Howdy class,

My name is Dan Wilcox and I’m a 3rd year Master of Fine Arts graduate student in the School of Art. I’m Golan’s TA for IACD this spring.

My background is in Computer Engineering but I was always into music so I went to Europe to learn New Media. I worked for 2 years at the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Austria on interactive installations and played music festivals with my robotcowboy project before coming to CMU.

robotcowboy

I’m an artist, engineer, performer, and musician who combines live musical performance techniques with experimental electronics and software for exploration into themes of science fiction, space travel, cyborgification, and far futurism. I prefer to use open source tools and software including Pure Data, OpenFrameworks, and Processing and maintain a Github page for public projects.

MDRS

Back in December, I spent 2 weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station run by the Mars Society in Utah as research for my thesis project:

In this Martian analog on Earth, the crew will spend 2 weeks living and working in a remote, simulated habitat: planning Extra Vehicular Activities, wearing space suits, exploring the terrain on foot or via rovers, maintain/upgrading systems, and experiencing a tin-can existence. Through this research, they’ll be able to better understand how people will live and work effectively on the Red Planet.

Dan’s mission is to document what life will be like for the first humans on Mars from “a feet on the ground” perspective. This work will then form the basis of his MFA Thesis project: a live musical performance and concept album around the theme of humanity crossing the sea of space and touching down on a familiar new world.

Welcome to the Spring 2013 edition of “Special Topics in Interactive Art and Computational Design”, an interdisciplinary studio course in new-media arts. I have taught this course in this format at CMU since 2010. If you’d like to enjoy the fruits of previous semesters, please see the links:

• Interactive Art & Computational Design, Spring 2012 (+ final projects)
• Interactive Art & Computational Design, Spring 2011 (+ final projects)
• Interactive Art & Computational Design, Spring 2010 (+ final projects)

We begin our semester with 25 students enrolled: twelve women and thirteen men. Here are some additional statistics about our class population, obtained from the entrance survey:

Students enrolled in the class span every level from first-year undergraduates to doctoral students, distributed as follows:

• Freshman – ⚫
• Sophomore – ⚫ ⚫
• Junior – ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫
• Senior – ⚫ ⚫
• Masters – ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫
• PhD – ⚫

Students in the class hail from 12 different degree programs within Carnegie Mellon, distributed as follows:

• Computer Science and Arts – ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫
• School of Art (Art) – ⚫ ⚫ ⚫
• Interaction Design (Design) – ⚫ ⚫ ⚫
• Tangible Interaction Design (Architecture) – ⚫ ⚫ ⚫
• Music & Technology – ⚫ ⚫
• Mechanical Engineering – ⚫ ⚫
• Computational Design (Architecture) – ⚫
• Entertainment Technology – ⚫
• Institute for Software Research – ⚫
• Electrical Engineering – ⚫
• Computer Science – ⚫
• Robotics – ⚫

Asked to select two of the following three options, enrolled students described that they were most interested in making things which are:

Asked to select two of the following three options, enrolled students described that they prefer to make things:

Students ranked their interests in various topics and themes. In decreasing order, enrolled students expressed their degree of interest in these subjects as follows (arbitrary units):

Experience with various text-based programming languages was as follows:

Enrolled students’ prior experience with the following arts-engineering toolkits was as follows: