course description
Our particular flavor of the Professional Practice Experience will focus on the professional practice of “creative technologists”. This is a term used by various industries (Event Production, Digital/Advertising Agencies, Design Studios, Technology Companies, etc) to describe someone working professionally at the intersection of art and technology. This semester we'll be learning the skills and workflows necessary for success in this field. It's typical for creative technologists to be "generalists", having some background in various creative coding frameworks, creative software (Adobe, Blender, etc) and creative hardware (Microcontrollers, sensors, etc). While the full scope of creative technology is too much to cover in a single course, our focus (Internet/Web based creative projects) is an area of creative technology that encompasses many aspects of the practice.
The phrase “creative technologist” isn’t even standardized and can mean wildly different things between companies. Nevertheless, chances are that you see yourself as an artist who uses technology as a medium, or you’re [pardon the overused phrase] “working at the intersection of art and technology.”
Blair Neal
The web browser is a blank canvas preinstalled in every kind of Internet connected device (mobile phones, laptops, VR headsets, etc). Through its code we can conjure up any kind of preexisting and not yet invented screen based media. The browser is also an art studio, equipped with tools for making hypertext, interactive video, 2D and 3D animation, electronic music, sound sampling and synthesis, mixed reality (AR/VR), artificial intelligence and so much more. This semester we'll learn how to unlock all of the browser's creative potential by learning it's core languages (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and it's creative APIs. The browser is also a place to share our work, collaborate with others and explore all manner of interesting cultural activity. In this course we will also learn the tools, workflows, conventions and methodologies of professional creative developers by working as an open source arts collective as we collaboratively develop a piece on online artware (software art).
