classes

Animals, People and Those In Between

H79.2746.1

Tues 3:30pm to 6:00pm

Marina Zurkow

This class uses animals, humans, and other creatures as a way to think about character representation. Claude Levi-Strauss’ observation that “Animals are Good to Think” is the starting point from which we make, discuss, and examine the ways in which art works imagine the interrelationships between the human, the animal, and our environment. If we can only perceive these things through mediation (media representations), then how we represent them is the fundamental question, reflecting our ideologies, prejudices, hopes, and fears. Do we speak for animals, and if so what are we saying for them? Are they friends, pets, environmental equals or beasts? How are hybrid monsters (chimera) created and what do they mean? How do we understand our places as subjects in a landscape or a datascape? How can anthropomorphic cuteness be subversive? This class focuses on questions of intention, relation, and subjectivity, through critical engagement with representations of people, animals, monsters, and mutants, in their respective environments. The class is further focused on the use of character in context, via toy design, robotics, animation, video, image generation or data visualization. There are introductory texts on character development, and generally an emphasis on literary, philosophical and natural history texts, including Jorge Luis Borges, John Berger, Giorgio Agamben, Donna Haraway, Rebecca Solnit, Steve Baker, Deleuze & Guattari. Assignments include studio work and readings. There is more emphasis on the development and analysis of ideas, and less emphasis on particular media or forms. Students make several short projects, backed up by readings and research into precedent art works. There is a final project. Class is a combination of studio critique, responses to art works, reading and discussion. Syllabus

Design Expo

H79.2274.1

Tues 3:30pm to 6:00pm

Nancy Hechinger

Students address a design challenge that is presented at the start of the term. Over the course of the semester, students work in small teams to prototype and develop ideas in response to the challenge; classes take the form of critique sessions of these ideas and their presentation. This year's theme is still being finalized and it is likely that several other universities from various countries will also be participating in the Microsoft Design Expo. It is planned that one of the project teams from each university will be invited to present their work to the research and design groups at Microsoft in Redmond, WA over the summer. Syllabus

Design Frontiers in Biology and Materiality

H79.2816.1

Mon 2:30pm to 5:25pm

Amanda Parkes

Biological organisms and systems are essentially living machines. Digital technologies allow us to create a control structure with computational predictability and precision. What happens, however, when designers begin to incorporate the self-determined internal control structure of a biological system as part of a design strategy? This course offers a new approach to materiality, positing that all matter is dynamic but exists within a continuum of control ranging from passively temporal (wood, water) to electronically active (photovoltaics, thermochromics) to biologically alive (plants, tissue). This course presents alternative design strategies for creating computational interfacing with living matter and state change of natural materials. Students are introduced to the world of the bio lab from a designer’s perspective, both conceptually and practically. We examine the state-of-the-art in artistic experimentation with biological systems such as the genetic manipulation projects of Eduardo Kac, or the carbon nanotubes grown into architectural structures of Ryan Wartena. We also examine more DIY approaches to living systems integration and interactivity with biological systems. Students use a hands-on approach in their design process, with biological sensing as input and indicators or material state change as an alternative method of information display, for example. This course is designed to further our computational relationship with the natural world pushing forward ideas in sustainability, interactivity, energy production and the emerging relationship between the designer/artist and the bio lab, approaching biology as an open frontier for digital design.

Hospitable Room: Designing a Hospital Pediatric Recreation Room

H79.2820.1

Tues 12:30pm to 3:00pm

Marianne Petit / Daniel O'Sullivan

Children in rehabilitation treatment often stay in the hospital for months at a time. We have the opportunity to create a room that will make that stay more fun and entertaining for them. This course will work in collaboration with the NYU Langone Medical Center: The Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine Pediatric Department. We have outfitted the pediatric recreation room with a video tracking, projection and transmission system through which ITP students participating in this class will build projects that examine how these environmental technologies can improve one's quality of stay in hospital. The technical exercises in the class will be around lighting, camera and coding tricks for video tracking and augmented reality as well as audio and video transmission over IP. Physical computing techniques will also be supported as projects require them. In addition, the class will cover issues of designing for the range of physical and cognitive function of children who will use this space. How can this system be used therapeutically? recreationally? how can it be used to decrease isolation? or foster collaboration? keep them smiling? Students in this class will meet with recreational and occupational therapists, the hospital's Therapeutic Recreation, Child Life & Creative Arts Therapies Department, as well as patients, to determine needs and usage. Final projects to deploy into the facility will be selected by faculty and hospital staff.

