Table of Contents
Submission
The submission will be in three parts:
- Outline
- Rough Draft
- Final Paper
on Blackboard in the “Homework, quizzes, tests tab, projects folder”, Project 1 outline icon.
Description
Students will watch video that presents a group of artists who create interactive experiences. You will select two artists and their experiences for topics in your paper.
Describe how each artist you selected collaborates with engineers and technologists to create interactive experiences that are influenced by audience interaction or environmental interaction. (Include a citation for each and footnote at the bottom of the page).
For each selected project, create a one sentence description that includes its name (include a citation), and a basic description of the audience interaction experience.
How is integration of art and technology key to the presentation of the artwork? (Include at least one citation)
Structure
Introduction: Thesis statement.
Start the paper with a single sentence that describes the most important takeaway you will be presenting. Here is a link to some ideas about how to produce a well written and powerful thesis statement
Body
- Supporting paragraph 1 and 2
- Discuss each project and the technology used to create it. Describe the type of audience interaction with it.
- Supporting paragraph 3
- Compare or contrast two of the artists. What did they have in common or how are they different from each other? Why did each artist consider audience participation important?
Conclusion
- Restate your thesis. What technologies did the artists share? What was the significant comparison or contrast you
Video information
The video is a presentation of a series of three artists and one foundation, and how they use technology to create their visions.
Watch the video and choose two artists. Your essay should compare and contrast two of the artists. Additional information and links are provided for three of the artists. Please choose two of the three artists for your project.
How Artists Are Using Technology – YouTube
Geoffrey Drake-Brockman
The first artist to present in the video is Geoffrey Drake-Brockman a cybernetics artist. Use your vocabulary list to help you interpret his presentation. His ideas are interesting and exciting. If you select Drake-Brockman watch his TED TALK as he describes in detail his process of developing and presenting his work. His examines inert emergent phenomena. He likes to observe how the audience interacts in unexpected ways with his works. Using coding and robotics the artist is able to create an interactive experience with his audience that creates unintended results.
Factum Foundation
The second presenter is an academic who presented the efforts of Factum Foundation to preserve and recreate Cultural heritage in detail with the goal to preserve the cultural history for the future. Factum Foundation develops new techniques in digital recording and processing to record artworks of many different types, from paintings and manuscripts to monumental sculptures and caves.
Janet Echelman
The Third artist is Janet Echelman. She creates outdoor sculptures that adapt to wind light and rain. These sculptures are massive, installed at traffic circles and city squares. She presented her work in a TED TALK that describes her journey as an artists’ and her ability to collaborate with local crafts people and engineers in technology to create her works. Echelmans work includes the use of crafts to influence the materials and structures of her art. But she also includes data and technology to present huge works in urban areas that interact with local natural wind and light.
Miral Kotb
The fourth artist is Miral Kotb, the founder of Illuminate dancers. She is the backbone of all the coding that interacts with the Illuminate choreography. Her original life plan was to become a professional dancer due to a serious illness she studied coding and electronics. After her recovery she collated her two passions of dance and coding to establish the dance company Illuminate.
Terminology
| Word | Definition | Artist |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropomorphism | Ascribing human attributes to an inanimate object or another animal. | Drake-Brockman |
| Complexity theory | The theory that processes having a large number of seemingly independent states can spontaneously order themselves into a coherent system. | Drake-Brockman |
| Emergence | Often a characteristic of complex systems: one can get unexpected behaviors not reducible to original functions | Drake-Brockman |
| Found objects | Art created from items that were not originally intended to be materials from which art is made. | Drake-Brockman |
| Pedestrian interaction | audience experience with the artwork | Drake-Brockman |
| Robot mythologies | engagement between people and created things | Drake-Brockman |
| Simulacrum (pl. Simulacra) | A representation or copy of an existing person or thing | Drake-Brockman |
| State machine | a device that can be in exactly one of a finite number of discrete conditions at a time, and that can change its state based on input and awareness of current state. | Drake-Brockman |
| Database | A database is a systematic collection of data. They support electronic storage and manipulation of data. | Echelman |
| Coding | term for computer programming, an activity in which computer programmers tell a computer what to do. | Kotb |
