NM 332
Experimental Media: Interactive Installation Art

Instructor: Curt Cloninger / curt at lab404 dot com
 

For all Experimental Media courses:

Students create work in a specific experimental genre of new media, exploring the unique strengths and challenges of that genre in comparison with other more standard new media genres. Conceptual and reflective thinking is particularly emphasized in conjunction with novel and inventive ways of making. The foremost goal of this class is to imagine and to experiment with ideas. Creativity, perception, improvisation, and invention are integral components of any successful design or fine art project and are a fundamental aspect of the course.

For this particular Interactive Installation Art course:

Interactive Installation Art uses interactive software/hardware systems in combination with other digital and physical media to create responsive and immersive physical spaces. This course explores the history, theory, and practice of Interactive Installation Art. Students will read historical and theoretical texts, and will respond by creating and installing their own experimental work. Topics incude multi-channel video, enchanted/modulated spaces, sculpture (physical and sonic), architecture, interactive sonic sculpture/instrument/system, tableaus, wondercabinets, self-sensing, telepresence, and site/non-site art.

The projects and assignments required in this class are time-intensive and require an average of 9 hours per week on the computer, either in a campus lab or on your own computer that contains the software used in the class.

Student Learning Objectives
In this course you will:

• Gain insight into the historical evolution of installation art and its relationship to 20th Century and contemporary culture.
• Understand installation art in the context of 20th/21st century art and "new media" art.
• Develop artistic methods that take creative advantage of new media forms in an installation art context.
• Produce original artworks that address a variety of conceptual topics.
• Recognize and utilize space as an artistic medium.
• Recognize your own agency as a new media artist, and become confident exercising that agency to modulate and change the world.

• multi-channel video
• enchanted/modulated spaces
• interactive objects
• sonic sculpture
• the miniature (scale)
• minimal space/body modulation (self-sensing)
• telepresent/networked spaces

Required Materials:
Bulldog email account -- check regularly
Student web hosting space (for posting work)
flash drive, notebook or sketchbook, graph paper, pencils, and pens