Assignment 01

This Assignment is due Wednesday, August 27th, at the beginning of class. 

This Assignment has 6 parts:

  1. Completing a small survey
  2. A blog post on relevant work that has inspired you
  3. A short blog post in response to the Critical Engineering Manifesto
  4. A short blog post considering some articles about technical novelty in the arts, as described below.
  5. A Looking Outwards blog post.
  6. Getting a Twitter account

A. Survey.

Please complete this short survey.
This will help me understand you all better.

B. Some Technological Art/Design that has Inspired You

Think about an interactive and/or computational project (from anywhere, by anyone except yourself) that you knew about before starting this course, and which you find inspirational. In a blog post of about 100-150 words,

  • Please discuss the project. What do you admire about it, and why do you admire these aspects of it?
  • How many people were involved in making it, and how did they organize themselves to achieve it?
  • To what opportunities or futures does the project point, if any?
  • Provide a link (if possible) and a full author and title reference.
  • Embed an image and/or YouTube/Vimeo video of the project (if available).
  • Label your blog post with the Category, Assignment-01B. (You can find these Categories already made for you in the “Categories” section of the WordPress editor.)

C. Critical Engineering.

Read the “Critical Engineering Manifesto” by Julian Oliver et al. (2011).

  • Select one of the tenets of the manifesto that you find interesting.
  • In a blog post of 100-200 words, re-explain it in your own words, and explain what you found interesting about it.
  • Provide an example, real or hypothetical, which illustrates the proposition.
  • Label your blog post with the Category, Assignment-01C

D. First Word, Last Word

Please examine the following three resources:

Think about technical novelty in relation to the arts. Naimark’s opposition (“First/Last Word Art”) and the Gartner Hype Cycle are two different attempts to understand how culture accomodates new technologies. Each delinates a spectrum from the well-understood to the utterly novel.

In a blog post of about 150-200 words,

  • Discuss the relationship of the GHC and FW/LW in greater detail.
  • Where do you locate your interests along these spectra?
  • Why do you think Schulze prefers to work in the “Trough of Disillusionment”?
  • Categorize your blog post with the Category, Assignment-01D

E. Your first Looking Outwards Assignment.

Read this page about what a Looking Outwards Assignment is.

After foraging widely (consider this list of potential starting points), select 3 projects in the broadly-scoped field(s) of computational new-media arts and/or design. (Note: all projects should somehow have involved/required the creation of custom software.) In a blog post,

  • Discuss one project that you admire profoundly (why?),
  • one project that surprised you (why?),
  • and one project that could have been great, but disappointed you (why?).
  • Categorize your blog post with the Category, LookingOutwards.

F. A Twitter Account.

Sorry to add to your distractions, but: please get a Twitter account (if you don’t already have one), and add your account information to your profile page on the WordPress. Get a Twitter application for your phone.

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. It is fine (perhaps, even, ideal) just to tune in.

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: