Instructor: Christiane Paul
E-mail:
paulc@newschool.edu
Office hours: by
appointment.
Course Description: This course invites
students to think experimentally about media-based
environments and experiences. It investigates designs,
contexts, and audience uses of
different mediated spaces. Students will explore how
attention to and design for
embodiment and for media-based experiences might lead
to innovative media practices in
public spaces, museums, art galleries, institutions and
online digital environments. The
class will also consider the role that locative, mobile
media--camera and video phones,
Blackberries, iPhones, and mobile devices with embedded
GPS--play in the mediation of
our environment. Mobile devices have become new
platforms for cultural production,
providing an interface through which users can
participate in networked public spaces.
The discussions of specific mediated spaces will be
informed by contemporary theory on
experience, space, time, and embodiment. Mediation
enables various forms of social
interaction and has to be considered in relation to
concepts of embodiment, the creation of
meaning, as well as individual autonomy and agency.
Students will analyze how
mediation affects our awareness of the social and
physical contexts of the environment
surrounding us. Through assignments and readings, the
course will explore the effect that
different categories of mediated spaces have on the
understanding of personal, cultural,
and informational contexts.
Attendance Policy: Students are expected to
attend all classes
regularly and punctually. Two unexcused absences will
automatically
result in lowering the final grade, and three unexcused
absences may
lead to failure of class. Coming to class late three
times will be
considered equivalent to one absence.
Required Course Work:
Completion of class assignments
Final project *or* paper (due May 7/14):
Paper: Write a paper on one of the subjects discussed in the
class. Your essay should engage with the issues addressed in the readings and assignments related to your chosen subject and articulate some important
aspects of it. Length of the paper is to be 2400 words + references.
OR
Project: Develop a 'mediated environment' for a museum /
interior space; or urban screen; or mobile media; or within Second
Life / a virtual world. Your environment can be an educational or activist or artistic project. You should conduct 'design research' with potential users of the
environment (e.g. your peers), as well as 'user experience' research and interpret how the use and design of media in your environment provoke inventive understandings and re-thinkings of media. Your project presentation can take the form of drawings / sketches or any multimedia format.
Grading:
Attendance and in-class
participation (quantity & quality): 20%
Posting on class website: 20%
Assignments (mid-term etc.): 30%
Final paper/project: 30%
The following syllabus is subject to change.
Week 1 | Mon 1/23
OverviewIntroduction to course: topics and course work.
Week 2 | 1/30
Interior Spaces and Museums
Design Research for Mediated Environments
Brenda Laurel (ed.), Design Research: Methods and
Perspectives (MIT Press)
Preface: Peter Lunenfeld, "The Design Cluster," p. 10-15
Introduction: Brenda Laurel, "Muscular Design," p. 16-19
Michael Naimark, "Sensory Anomalies" p. 109-117
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical vehicles: writings, projects,
interviews (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), "Interrogative Design," p.16-17
5-5:30PM: Q&A with Michael Naimark via Skype (TBD)
Projects:
Immersive Panoramic Film Installations:
Michael Naimark, Interactive and Immersive Film
Installations | 1977-1997 / Be Now Here Interactive
Jeffrey Shaw, Place Ruhr / Place - A User's Manual / Eve
Wodizcko, Interrogative Design Group Center
http://cavs.mit.edu/artists.html?id=417,418
Week 3 | 2/6
Interior Spaces & Museums
From Illusion to Immersion (Virtual Reality)
Oliver Grau, Virtual Art - From Illusion to Immersion
(MIT Press)
Chapter 2: Historic Spaces of Illusion, "Immersive Image Strategies of
the Classical
World," pp. 25-33
