CTC runs all the courses required to complete the Concentration. Additionally, CTC runs a number of elective courses that change every year. All CTC run courses provide CTC credit. Additionally, many courses throughout the school can also be taken for CTC credit. These can viewed here: Courses for CTC Credit
CTC Concentration is a required, advanced course for all CTC Concentrators taken after a student has earned 12 CTC credits. In this course, students develop and complete a large-scale project that draws from the students' prior studies in the CTC Concentration. Students write source code, author software, and program hardware for making their own works of art and design. Complementing this work, students engage in critical discourse surrounding computation, technology, and culture through dialogue and writing. Coding as a technology with implications for making and authorship is explored through a pedagogy of code sharing and collaborative learning. Differences in programming cultures across languages and disciplines is one of the motive forces in this course. Throughout the semester, seminar discussions are organized and around canonical computational texts and the course's parallel lecture series.
The BioInteractive Surfaces studio will examine the applications of programmable living cells technology and biosensing. Students will design interactive surfaces to facilitate communication between humans and their surroundings for a healthier and sustainable future. Experimenting with various material systems to host biochemical interactions, such as microfluidics, biomaterials, and fabrics, students will develop interactive surfaces ranging from responsive textiles to urban displays. This course is part of the Hyundai Collaborative research initiative Adaptive Ecologies, exploring new relationships between advanced technologies, public environments, and personal experiences. This course is supported by Co-Works Research Lab and students will have access to equipment and space under social distancing guidelines.
Permission of Instructor required.
Open to juniors and above.
Also offered as DM-2044; Register in the course for which credit is desired.
This course explores the relationships between new media languages and physical space.
Building from the history and aesthetics of installation art and relational theater, and based on conceptualizations such as “Relational Architecture” by Lozano Hemmer and the “Poetics of Augmented Space” by Lev Manovich, we will learn to leverage interactive and audiovisual elements in order to enhance and re-contextualize spatial experiences that are media-rich, relational, and responsive.
We will use softwares, video-projectors, micro-controllers, sensors and VR equipment to investigate various interactive techniques including video-mapping, video-audio design, surround sound systems and computer vision. We will learn to deploy not only vision, but also hearing, olfaction, and touch to create true immersive and multi-sensorial environments.
The class comprises of lectures, hands-on workshops and individual projects. The students will gain a deep understanding of topics of spatial thinking and user-generated experiences related to space, as well as a theoretical and critical understanding of the history of installation and interactive art.
Also offered as DM-1536; Register in the course for which credit is desired.
Throughout time artists have operated in the realm of healer/shaman, magician/mystic, and fool while teasing between technologies and offering visions into the unseen. In this course we will create performance works utilizing audio, digital video, and/or installation to spark the spiritual mind. Students will develop a comprehension of the term 'technoetics', and discuss readings from Erik Davis' book TechGnosis. The semester will consist of a series of meditations, short projects and performance exercises, culminating into one final work. We'll review works by Roy Ascott, Tabita Rezaire, La Pocha Nostra, Laurie Anderson, Meriem Bennani, Juliana Huxtable, Frederick Heyman, Sun Ra, and Troika Ranch among others and discuss ways we can make and hold these connections in our work.
Estimated Materials Cost: $150.00
Open to sophomore and above.
Also offered as DM-2037; Register in the course for which credit is desired.
This course explores the relationships between new media languages and physical space. Using technologies ranging from the intimacy of handheld devices to the monumental scale of a building façade, in this class we will learn to activate the space through multimedia content and relational strategies. Based on conceptualizations such as "Relational Architecture" by Lozano Hemmer and the "Poetics of Augmented Space" by Lev Manovich, we will design interactive and audiovisual elements to enhance and re-contextualize spatial experiences that are media-rich, relational, and responsive. We will use software, video-projectors, VR headsets and various tracking technologies to investigate techniques of video-mapping, mixed reality, computer vision and interactive media. We will learn to deploy not only vision, but also hearing and touch to create true immersive and multi-sensorial environments. The class comprises of lectures, hands-on workshops and individual projects. The students will gain a deep understanding of topics on spatial thinking, spatial design and user-generated experiences related to space, as well as a theoretical and historical understanding of installation and interactive art.
Estimated Materials Cost: $150.00
Open to sophomore and above.
Also offerd as DM-2039; Register in the course for which credit is desired.
This interdisciplinary studio course explores the critical perspectives of internet-based performance art. Students will be provided with the conceptual frameworks and historical contexts necessary to make compelling performances that either exist on the internet or make use of networked technologies like routers and IP cameras. Students may perform using their bodies, simple machines, twitter bots, or any medium of choice for one's followers, algorithms, strangers, trolls, and even viewers IRL. If a platform exists online, whether it is YouTube or email, Yelp or Reddit, then it is relevant to this course and ripe for performance. We will analyze performances by Marisa Olson, Ann Hirsch, Dynasty Handbag, Jayson Musson, Michael Mandiberg; and read work by Artie Vierkant, Hito Steyerl, Marvin Carlson, Micha Cárdenas, and many more.
Open to sophomore and above.
Also offered as DM-2038; Register in the course for which credit is desired.
