This set of deliverables has two parts, due Tuesday November 8th.
- Preparing yourself and your computer for working with Unity
- Curating a collection of digital artifacts
1. Unity Preparation:
- Get an external hard drive if you don’t already have one. You’ll need it immediately after this project. Lacie is a reliable manufacturer and produces rugged portable hard drives. A solid-state drive recommended by our faculty is this one. You will want to format it to ExFat; other formatting modes will not allow access from both Mac and Windows.
- Get a 3-button mouse if you don’t already have one. I like the Logitech M100 wired mouse ($9, or $14 at the CMU Computer Store), though you may also need a USB-A to USB-C adapter ($14). Alternatively, you could get a USB-C wired mouse ($17) or a wireless mouse. If you don’t have a 3-button mouse for your laptop, you will really hate life using Unity.
- Make hard drive space to install Unity. If you intend to use Unity on your laptop, make sure your operating system is up to date, and that your laptop has at least 20GB of free space.
- FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS to install Unity on your laptop. Our goal is to install the exact same version as on the CMU cluster computers, 2021.3.8f1. Once you’ve done this: in the Discord channel #4-unity-newproject, post a screenshot of a new (blank) Unity project running on your computer. (If you aren’t using your own laptop for this unit, then instead post a screenshot from a CMU school computer, demonstrating your ability to successfully launch Unity and create a new blank project.)
- Watch this one-hour introductory video below, by Professor Paolo Pedercini. This is essential viewing.
2. Digital Curation / Internet Readymade
Due November 8th. This is a quick project.
For this one-week project, you are asked to indulge in your inclination to surf the web, to go down a rabbit hole, to immerse yourself in internet platforms, to distill a collection of objects that seem extraordinary only to you, and to rescue these data from obscurity. To understand what I mean, see our lecture notes.
For this project, I am not particularly interested in your ability to imagine and create; I am interested in your capacity to discover and document. Now:
- Research a type of artifact, media, subculture or practice you find on the internet.
- Create a collection of pertinent digital “objects” that you consider valuable but under-appreciated from an aesthetic, political, historical, or anthropological standpoint.
- Curate these objects into an exhibition. Make a discovery, curate a collection, allow the things you find to speak for themselves. Present this collection in an online collage using Hotglue (https://hotglue.me/). You’ll need to make a free Hotglue account.
- In a Discord post in the appropriate channel (#4-digital-curation), provide a link to your Hotglue collage.
- In the #4-digital-curation channel, write a few sentences about what your collection is, why it interests you, and any special remarks about how you collected it.
- Additionally, post a screenshot of your Hotglue page in the #4-digital-curation channel.