Chapter 4: Intermedia Stages of Virtual Reality in the Twentieth
Century, pp. 141-161;
pp. 169-176
Projects:
Char Davies, Osmose / Ephemere
Maurice Benayoun, World Skin and other works
Week 4 | 2/13
Interior Spaces & Museums
Curating and Presenting Mediated Environments / Exhibitions
Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: TBD
Christiane Paul, Interfacing New Media: From the White Cube to the Black Box and Beyond in New Media in the White Cube and Beyond - Curatorial Models for Digital Art
Games Case Study (TBD)
Projects:
Exhibition Examples / Case Studies:
Data Dynamics, Whitney Museum of American Art
Feedback, LABoral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Asturias, Spain
Feedforward - The Angel of History, LABoral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Asturias, Spain
NetCondition /
Future Cinema, ZKM (Zentrum für Kultur and Medien) / Center for Culture and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany
Games. Computer Games by artists, Hartware Medien Kunst Verein (HMKV), Dortmund, Germany
Mon 2/22 President's Day
Week 5 | 2/27
Urban Screens
Erkki Huhtamo, "Elements of
Screenology"
Mirjam Struppek, "Urban Screens - The Urbane Potential of Public Screens
for Interaction" in: intelligent agent Vol. 6 No. 2, Special Issue:
Papers presented at the ISEA2006
Symposium, August 2006
Recommended Readings:
[Please click on html to access full articles]
Mirjam Struppek and Pieter Boeder (eds.), Special
Issue on Urban Screens, First Monday peer-reviewed journal on the
internet - February 2006:
Lev Manovich, The poetics of urban media surfaces
5-5:30PM: Q&A with Malcolm Levy on Electric Speed exhibition via Skype (To be confirmed)
Resources and Projects:
Organizations:
Urban
Screens
The Big Screen Project
Streaming Museum
Creative Time, The 59th Minute
Projects:
Urban Screens and Media Facades
Week 6 | 3/5 Locative
Media
City and Future City
Fredric Jameson, "Future City"
Saskia Sassen, "Cityness in the Urban
Age" in Urban Age Bulletin 2 (Autumn 2005)
Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard, Urban Computing and its Discontents
Institute for the Future, Cities in Transition (2010)
Recommended Reading:
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical vehicles: writings, projects,
interviews (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), "Designing for the City of Strangers" pp. 4-16
Christiane Paul, "The Prophet's Prosthesis: An Interview with Krzysztof
Wodiczko" in Sculpture Vol.18 No. 4 (May 1999)
Resources and Projects:
Rem Koolhaas, OMA
Digital Media City, Seoul, Korea
Sungdo Future City (video), Korea
Mid-term assignment:
Paper: Write a short paper (750 words) on mediated environments
(in museums, galleries, interior spaces or on urban screens) or one of
the projects discussed in class, incorporating the readings and issues
discussed in class.
OR
Project: Develop a 'mediated environment' for a museum, gallery,
interior space or urban screen. Your environment can be an educational
project; an installation of your own work; a reconfiguration of an
existing work. Your project presentation can take the form of drawings
/ sketches or any multimedia format.
Spring Break 3/12 - 3/18
Week 7 | 3/19
Mid-term Presentations
Week 8 | 3/26
Locative Media
Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban
Geography(1955)
Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground - Architecture,
Pervasive Computing,
and Environmental Knowing (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2004)
Chapter 2: "Embodied Predispositions" pp. 27-44
Chapter 3: "Habitual Contexts" pp. 46-52
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow - The Psychology of
Engagement with Everyday Life (Basic Books: New York, 1997)
Chapter 2: "The Content of Experience" pp. 17-34
Recommended Reading:
Alison Sant, Redefining the Basemap
Resources and Projects:
Media Annotations of Cartographic Space
Scott Paterson, Marina Zurkow, and Julian Bleecker, PDPal (2002 - )
Proboscis' Urban
Tapestries
(2002-2004)
Repositioning Cartography
Esther Polak and Jeroen Kee, Amsterdam Real Time (2002)
Teri Rueb, The
Choreography of Everyday Movement (2001)
Scott Snibbe and Amy Balkin, Cabspotting
