Time Schedule:
Allison Kudla
DXARTS 490
Seattle Campus
Taught by UW faculty and visiting artists, engineers, scientists, and humanities scholars.
Class description
Experiential Surrealism, Site Specfic Digital Art: The history of art has a long and deep fascination with creating abstracted and surreal realities within our mind's landscape. In the second half of the 20th Century pioneers in EarthArt managed to embed these realities into our physical landscape, rather than leaving the representations inside of the rectilinear picture frame. Other artists began working with digital projections and lighting to create new spaces or skins on the surface of physical reality with the goal of augmenting and altering our visual reality. The primary focus of this class is to implant students with a specific theoretical thread in an art historical discourse that will empower them to recognize the myriad of possibilities capable for embedding further layers of dimensionality into our physical reality through the use of technology and research on the nature of the materials, spaces and systems they intend to augment. The students will choose specific spaces or systems; rearrange, reform or reinvent them with the primary goal in mind of creating a site specific augmented version of the original reality. Various techniques for exploring ways of doing this will be presented, including basic digital sound and image manipulation techniques, video, mechatronics and finally art historical research on logic systems and poetic discourses invoked in works of a similar type.
Taught by Allison Kudla and Max Keene
Student learning goals
Introduction to site specific art
Exposure to contemporary works on the subject
Project planning and evaluation
Fast paced ideation
Basic technical skills in audio, video, image processing and mechatronics
Theoretical and historical discourse for site specific art
General method of instruction
Group work, tribal learning, field trips, many examples of various works for inspiration.
Recommended preparation
A background and deep interest in art and computing.
Class assignments and grading
Short turnaround studio based "studies" intended for the purpose of liberating the imagination and seeding long term projects to be potentially carried out as the artist furthers his/her own practice later on in their career.
Creativity and ability to take risks. Depth of engagment with the materials and ideas presentd in class. The degree of technical execution and craft of the final product or experience. Ability to adequately scale idea to time alotted and resources available.