Methods of Motion

H79.2448.1

Thur 12:30pm to 3:00pm

Marianne Petit

This class explores methods of storytelling through animation. We examine a range of techniques including pixillation, stop motion, collage, abstract and cartoon animation. We apply a variety of tools such as iStopMotion, After Effects, and Flash. There are five animation short animation assignments and one final project. Students are encouraged to experiment. Drawing skills are not necessary though students are required to maintain a weekly sketchbook. A basic knowledge of digital video is a plus. Syllabus

The Softness of Things: Technology in Space and Form

H79.2578.1

Thur 3:30pm to 6:00pm

Despina Papadopoulos

Jasper Johns once wrote in his notebook: "Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it." In this class we investigate what it means to "do things" to objects in ways that transforms them and our relationship to them. We experiment with materials and objects, stretching their limits and exploring their relationship to space and the body. These investigations are grounded in an understanding of the interactional possibilities of gestures, social and spatial dynamics, networks and open source systems while we develop a new set of artifacts and construction techniques. Softness, modularity, adaptability and re-configurability, washability, power management, connectors and ways to engage the senses (and sensors) are just some of the ideas and topics we examine through weekly assignments and social experiments. Syllabus

Time

H79.2826.1

Wed 6:30pm to 9:00pm

Che-Wei Wang

The ways we keep time are the ways we are kept. One might argue that humans ideated timekeeping and now we take it for granted. Without clocks we can't enjoy the benefits of social synchronicity. But with them, we are unwillingly constrained to arbitrary increments that guide our countless decisions. This class uses technology as a way to rethink and recapture the ways we keep time. Over the first half of the semester, we prototype a series of time keeping devices around a set of themes. Blindness, bio-mechanics, materials, space+location, isolation, synchronicity, and collaborative time. Each class begins with the delivery of tools to help construct various types of timepieces along with reviews and discussions. Video, software, motors + mechanisms, electronic signaling and communication tools are covered each week in relation to how they can be used to re-imagine time-keeping. Classes later in the semester are tailored to provide technical and conceptual support for final projects.

When Strangers Meet

H79.2762.1

Tues 3:30pm to 6:00pm

Kio Stark

Even the simplest exchange among strangers can contain a tangled accumulation of meanings: what transpires may have physical, emotional, social, political, technological and historical dimensions. This class takes an analytical approach to unraveling and understanding these charged moments. In the process of the studying how and why strangers interact in public, we address some of the abiding themes at ITP—urban behavior, spontaneous interaction, the pleasure of the unexpected, how technology can mediate and/or enable human experience—and we make a close and thorough examination of how they play out in this narrow slice of human experience. This approach is designed to bring students to a more concrete understanding of these larger abstract ideas. Classwork consists of readings, class discussions, field assignments (a series of assigned interactions with strangers that the students will document and discuss) and an analytical final paper. Students learn how the interactions of strangers have changed historically (and why), what the experience of interaction with strangers means to the participants, how strangers 'read' each other, how they initiate interactions, how they avoid interactions, how they trust each other and how they fool each other. Readings range from seminal works on urban sociology and public behavior (Georg Simmel, Stanley Milgram, Erving Goffman, Jane Jacobs, William H. Whyte, Elijah Anderson) to more lyrical examinations of strangers in cities (Tim Etchells, Italo Calvino, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Edgar Allan Poe) to recent neuropsychiatric discoveries about trust, mimicry, and flash judgments. Because stranger interactions are at heart a means to interrupt the expected narrative of the everyday, we consider the works of artists and thinkers who show how such disruption, surprise, spontaneity, and play are fundamental to the pleasure and substance of urban life, for example: the Situationists and their descendents, Sophie Calle, Marina Abramovic, Francis Alys, Graffiti Research Lab, Robert Rauschenberg, Survival Research Labs. We also explore recent art/technology projects that specifically engage strangers, such as Familiar Strangers, the Listening Station, PostSecret, Oddible, Loca: Set to Discoverable, Following/the Man in the Crowd, Mobile Feelings, and others. Syllabus