IMII_ART/Rouvelle/Spring '06
Friday 11am-5pm. (Lunch break from 12-1)
Brown Center 206
Contact:jrouvelle@mica.edu
Office: Brown Center, room 211, phone (in office).
Office hours: by appointment
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Week 1 (below)
Course Description:
IMII:art will explore the dynamics and aesthetic potentials of interactivity
and collaboration. Students will develop and play mobile multi-player urban
strategy games, learn about sensors and micro-controllers and build their own
interactive projects that will be linked together with other projects from other
institutions around the world to form a massive chain reaction that will occur
at the end of the semester, on May 6.
IMII:art will be the first electronically “glocalized” course at
MICA, where students will have the opportunity to communicate, collaborate and
partner with students from other schools in real time, via ivist and other systems,
and, finally, participate in a massive chain reaction in connection with several
other institutions at the end of the semester. Entitled “Chain Reaction
‘06”, kinetic sculpture, media projections, dynamic architecture,
sound, and any media that has interactive sensibilities will be arranged so
that when activated, a domino effect will ensue. The catalytic agents could
range from the primordial to the digital. Water, fire, and air could be dispensed
by electromechanical devices and interleaved with data packets and algorithms
to induce a society of reactive agents. The governing principles or group behavior
will be decided through class collaboration and informed by research into such
topics: as swarm intelligence, missile guidance, alchemy, dominos, and artificial
life. The resulting chain reaction could resemble an exquisite corpse, an anarchist’s
ideal internet, ant colonies, the Mouse Trap game, or a premeditated sequence
of events that would amaze Rube Goldberg. Prerequisite: EA 210, IMI.
Evaluation:
Grades in this course will be based on regular class attendance, the quality
of your work, class participation, and progress. Tardiness and excessive absences
will adversely affect your grade. Participation in discussions and critiques
is mandatory.
Projects & Grading:
Students will be graded by letter, A-F, on all evaluated work. Work must be
completed on time and in full satisfaction of each project goal. Late work (assignments
handed in or posted after the start of in-class critique sessions) will be automatically
downgraded by one letter grade.
A Well above the expectations of the course. Outstanding participation, attendance, and exceptional progress.
B Above average assignments and participation. No more than one absence.
C Average execution of assignments, participation, and no more than two absences.
D Well below average: work, attendance (two absences), projects, and participation.
F Unsatisfactory: work, attendance (more than two absences), projects, and participation
Attendance:
Two or more unexcused absences from class may result in failure. Two unexcused
late arrivals, or early departures (eg, not returning from dinner, or other
unexplained disappearance) will be marked as the equivalent of one absence.
Absence from a class is not an excuse for skipping a tutorial, reading assignment,
or posting an assignment. You are fully responsible for completing work.
Readings:
Readings and tutorials will often be delivered through the web - via links (URLs).
Critiques will frequently be initiated from various topics covered in the readings
- in other words, please use the concepts you read about in discussion of fellow
students' work.
Supplies:
Please bring to each class: 1-2 CD-R(s) - Recordable Compact Discs (700 MB).
You'll probably go through many of them, for both this and other digital classes.
You might also want to bring in a sharpie to label your CD's.
It is essential that all work done in class be saved to CD-R at the conclusion
of class. There will be many, many other students using these computers and
anything saved on them will be permanently removed shortly after the conclusion
of class.
Software Consultant:
If you are having trouble becoming acquainted with the software we will be using
please see the software consultant.
Food and Drink in the Computer Labs:
No.
ADA COMPLIANCE:
In order to provide the highest quality educational experience for every student,
MICA is committed to compliance with the ADA and Section 504. Any student who
has (or suspects he or she may have) a physical, cognitive, or psychological
disability and who wants to request accommodations must immediately schedule
an appointment to meet with the Director of the Learning Resource Center, Dr.
Kathryn Smith, by calling the LRC Administrative Assistant, Mary Walsh, at (410)669-3177.
The LRC is MICA’s designated department for determining reasonable accommodations
based on legal requirements and will provide the eligible student with an official
Accommodation Verification letter to the instructor. Each semester the student
must formally request accommodations from the LRC each semester, and format
of the Verification letters change each semester to ensure currency.
NOTE: Students with disabilities who want assistance during emergency evacuations
must register with the LRC within the first week of each semester.
HEALTH AND SAFETY:
MICA has developed policies and practices to ensure a healthful environment
and safe approaches to the use of equipment, materials, and processes. It is
the mutual responsibility of faculty and students to review health and
safety standards relevant to each class at the beginning of each semester.
Students should be aware of general fire, health, and safety regulations
posted in each area and course specific polices, practices, and cautions.