Tomas Apodaca, Fly
Cab
Esther Polak, MILK (2003) / http://locative.x-
i.net/piens/index.html
C5, Landscape Initiative (2002-2005)
Behavioral Awareness - Responding to the Environment
Jennifer Crowe and Scott Paterson, Follow Through (2005)
Layla Gaye, Sonic City (2002-04)
Location-based Storytelling
Teri Rueb, Core Sample
Julian Bleecker, WiFi ArtCache
Valentina Nisi, Dr. Ian Oakley, and Dr. Mads Haahr, Media Portrait of the Liberties
(MPL)
Week 9 | 4/2
Locative Media
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, "Walking in the City" / "Spatial Stories"
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, "The Dialectics of Inside and Outside," pp. 211-231
Eric Paulos, Urban Probes (talk at CHI 2005)
Resources and Projects:
Citizen Science and Environmental Context-Awareness
Urban Atmospheres group at the Intel Research Lab, Participatory Urbanism
Eric Paulos, The
Living Environments Lab / http://www.living-
environments.net/projects/citizenscience
Preemptive Media, AIR
(Area's Immediate Reading)
Natalie Jeremijenko, Feral Robotic
Dogs
Urba
n Sensing (CENS / UCLA)
SensorPlanet
(Nokia)
SenseWeb
(Microsoft)
The
Urban Pollution Monitoring Project (Equator UK)
Week 10 | 4/9
Virtual Worlds / Second
Life
Hubert Dreyfus, On the Internet
Screening: 365, Avatara / Jason Spingarn-Koff, Life 2.0
Resources and Projects:
Institute for Digital Media Arts, Ball State University, Flickr Gettr / SLURL
Institute for Digital Media Arts, Ball State University, Traversal
Peter Greenaway, Speech on Machinima
Week 11 | 4/16
Virtual
Worlds / Games
From Homo Ludens Ludens catalogue:
Erich Berger, “Homo Ludens Ludens. Locating play in contemporary culture and society” (p. 34-36)
Daphne Dragona, “Who Dares to De-Sacralise Today's Play?” (p. 42-47)
Carolina Miranda, “Let the Games Begin” (ARTnews, April 2011)
Browse through works, either in the catalogue or at the website [click on “Next” for project image and on the project image for description] and pick a few works that you find interesting as mediated environments
Download Facade at http://www.interactivestory.net/ and explore it a couple of times
Recommended listening:
NPR, “On the Media”:
The Culture of Gaming
The Future of Gaming
How Nintendo Saved the Video Game Industry
The Influence of Gaming
Games Resources
Resources:
Exhibitions:
LABoral, Gijon, Spain, Homo Ludens Ludens (2008)
LABoral, Gijon, Spain, PLAYWARE - GAMEWORLD EXPANSION PACK
LABoral, Gijon, Spain, GAMEWORLD
HTTP Gallery, London, Game/Play_(2006)
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL), Next Level: Art, Games & Reality_(2006)
Pace Wildenstein, Breaking and Entering, December 10, 2005 - January 28, 2006
Mediateca Caixaforum, Game as Critic As Art_ (2005)
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF, Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts_(2004) / http://interactive.usc.edu/archives/001414.html
New Museum of Contemporary Art, Killer Instinct (2003/04)
Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, Australia, Plaything_(2003)
Hartware, Dortmund, Germany, Games, curated by Tilman Baumg_rtel, Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler_ (2003)
Institute for Contemporary Art, Cape Town, South Africa, (re:Play) (2003) curated by Radioqalia_
Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA, SHIFT-CTRL, Robert Nideffer, Antoinette LaFarge, (2000)
Cracking the Maze, curated by Anne-Marie Schleiner, online (1999)
Week 12 | 4/23
Virtual Worlds / Second Life
Denise Doyle, "Embodied presence: the imaginary in virtual worlds"
Paul Sermon, "Liberate your avatar; the revolution will be social networked"
Avatar Identity: Meeting in Sl with Josephine Dorado's class.
Resources:
Eva and Franco Mattes
aka 0100101110101101.ORG, 13 Most Beautiful Avatars
Eva and Franco Mattes
aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Synthetic Performances
Life to the 2nd Power
Dante Hotel Regenerated at http://slurl.com/secondlife/106/107/1027/
Life Squared and the Dante Hotel - a project description
Week 13 | 4/30
Games as Mediated Environments
Games for Change and guest (TBD)
Week 14 & 15 | 5/7 & 5/14
Project and Paper Presentations
|