Creative Code

Creative Code: a first year seminar

Course Description:

In Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing, Malcolm McCullough persuasively argues for interactive media as a principal liberal art of the twenty-first century. The field of interactive media, examples of which include computer-based art, medical imaging technologies, and hypertext poetry, is re-defining science and art. In this seminar we will work at the intersection of several emerging fields: information aesthetics, computer animation, interactivity, and hypertext literature. Throughout the course, students consider the implications of interdisciplinary collaborations on interactive media. How is interactive media produced and how does it re-cast our understanding of the relationship between humans and technology? What does it mean to say that we live in an interactive digital culture?

At the end of the course, students should know how to 1) think critically about being a “spimer” in a mediated world (see Bruce Sterling, Making Things, for the definition of a spimer); 2) write, think, and create in relation to interactivity; 3) visualize information using dynamic computer graphics, create simple interactive computer programs, and work with interactive texts and animated images.