Students who have concerns related to health and safety should contact
Quentin Moseley, Environment Health and Safety Coordinator at 410 225 0220
or email at qmoseley@mica.edu
There is no Final Exam during exam week. Our final class is the last week of classes, but our FINAL PROJECT WILL OCCUR ON MAY 6TH, THIS IS MANDATORY
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Text: Dr. Edward Shanken has written and edited significant articles on Telematic Art – we will be reading several of his papers.
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Week 1
Course Overview.
Our Collaborators: Barney Haynes and the CCA who is inspired by Arthur Ganson
Simple explanation of what we are doing, and what you will be doing in class:
*Learning about Networked Objects and Art.
*Familiarizing yourselves with certain tools to make Networked Objects and Art, these tools will include MAX/MSP/JITTER, Basic Stamps, Cell phones, etc...
*Creating a work - either on your own or in small groups - that can be triggered by another work, that is in turn triggered by another work, that is.... you get the idea. The twist is that some of the works we produce must trigger something via the web.
*There is also a real-time visualization (Screen based) aspect to what we produce. That means that some of you may work to create visualization stations that will be available to the public online, as well as offline, during the event. Imagine a plasma screen in the lobby of Main, and you get the idea.
*Some of you may want to create bi-directional, interactive works, that trigger, process, re-trigger, etc... You may do this locally (among people/projects in the class), or over the web/globally. If you want to work globally, please try to connect with students at CCA who have similar interests - we (Barney and I) will make every effort to connect both classes in real-time - via ichat or ivisit - starting in a few weeks.
*Some of you will help to develop the architecture that will ensure that data can flow between all of the participants during the tests, and during the event. This is very important and I would like to locate those of you who would be interested in this as soon as possible.
Important Dates:
Feb 3rd - First Data Exchange with CCA
Feb 24th - Visit from Norm White, of Telematic Arm Wrestling Fame (see below).
April 29th - Opportunity to present works at the Maryland Robotics Festival in Linthicum. Might be a good opportunity to try some of the project out before the main event.
May 6 - Chain Reaction (Final Project)
A few noteworthy network projects. Forms of experimental, interactive art.
Roy
Ascott
Norm White
R.I.P.L.T.R.A.N.E.
Edmond Chouinard: "Web
of Love" , Telepathic
Body Jerks, Flames
and Flowers
Technology Overview:
Barney and his crew will be using Max as their authoring environment. To make things easier, I will ask all of you to familiarize yourselves with MAX by doing the first 11 MAX Tutorials found in the Documentation for MAX/MSP in our Lab.
In Brief:
Max is a graphical multimedia programming environment. It was originally developed by Miller Puckette as a MIDI mediation language at IRCAM, and is now currently maintained and sold by David Zicarelli's company Cycling'74.
It is an ideal environment for developing two kinds of applications: realtime processing of data, such as serial input, MIDI messages, sound, video, 3D and system messages; and mapping data from one format to another in wildly creative ways. Barney's class will be using MAX as their authoring environment. I would like to do the same. My hope is that some of you find MAX to be an environment you would like to work in during the semester. Think of it as a glue that will hold all of the elements of our Chain Reaction together.
Max is the core language, used for MIDI, basic data manipulation & interface design. MSP is the digital signal processing architecture of Max, used for manipulating frequency, or streams of numbers at extremely high speeds. Jitter is Cycling'74's extension for fast processing of large grids of numbers, or matrices. It is especially optimized at points for 4-plane grids of eight bit numbers, or video frames. It also is an extraordinarily powerful development environment for nontraditional OpenGL work. SoftVNS 2 is David Rokeby's extension for Max that allows a more specialized way of working with video input and playback.
A note on extensions:
There is a rich tapestry of third-party extensions for Max. Many of these work very well with OS X. Installing these is quite easy if you have administrative access to your working machine- i.e. if you're working on your own personal laptop. If you feel there is an extension set you would like placed on the lab machines, please talk to me; you're probably right and I'll put it on there.
Of immediate interest to some of you may be:
* Bill Orcutt has written a great collection of Max utilities, including a way of getting at the shell prompt, a mySQL client, a Python Interpreter (requires MacPython 2.2), and Google and Google Images clients, and many other cool things. They're here.
Max links:
* The Cycling'74 resource list is wonderful, and a great place to start your search.
* Ma(r)x Tutorials are rumored to be excellent.
* The LObjects are Peter Elsea's grand contribution to the handling of lists in Max.
* Jasch, the frequent collaborator of Johnny deKam, has made a collection of objects which includes a great shortcut for 'prepend set' and a port of the C-string manipulation libraries. Here.
