Course Description
This is an interdisciplinary studio course in expanded media practices that arise from using devices and algorithms to capture the world. We will explore experimental workflows, ranging from no-tech and low-tech to emerging and state-of-the-art techniques, in order to capture, model, and share new representations of people, objects, places and events. Through self-directed research projects, students will develop systems to capture a wide variety of phenomena, and creatively share the media they collect. We will cover a wide range of techniques and artistic practices that incorporate immersive, panoramic, high-speed, multiscopic, and multispectral imaging; depth sensors and 3D scanners; motion capture systems for gestures of the face, body, hand, and eye; computer vision and machine learning techniques for detection, tracking, recognition and classification; and other unusual, forgotten, and nascent technologies for transducing the unseen, ephemeral, and otherwise undetectable.
Learning Objectives
This course is concerned with new ways of seeing,
and the creation of systems to enable new ways of seeing.
This is an interdisciplinary course in experimental media practices that arise from using devices to “capture” the world. In particular, we are concerned with how we can understand and build representations of the world using devices that sense beyond the limits of human perception. In this course, we seek:
- To explore the affordances of unfamiliar, forgotten, and nascent image capture technologies in revealing unseen or alternative realities.
- To explore the use of algorithmic and methodological thinking in expanding our expressive vocabulary for representations of people, objects, environments, and events.
- To question the practical and epistemological assumptions that underpin the project of capturing representations of reality with devices.
- To develop research practices as creative technologists.
At the conclusion of this course, students will be able to:
- Recognize and identify the use of expanded capture techniques (such as photogrammetry, motion capture, multispectral imaging, binaural audio, stroboscopy, etc.) in popular and experimental media.
- Demonstrate understanding of the scientific principles and/or engineering foundations underlying such techniques, in revealing phenomena beyond the limits of ordinary human perception.
- Demonstrate understanding of the poetic and elucidative potentials of such techniques, and their application to the production of expressive and provocative new culture.
- Command the practical use of one or more such techniques.