Project-0: Introduction

This 5-part assignment is due at the beginning of class on January 14th, 2013.

The purpose of this assignment is to ensure that all students are equipped with the primary communication and sharing tools we will use in the course (WordPress, Twitter, and Github). Students will familiarize themselves with, and introduce themselves on, the course website.

Part 1. Catching up on basics.

Please review the following documents on our course website:

Then, proceed to the following….

Part 2. Update your course “author profile”.

Log in to this course website using the credentials provided over email. Please flesh out your “author profile” — with a brief self-description, URL for your homepage, your Github ID (see below), your Twitter ID (see below), etcetera. (Don’t forget to reset your password!) For an example, see my profile, https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2013/author/admin/.

Part 3. Create your first blog Post.

Log in to this WordPress-based course website using the credentials provided over email. Create a new “Post”. (You may find it helpful to review this page of information, Using this Site.) In your post, you are asked to provide the following five items:

  1. A brief introduction to yourself: any information you’d like to share; a sentence or two about your interests, and perhaps a sentence about what you hope to accomplish this semester in IACD.
  2. A link to your Twitter.com account (see below).
  3. A link to your Github.com account (see below).
  4. Tag your blog post with the ‘project-0’ category, so that it can be easily found later.
  5. Documentation of one of your own prior projects, which you created by writing software. You will present this project to the group on the first day of class, as a part of introducing yourself. Please note:
    • It’s fine if your prior project is small, and/or was created as an assignment for another class. It’s understood that many of you may not yet have large portfolios of prior work.
    • The project may be of any kind, but culture-related work (“art”, “design”, etc.) would be most appropriate.
    • “Writing software” can include non-textual programming environments (such as Pure Data, Max/MSP, Grasshopper, etcetera).
    • It may be a group project, but solo work would be most appropriate, if possible. If other people were involved in its creation, provide full credits to them.
    • Please include a textual description of your project, and an image. If video documentation exists, please embed a YouTube or Vimeo in your post. (See this page if you need instructions on how to do this.) In your accompanying text, please describe what you think was (a) successful and (b) lacking in your execution.
    • Don’t forget to include an image, that’s important. I want to make sure you have no difficulties in uploading images to the WordPress blog. For your information, the display width of the text area is 620 pixels.

Part 4. Create your Twitter account.

New media art and design is a very quickly moving field; news about current developments is most often disseminated via Twitter. If you do not already have one, please get a Twitter account. The purpose of Twitter (in the context of this course) is to stay appraised of current developments in the field; there is no expectation that you will (or ought to) send tweets of your own. Include a link to your Twitter account in your first blog post.

I recommend you subscribe to the following feeds, and check them once daily or perhaps a few times per week; doing so will keep our class cohort on the same page, and will help build up our common vocabulary of references:

Part 5. Create your Github account.

Huge swaths of new media art projects and initiatives consist of (or are built upon) freely shared software, such as Processing, OpenFrameworks, etcetera. Github is the world’s most widely used tool for sharing code, allowing artists and designers to both use and contribute to these communities for commons-based peer production. It is absolutely essential to develop Git skills so that we, as artists and designers, may participate as first-class citizens in these communities. In the IACD course, we will use Github as the repository for the source code for all of our projects.

If you don’t already have one, get an account at Github.com. Include a link to your Github account in your first blog post. This link may look similar to the following example:

Here’s my Github account: https://github.com/golanlevin