Class Notes

Here you will find notes, comments and other references that come up during classes.

21 Oct

The Interface

Lecture Slides
Selected Bibliography
Related Examples

rAndom International – 2012 – Rain Room
Simon Marxen – 2011 – In The Bubble
Physical and body awareness.

Ralf Baecker – 2014 – Mirage
Abstract representation, complex and hidden logic and control of the interface.

Støj – 2017 – Sound-controlled Wolfenstein 3D
Some natural controls can be impractical.

Oblong Industries – 2011 – g-speak [company came out of consultancy service for Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002)]
Natural controls in specific scales are difficult to use.

Pascal Dombis – 2006-2012 – Spin

Jonathan Harris – 2015 – Network Effect
Classic data visualization design + the immensity of the material reveal the complex phenomenology of the Internet.

J. Brandell & G. M. Brower – 2011 – Life in a Day Touchscreen Gallery
The idea of expanding the conventional film structure with crowdsourced, programmatically arranged and interactively manipulable contents was designed to consequently reflect the logic of online video sharing.
It is a highly configurable platform for organizing, sorting and screening the clip sets of all the 80,000 short video submissions to a conventionally scripted and edited crowdsourcing film Life in a Day (dir. by Kevin Macdonald in 2010) which used around 10,000 selected video clips.

14 Oct

Modalities of Interaction:
Machine-Machine

Lecture Slides
Related Examples

Luke DuBois – 2016 – Acceptance 2016: a second iteration of Acceptance, faster response, higher accuracy. Since this software matches the sound snippets recognized as articulated words, it would be interesting to see it matching between different genres or types of speech-heavy videos.

Although not directly relying on machine-machine interaction, these creative explorations in AI are interesting:
Oscar Sharp & Ross Goodwin [AI (Benjamin)] – 2016 – Sunspring
Mike Tyka – 2017 – Neural Portraits
Mario Klingemann – 2017 – Alternative Face
Weidi Zhang – 2018 – Lavin

16 Sep

Modalities of Interaction:
Human-Machine

Lecture Slides
Related Examples

TECHNICAL
Ken Rinaldo – 2009 – Paparazzi Bots
Re: Sven König – 2006 – sCrAmBlEdHaCkZ!, see Parag Kumar Mital – 2012 – YouTube Smash Up

AESTHETIC (EXPERIENTIAL)
Re: rAndom International – 2012 – Rain Room, see the rain scene in Peter Weir – 1998 – The Truman Show (film)

EXPRESSIVE (ENGAGEMENT)
Ken Feingold – 2001 – Sinking Feeling
Kenichi Okada – 2010 – Peeping Hole
Marnix de Nijs & Edwin van der Heide – 2000 – Spatial Sounds
Støj – 2017 – Sound-controlled Wolfenstein 3D

9 Sep

Modalities of Interaction:
Human-Machine-Human

Lecture Slides

2 Sep

A couple of references that came to mind while presenting your project ideas. Look them up and try to figure out which one relates to what aspects of your projects and we will discuss them in more details next class.

The ethics (and the inevitability of carbon footprinting or making a mess in the entropic universe) of Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers (from 2006) and Running the Numbers II (from 2009) series satirized by Scott Blake’s – 2011 – Inkjet Cartridge Chris Jordan, and the consequences (re: the immensity of the artist’s ego).

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
One of the key books demystifying and discrediting the dreams about the egalitarianism of the Internet platforms and services.

Vladimir Todorović – 2013 – 1985: An abstract, nonverbal, animated rendition of the fictional activities of the ministries of Peace, Love, Plenty and Truth that govern Oceania one year after the events in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Sudden changes of sound and image triggered by the random walk algorithm which was modified with cosine function, accelerated and decelerated.

Ai Weiwei: When the rebellion/transgression becomes a brand.

26 Aug

Mapping the Further Exploration of
Interactive Media

LECTURE SLIDES

Kirby Ferguson, Everything is a Remix

Dejan Grba, I Cite (Very) Art: Innovative Combinatorics in New Media Art

19 Aug

Werner Herzog, recommended feature films: