being a source of knowledge that is engaging and understandable. We will look at a myriad of historic and modern examples of how design has helped distill raw information into clear, coherent forms. We will study the information display typologies that have evolved and develop the skills and visual vocabulary to make sense of and effectively communicate information. The students will identify an information problem to tackle visually and produce a visual narrative from it.
This seven week course will break down each week as follows:
1: History of information
2: Perception and how we process visual information
3: Information display typologies
4: Data and information narratives
5: Practical applications and identifying information opportunities
6: The relationship between information and visual design
7: Final projects review
Topics in Fabrication: Digital Fabrication
Category: Physical Computing and Experimental Interfaces
IMNY-UT.0251 – 2pt – 7 Weeks – Blair Simmons
Do you want to MAKE THINGS with your computer? Are you an artist, engineer, designer, sculptor or architect? Are you a few of those things? How are 3D scanning and 3D modeling different? What materials should I be using? Should I be 3D printing or CNC-ing this CAD file? What is a boolean operation and why is it my new best friend? This class will answer all of your questions. Don’t know what any of these things are? This class will answer those questions also.
By the end of this course, you will be familiar with all that digital fabrication has to offer. We will cover everything from laser to 3D to CNC. You will learn how to identify which digital fabrication technique works best for your projects. But more than that, you will learn what kinds of questions you should be asking in order to complete a project from start to finish. As technology advances at rapid speeds, digital making machines and software are changing just as fast. So instead of just being taught about the machines of today, you will also be given the tools to teach yourself the machines of tomorrow. Emphasis will be put on learning how to ask the right kind of questions to successfully finish a project.
What do you want to make? Let’s make it.
Topics in Physical Computing and Experimental Interfaces: Physical Computing
Category: Physical Computing and Experimental Interfaces
IMNY-UT.0245 – 4pt – 14 Weeks – Rob Faludi
This course expands the students’ palette for physical interaction design with computational media. We look away from the limitations of the mouse, keyboard and monitor interface of today’s computers, and start instead with the expressive capabilities of the human body. We consider uses of the computer for more than just information retrieval and processing, and at locations other than the home or the office. The platform for the class is a microcontroller, a single-chip computer that can fit in your hand. The core technical concepts include digital, analog and serial input and output. Core interaction design concepts include user observation, affordances, and converting physical action into digital information. Students have weekly lab exercises to build skills with the microcontroller and related tools, and longer assignments in which they apply the principles from weekly labs in creative applications. Both individual work and group work is required.
Topics in Programming and Data: New Realities
Category: Programming and Data
IMNY-UT.0220 – 4pt – 14 Weeks – Nien Lam and Sebastian Buys
While the first augmented reality experiences were achieved over fifty years ago, we’ve only recently carried these experiences in our pockets. From Pokémon GO and Snapchat filters to Google Maps AR and IKEA Place, augmented reality is rapidly changing how we shop, work, and play.
This course will be a hands-on workshop where we create our own mobile AR experiences. Design, UX, and coding concepts will be considered simultaneously throughout the semester. You’ll study emerging best practices while challenging, subverting, and experimenting with new ideas.
For design and development, we will primarily use Apple technologies – ARKit, RealityKit and RealityComposer. Along the way we’ll survey implementations across the landscape, from game engines to wearable hardware like Magic Leap and HoloLens. We’ll also look at Facebook’s Spark AR Studio, Snapchat’s Lens Studio, Adobe Aero, and other ways that major platforms incorporate augmented reality into their products.
Full-time access to an iOS device and a Mac laptop running the latest operating systems are required.
At the end of the class, students will have an augmented reality experience to add to their portfolios and a strong basis for future mobile AR work.
ITP Fall 2020 Courses open to IMA at any level
The following ITP courses have room reserved for IMA students at any level:
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, and image manipulation and have transformed our social worlds and our artistic practice. This course will 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, looking at artists like Stephanie Dinkins, Meredith Lackey, and Mimi Onuoha. Students will be asked to propose several projects as thought experiments, and fully realize one online/digital socially engaged project. We will review and discuss the different definitions of “socially engaged practice”, including discussions about “best practices” to use for working with different communities, and the politics of how we interact socially and how we approach the physical as well as social space around us. We will work on how digital tools have been used in socially engaged art and how they could be used further, and experiment with how online life can functions as a public space, 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 practice operates socially and culturally. We will have some meetings and activities in public spaces, field trips to organizations such as Eyebeam, and practical applications of methodology, as well as two or three guest lecturers.
Faking the News
Lies. Hoaxes. Conspiracies. Rumors. Propaganda. Fake news is an age-old phenomenon—but the internet is making targeted misinformation cheap and scalable. That is affecting politics, public opinion, and the everyday experience of the internet.
In this 6 week class, we will explore the cutting edge of “fake news” by engaging in ethical research and fabrication. Participants will manufacture and observe a controlled “fake news” event. We will experiment with command-line tools for doctoring video, neural nets and deepfakes to fabricate reality, Twitter bots, behavioral psychology, and the dark underbelly of the ad economy.
Citizen Science: Biotechnology
Genspace is collaborating on this course with ITP so that students can learn science literacy through several specialized workshops that will take place Genspace – topics include Biohacking (with an introduction to CRISPR) + Biomaterials. Students will create projects throughout the semester utilizing both Genspace and ITP resources. Additionally, students will learn the basics of biodesign and bioinformatics to help them frame and conceptualize their research and their projects and how best to use these skills ethically and responsibly in aesthetic and scientific ways.
Since 2009 Genspace has operated a community biology laboratory in Brooklyn stemming from the hacking, biohacking, and DIYbio movements. It currently supports citizen science and public access to biology, biotechnology, synthetic biology, genetic engineering, citizen science, open source software, open source hardware.
Time
Time is at once fundamental and mysterious. From the 2000-year-old Antikythera Mechanism to modern cesium-fountain clocks, humans have long sought to understand temporal patterns in nature, and build mechanisms to measure, reflect and predict those patterns. We’re at a unique moment, one in which we’ve developed the ability to perceive relativistic effects on time at the smallest scales, while struggling to think and plan across generations. In this course, we’ll reflect on the deep mysteries of time while also gaining hands-on skills applicable to temporal media and technologies. Topics will range from historical clock and orrery design through modern computer architecture (“A computer is a clock with benefits” writes Paul Ford in Bloomberg’s issue dedicated to code). Practically, we’ll build mechanical and software clocks; experiment with time-series data and time protocols; and survey techniques for digital signal processing and real-time operating systems. Students will execute several short assignments and a final project.
Immersive Listening: Designing Sound for VR
Until recently 3D sound was a novelty reserved for special uses and reaching a limited audience, no medium in popular culture has been as inherently dependent upon spatial audio as virtual reality. The widespread and standardized implementation of surround sound in film brought cinema to a new level of immersion, but is limited to theatrical exhibition and home theater systems. Today a considerable amount of content is consumed on mobile devices and laptops which excludes the cinematic experience of spatial sound. With the current rise of cinematic VR and the blurring line between gaming and experiential VR, spatial audio is no longer just an added bonus, but rather a necessity in designing immersive VR experiences. In this course, we will explore the emerging field of 3D sound design and for both 360 video and game engine-built VR using a digital audio workstation, game engines, and 3D audio plugins.