About

 

Course Essentials

Course Description

Internet Art & Culture is an immersive online experience that engages students in networked studio practice and collaborative study. Taught both locally and online, the course explores forms of remote learning through live, weekly class sessions via web-conferencing, as well as individual student critiques with the instructor via Skype. Students work extensively in a WordPress “multi-site” system developed specifically for the course, a virtual studio environment that integrates a broad range of Web tools for artistic production, collaborative research, and online writing. The course focuses on the integration of social media and contemporary Internet practices into the studio experience, providing students with a critical understanding of the dissolving boundaries between contemporary media art, telecommunications, and global information culture. The course includes: readings by media critics, historians and scholars on the impact of the Internet on society and the individual; the critique of online artworks by contemporary artists; and critical writing focusing on a broad range of historical, theoretic, aesthetic, and technological topics pertaining to Internet art and culture. Each student is required to complete a series of micro-projects, as well as a final project, which employ the network as a medium for artistic creation.

Learning Objectives

The objective of Open Source Studio: Internet Art & Culture is to develop critical and artistic skills for the interpretation and creation of networked media art. Through readings, lectures, multimedia projects, and the critique of online artworks, students are exposed to the aesthetic, historical, social, cultural, and technological issues inherent in our increasingly global media environment.

Students also gain collaborative skills through study in an online learning environment that emphasizes shared, cross-disciplinary activity.

Learning Outcome

On successful completion of the course students will have a new understanding of the Internet as an artistic medium. They will also have new insight into the collaborative process through participation in the online learning experience, and how each student’s contribution can alter the dynamics of the learning and artistic experience. It is the premise of Internet Art & Culture that learning, exploring, discovering, and producing finds new creative agency in close interaction with other students in the course through the use of online tools. Students will have an understanding of how concepts of open source apply to artistic creation and academic study when structured in a shared, tele-communications environment that requires cooperation and transparency. Lastly, students will gain an in-depth understanding of the conceptual, aesthetic and technological skills required to create art that draws from communications media and comments on the broader global information culture.

Grading & Rubrics

Grading for class participation in broken down into the following:

  • Class Participation and Attendance – 10%
  • WordPress & Social Media – 5%
  • Micro-projects – 15%
  • Research Assignments – 15%
  • Project Updates – 10%
  • Project Hyperessay – 15%
  • Final Project – 30%

Grades for the course are based on the following general criteria:

  • The commitment to engage the process of online production, research, and dialogue
  • Developing and maintaining a WordPress site, gaining proficiency with assigned techniques and methodologies
  • Incorporate concepts and techniques drawn from the study of net based culture and art into student work
  • Come to class on time and participate in discussion
  • Complete work on time
  • Points are given for each assignment, such that students are responsible for the accumulation of the final score/grade (much like a game!)
  • Grades are allocated according to the standard NTU system of percentages

Grading will be assigned for all assignments & attendance:

  • Micro-projects: each 5 points (total 35 points)
  • Project hypressay: each section 10 points (total 50 points)
  • Research critiques of artworks & readings: each 5 points (total 40 points)
  • Project updates: each 2 points (total 20 points)
  • Final project: 100 points
  • Class attendance: 3 points per class and on time (total 39 points)

Attendance & Class participation:

Students participate through discussion and presentation during weekly 3-hour class sessions held onsite for weeks 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13 and online via Adobe Connect for the remaining weeks 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Students are required to attend class and/or login without being late, or else a point will be deducted. Students should plan to login in at 7:30 PM so the class can begin promptly at 7:40 PM. Students are also required to participate in class discussion and to present their work during critique. Students with more than 3 unexcused absences will automatically fail the course, which is a University policy.

Hardware & Software Requirements

  • MacBook Pro (or laptop) with webcam & mic (bring to class each week when at ADM)
  • Broadband connection (for online classes)
  • Headset or earbuds
  • Firefox browser

Randall Packer, Visiting Associate Professor

Since the 1980s, multimedia artist, composer, and educator Randall Packer has worked at the intersection of interactive media and live performance. He has received international acclaim for his social and politically infused works, and has performed and exhibited at museums, theaters, and festivals throughout the world. Packer is also a writer and scholar in new media, most notably the co-editor of Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. He holds an MFA and PhD in music composition and has taught multimedia at the University of California, Berkeley, Maryland Institute College of Art, American University, CalArts, and Johns Hopkins University. Most recently, he developed Open Source Studio (OSS), an international project exploring collaboration and networked learning in the media arts. He is Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Art, Design & Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he teaches the art of the networked practice. Packer is also an artist educator at the Museum of Modern Art’s Digital Learning: his course, Catalysts: Artists Creating with Video, Sound, and Time, received an award from Museums and the Web as the best educational site of 2014. Packer works and teaches remotely from his studio in Washington, DC.

Juan Camilo González, Teaching Assistant

Juan Camilo González studied Visual Arts at the Javeriana University of Bogotá, Colombia. With the support of the Annenberg Fellowship, he finished in 2011 his MFA in Animation & Digital Arts from the University of Southern California. Director and co-founder of the group Moebius Animación dedicated to exhibit artists, films and research around experimental animation in Latin America and Spain. Currently a PhD candidate at the School of Art Design & Media in Singapore where his thesis focuses on the theoretical and practical research of data-driven hand drawn animations.