Daily Tech:
Tech that may be useful for our project, and interesting in general:
semacode
Assignment:
Read: “Telematic
Embrace: A love story?” Edward Shanken. The point is to familiarize
you with the premise of Telematic Art.
Print out a copy of the first 11 MAX tutorials - do them. DON'T WORRY ABOUT MIDI.
If you would like to make some noise, literally, do the first few tutorials for MSP - found in the documentation for MAX/MSP.
And don't forget to take a look at Ma(r)x Tutorials , they are rumored to be excellent.
Based on our discussion today, and after looking over Barney's site, please think about how you might like to participate in the project. If you have some ideas begin to think about how the data can find its' way into MAX. The concept is to have a series of inputs and outputs - feel free to think BROADLY about the project and how you might be able to participate in it - and be able to let me know what you'd like to do in conceptual, as well as technical terms. We will ultimately break up into small groups and create various projects that are all inter-related.
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Week 2
Discuss Shanken Article and your ideas for the piece.
Experimental Forms and Practices:
ELF and Brainwave Frequency Experiment, David S. Walonick
PEAR Princeton Engineering Anamolies Research
Jack Houck
Boundary Institute/online tests-experiments
Assignment:
Read: Karl Pribram Interview
Review the projects we discussed today.
MAX TUTORIALS.
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Week 3
Discuss Article
Presentation of experiments – discussion
Glowlab
SocialFiction
ARG’s
Urban Strategy Games
Tech
ivisit – global classroom introduction
intro to networking with Max.
assignment: simple max networking patch.
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Week 4
basic stamp/max
intro to bs2 and max
assignment: break into pairs, create a simple input device with a basic stamp that sends sensor data (can be anything from a push-button to a IR distance detector, whatever you are comfortable with) over the web to another basic stamp via Max.
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Week 5
Bs2/Max Projects – work on in class
ivisit – connect with CCA and chat.
** ivisit will be available during each class for the rest of the term. Barney
Haynes (Prof. From CCA) and I will facilitate contact among student groups.
The intention is to explore ideas for the final project – connect with
like-minded students in CCA and, using the tools you have learned, begin some
experiments with them. Regardless of the form of the final project(s), it is
essential that we can pass data among the two groups. Barney and I will devise
a few general assignments to test this during the next few weeks – if
you have your own ideas, please feel free to experiment and present you findings
to the class at large.
Assignment: work on BS2 Max Project
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Week 6
Present BS2 Max project/Crit
Tech Demo:
Bluetooth/BS2/Max
Bluetooth Module
Assignment: Norm White’s interactive art: “Telematic Arm Wrestling”,
Ed Shanken.
Please formulate two questions for Norm. Bear in mind that he created some of
the earliest telematic art.
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Week 7
Norm White will visit.
tech review.
Discussion of final project form – This is the beginning of our talks about the May 6 event.
Break into groups and begin working on final project. I will facilitate the group formation – if you have people you’d like to work with please let me know. I would also like to have people with different skill sets but similar aesthetic sensibilities working together.
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Week 8-10
Week 8 Tech Demo – Cell phone/Max interface
Week 9 Tech Demo – Cell phone/Max/BS2
(three weeks) work on projects. During this time I will ask each group to present
their work to the class so that we can discuss and facilitate how these pieces
will all fit together.
During these weeks I will assist you as you form the palette of tech and the
intentions of your project. We will discuss the form of your work and how it
relates to the goal of the final project, and you technical needs.
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Week 11
Rube Goldberg experiment #1
We will conduct an intercontinental Rube Goldberg Machine today. The idea is
that information will pass between Baltimore and SF (CCA). Both groups will
use cell phones/Max/Basic Stamps.
We will engage in these experiments for each week through the final project
on May 6th. You will be doing this in your small groups – PLEASE let me
know if you have ANY problems, so that I can help you.
***I need your equipment needs for the May 6 event by the end of class
Bob Bielecki will be visiting class next time – I will speak with you about his work today. Please prepare two questions for him.
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Week 12
Bob Bielecki.
Bob is a brilliant artist/inventor who has worked with many, many artists on
many, many projects. We will present documentation of our Rube Goldberg Experiment
from last week and discuss our project(s) with Bob. He is one of the great aesthetic-technical
problem solvers ever…
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Week 13
Installation and Prep for May 6
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Week 14
Test Run in collaboration with CCA – PROJECTS MUST BE FUNCTIONAL FOR TODAY’S
REHEARSAL
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Week 15
Installation Day for May 6th (Tomorrow) Event
May 6 (SATURDAY) EVENT BEGINS AT 8pm and will run until MIDNIGHT.
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