Monday and Wednesday 1:00-2:40pm
In Computational Art Practices: Physical Computing Machines students will be invited to iterate, test, hack, build, and experiment with a myriad of art+technology-based skill sets. We will learn to work with a collection of digital and analog tools across software and hardware applications for prototyping. The course has been designed to provide students with some core foundations of new media programming tools, basic principles of physical computing, and mechanical tinkering for practitioners. We will take a critical examination of a breadth of creative practitioners from around the world, discussing the many moods, emotional modifications and fantastical iterations they have brought to fruition. The course will examine the rich catalog across new media and televisual mediations from Nam June Paik to Behnaz Farahi and across the expressive mechanical objects from Rebecca Horn to Arthur Ganson. Our series of programmed outputs will serve to interrogate the discipline's well documented histories of fusing together politics and economics—propaganda and pop culture—global geographies and their associated cultural values. Simultaneously, we will be assisted in situating our productions within semiotics, technology, biomimicry, and architecture using a combination of textual analysis and video screenings. We will actively engage, be critical in our participation and create a space for creative enjoyment.
