CSCI E-9 Computational Art:
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Welcome! Class meets Mondays AND Thursdays, 7:35-9:35pm, 53 Church Street, Room 202.
Questions? Please contact the people listed under Course Staff on the syllabus. COURSE DESCRIPTION This course is a practical introduction to computational art in a collaborative studio environment. Through creation, exhibition, and critique of a series of screen-based and physical computing artworks, students learn the three key elements of computational artwork: awareness (input or sensing); intention (processing or computation), and action (output or display). INTRODUCTION Art with technology, aesthetics and computation, technology with art, art and technology studies, interactive art, physical computing, telepresence, net art... all these words and more have been thrown at the problem of defining what we mean when we talk about making art with contemporary technology. Part of the problem here is exactly what makes this field so exciting as an artist or an observer - despite many efforts to the contrary, no one yet owns this field. The history has not been written, and attempts to codify a language are premature. We chose "computational art" as the title of this class, not to establish a new paradigm but in an effort to describe something more specific about the work we are looking at and engaging in. While the meaning of "art" will remain a topic of discussion (in this class and hopefully in our lives), it is worth creating a working definition of computation, if for no other reason than to establish an understanding of computation as something other than "computer." A computer is a box on your desk, a physical object that is a manifestation of one (important and major) attempt to give humans faster and easier access to computational ideas. While we will use and discuss computer technology in this class, we are decidedly not interested in the computer as an object. Rather, we are interested in the ideas that the computer gives us access to: recursion, visualization, data manipulation to name a few. The question will not be what can I make the computer do, but rather what are computational ideas doing to my concepts of space, information and communication? How does access to this kind of processing allow me to embody (or disembody) ideas? In particular we would like to focus on three concepts that have strong meanings in both the traditional art and computational fields: AWARENESS: INPUT OR SENSING INTENTION: PROCESSING OR COMPUTATION ACTION: OUTPUT OR DISPLAY |