This course works from the premise that digital technology has produced a crisis of embodied experience. Today we live in various forms of augmented s pace, our three-dimensional space of experience is overlaid with additional algorithmic dimensions. Our engagement with technology, its interfaces and VR have changed the human relation to the world and to others. Various phenomena of contemporary culture suggest that the digital is causing a kind o f puberty, a disconnectedness, a feeling of being out of tune with one's own body. We will address t his crisis of embodiment from two perspectives: phenomenology and philosophical anthropology. Both fields have stressed the meaning of embodied and kinesthetic experience of space, shared attention, and face-to-face communication. After all, these in teractions are the essence of what makes us human- are they threatened to be distorted? Posthumanist discourses respond by arguing that we should embra ce technology as an ally to combat the destructive and exclusionary aspects of essentialist humanism -and champion the model of the cyborg body.
The course presumes that epistemology and technology are crucially intertwined with questions of identity and the self. Topics include the cognitive f unction of flat surfaces, the non-humanist origins of the digital, and the perks of interface design ; the transformation of face-to-face communication , cyber-feminism, and online cultures like 'otherkin'. The notion of the 'body in crisis' thereby implies a moment of decision: What is the future of the body?
To address this question, we will turn to selected readings. We will unpack these in lectures and through the discussion of numerous examples. A special focus is the transformative and reflective potentials of design and art in dealing with these issues. In two assignments, students are asked to digest the course materials and discussions directly through their studio practice and making.
Estimated Materials Cost: $150.00
Open to sophomore and above.
Drawing is an instrument of thinking and is an essential activity in the research, invention and the fabrication of effects. This course will explore drawing as an interactive medium through which new ideas, stories and relationships between human-computer, computer-computer, computer-human and even human-human can take form. We will be prototyping and programming scenarios that engage the spatial, temporal and performative aspects of drawing. Computational techniques in image analysis, generation and drawing based activities will be introduced to compliment methodologies. Lectures, workshops and guests will punctuate the semester.
Open to sophomore and above.
In thinking about how we design our future, it is crucial to look critically at the past. Alternative Histories of Computation is a studio course that situates creative computation within a critical context. Drawing from science and technology studies, digital media studies, and archival material and ephemera, we will cover various trajectories in computation as they relate to labor, race and ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Students will generate creative projects alongside these topics, allowing the critical discourses to frame and inform their work.
‘Seeing Machines’ are imaging technologies that produce and distribute pictures. (1) Google maps, surveillance networks, museum digital archives, QR codes, and facial recognition systems are some examples. Their quantity and reach is vast: more images are being created by these systems today than the combined sum of all images before the year 2000. In 2017, picture production largely happens within automated networks, distributed by computers in a massive flow of data, (and most won’t ever be seen by the human eye). This class will explore how artists intervene and subvert Seeing Machines’ tools—scripts, programs, automation and other technologies — to systematize, classify and distribute images. Through a set of projects, student-led presentations, readings and discussions, we will understand how Seeing Machines operate and control, and create methods to make artwork in response. Topics will include: images that have never been seen by humans, making images for machines, programming and automation, security & privacy, databases & their lack of objectivity, are pixels real?, the Enlightenment as precursor, the quantification of space & time, lenses without photographers.
This course will explore how technology may liberate or fortify women and gender-nonconforming bodies via art -- especially by forging and/or imagining feminist hybrid human forms. We'll explore everything from web artworks to AI collaborations, Afrofuturism/scifi, theory, pop songs, digital installations, and scientific articles. Beginning at the feminist roots of code, we will ask how the feminist cyborg lives alongside the motion picture fembot and a long history of femme AI. We'll think about how technology could birth new forms of sex, alleviate gender dysphoria, and amplify femme voices -- and how/why it has failed to do so. Finally, we'll look at imagined digital feminist Creations, and ask how far away we are from their actualization. Expect artists and authors like Donna Harroway, Legacy Russell, McKenzie Wark, N. Katherine Hayles, Paul B. Preciado, Laboria Cuboniks, Octavia Butler, Shelley Jackson, Sondra Perry, Janelle Monae, Allison Parrish, Sadie Plant, Rachel Rossin, VNS Matrix, Mary Maggic, Nalo Hopkinson, Evan Ifekoya, Mary Shelley, Lauren McCarthy, Monique Wittig, and Martine Neddam. The themes of this class will be fodder for students' own digital feminist creations: several mini-projects and a final artwork, all of which may take any form. Students will be encouraged but not required to learn digital tools for these projects.
Open to juniors and above.
Also offered as DM-2033; Register in the course for which credit is desired.
In this course we will critically inquire into ways artists and thinkers reimagine digital technologies as we ourselves work to do the same. We will experiment with digital photography, video, nonlinear storytelling, digital/networked performance. Throughout the semester, we will work on a series of short projects and a final individual or collaborative piece. We’ll cover works by Keith + Mendi Obadike, Nam June Paik, E.A.T., Meriem Bennani, Laurie Anderson, MONGREL, VNS Matrix, Madeline Gins, Signe Pierce, Roy Ascott, Lilian Schwartz among many others!