Joseph Michael Kramer

This team-taught introductory studio provides a foundation for creative work across contemporary media practices. Students explore how systems, tools, and materials co-exist in an expansive ecosystem of technical possibility, to be mixed and used to create works that engage with technology as tool, medium, and terrain for playful exploration.
Through hands-on workshop modules, individual projects and possibilities for collaboration, the course introduces approaches drawn from creative coding, electronics, 3D, games, and related media to create responsive, time-based, and interactive audiovisual works. Creative misuse, tinkering, hacking, probing and breaking are strongly encouraged. Students gain a broad interdisciplinary grounding in the skills, concepts, histories, and key areas of inquiry necessary for informed artistic engagement with technology.
Weekly sessions combine technical instruction with conceptual framing, encouraging students to develop their own ideas while introducing the broader AT/SP curriculum, pathways, and areas of practice. No prior experience required.

This class goes beyond the idea of ?surround sound? to consider the possibilities and challenges inherent in presenting sonic compositions to listeners through something other than the default left and right loudspeakers. From the spatial illusions of stereo and ambisonic arrays to tiny, tinny speaker fields, techniques for designing and experiencing multichannel, spatialized sound work will be explored. Emphasis will be given to emerging technologies and experimental techniques. DIY approaches and accessible tools, such as those available for VR sound, will be explored on the path to a practice that foregrounds the presentation of sound in space. A case for mono will be considered.

Some of the artists whose work we will explore include Janet Cardiff, Natasha Barrett, Iannis Xenakis, Florian Hecker, and Tristan Perich. Readings will include artist statements as well as technical manuals for relevant tools.

Weekly assignments are designed to emphasize specific technical or aesthetic concerns such as issues of electronic and acoustic power, multichannel playback formats, spatial audio in virtual reality, audience experience and the ?sweet spot?. One to two portfolio projects will be created and presented in class in two formal critiques.

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.