RISD Digital+Media, Fall 2013
Lauren McCarthy, laurmccarthy@gmail.com
Evelyn Eastmond, eeastmon@risd.edu
TA Chih Hao Yu, cyu01@risd.edu
TA Bec Conrad, rconrad@risd.edu
Wednesday, 1–6pm
Room 305, CIT/Mason Building
Office hours, Tuesday, 10-11am or 3–4pm
Location TBD (look around on 4th floor)
Overview
This studio-based course will introduce programming as a medium for artistic and design practices. Students will learn basic programming concepts through a series of short exercises, discussions, group presentations, and a longer studio project. Software practices will be grounded in a critical context to examine how and why contemporary artists choose to use software, and how software written by artists gets used and disseminated via the web. The course will also cover good programming practices and open source ideologies. Students will be working primarily with JavaScript. No prior programming experience is necessary.
Assignments
The first half of the course will be structured around 1-3 week shorter assignments. The second half of the course will be dedicated to developing a project of your own choosing. Along with programming assignments, there will also be occasional readings, videos, and other activities.
Assignments will be posted weekly, and due at time and date indicated, check the website frequently!
Asking for help
Each of the TAs will have weekly office hours (see above for times and locations). Class will normally run from 1-4pm, 4-6pm will be studio time / office hours.
We will not respond to personal emails with code questions, but ask them instead on the class google group! We will answer questions here so that everyone can learn, we also strongly encourage you to answer each other's questions. Please feel free to write us with logistical, conceptual, or other questions!
See the HALP! section on the resources page for more tutorials on debugging and asking for help.
Expectations
Programming can be challenging at first, but hang in there. Ask lots of questions of us, your TA, and your classmates. This course is intended to be useful to you and your studio practice. Let us know what you are interested in, and bring in exciting projects and examples you find.
The studio-based course/workshop will be highly interactive and your participation is critical. It includes preparing material and assignments, in-class discussions, critiques and collaborative work. Be ready to share what you’re working on with others, failures can be just as interesting as successes.
Attendance is essential, if you are going to be absent or late notify the TA.
Grading
Since this is a studio course, grades are primarily based on your commitment to the medium and its application to your practice. This is not a grade-heavy course, but here are some guidelines to help ensure your progress in the class throughout the semester:
Assignments: Short 1-week assignments will be graded on a ✓-, ✓, ✓+ basis. If assignments average to less than a ✓, final grade will automatically drop one letter grade. Criteria: completeness of assignment as detailed in the assignments page.
Midterm: Midterm critique will be graded on a ✓-, ✓, ✓+ basis. Criteria: preliminary sketch effort, completeness of idea and plan/outline for final project, critique participation.
Final: Final critique will be letter-graded and will be the largest factor in your final grade. Criteria: completeness of idea and final project, critique participation.
Participation: Consistent class attendance and class participation affects your grade.
About the library
The code you will be writing is based on a cutting-edge, fresh new version of Processing for the web. It's meant to give you the same access to graphical, computational and logical structures that Processing offers with the additional ability to interface with common web paradigms and technologies. Given that this version of Processing is so new, you can help us make it better by letting us know when you run into confusing problems or bugs (problems in the code). This framework is experimental and fragile, like most materials you may already be used to.