Joseph Michael Kramer

This team-taught, introductory course provides a foundation for most additional coursework in the Art and Technology Studies department. Students are given a broad interdisciplinary grounding in the skills, concepts, and hands-on experiences they will need to engage the potentials of new technologies in art making. Every other week, a lecture and discussion group exposes students to concepts of electronic media, perception, inter-media composition, emerging venues, and other issues important to artists working with technologically based media. Students will attend a morning & afternoon section each day to gain hands-on experience with a variety of forms and techniques central to technologically-based art making.

DIY has become a widespread movement in the artistic community. Modifying, tinkering, tweaking and downright hijacking have become a commonplace practice among today?s artists. Many everyday electronic objects are yearning to be liberated from their banal existences. This course explores readily available materials with a goal of bringing out the hidden aesthetic potentials of electronic devices. Students dig beneath the shiny surfaces to uncover underlying workings, principles and mechanisms. Class projects result in new artworks by reanimating the physical presences and behaviors of the reassembled artifact.

This course will provide an introduction to programming for sound synthesis and real-time performance using the Max/MSP and Supercollider II languages. Students will learn the basic structures, strategies, concepts, and vocabularies of these two languages in order to prepare them for using these techniques within other sound department courses.

Electronics can be a kind of language that, when an artist becomes fluent in it, opens doors to numerous aesthetic possibilities. Students will learn the basic principles of electronics along with hands-on techniques for putting the power of electrons into their work. They will be introduced to electronic components and circuits for switching, sensing, making decisions, and, to a limited degree, linking to computers. Students will encounter digital and analog answers to some of the most common art-making needs, gaining a foundation which will enable them to continue to expand their repertoire of aesthetic technological skills.

This course approaches the tools provided by game engines as an experimental sound studio capable of creating new kinds of digital audio works for un-fixed media. Procedural audio tools can lead to endlessly evolving sound compositions and generative music; interactivity can empower navigability through sonic worlds, virtual sound installations, or the creation of new instruments; physics simulations can allow for real, hyperreal, and unreal audio environments for listeners, viewers, and gamers. Starting from the first day with the download of a game engine and a digital audio workstation and ending on the last with the critique of a sound-focused work, this class will provide a thorough introduction to authoring sound-focused art experiences using game engines.
Some of the scholars/artists we will study in this course include Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller¿s audio walks, Peter Gena, Poppy Crum, Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers among others. Of particular interest are works that explore the use of real time, interactive, and emergent systems that critically address the ways that sound, action, and presence shape the experience of listening bodies.
Screening may include virtual reality works such as Notes on Blindness by Colinart, La Burthe, and Middleton and Spinney or spatial audio experiences such as Scott Reitheman¿s Boom App.
Through weekly assignments and class studio time, we will focus first on building technical skills and developing some historical context related to game engine development, digital audio production, spatial hearing and spatial audio approaches, and real time motion tracking and interaction. Individual projects for formal class critiques will be proposed by students and may take the form of music composition, virtual sound installation, video game or VR sound design, new sonics forms, etc.