CT - Creative Technologies

Online community colloquium on topics in contemporary creativity and creative practices. How does creative work address its most challenging problems, both in the arts and in broader social and professional contexts? How does creative labor intersect with other forms of labor to address power and inequity in society? Guest lecturers address the critical contexts—including racism, ableism, patriarchy, and other structures of power—for cultural work, and how those contexts, which are inseparable from the discipline of art-making and curation in 21st-century technological contexts, can be transformed. (Formerly CT 1B, Imagination and Intervention: a Creative Technologies Colloquium.)

Introduction to digital design practices. How do contemporary design technologies and applications shape creative practice and expressive work? Students explore digital design tools and working methods, across a range of formats and mediums, through a project-centered framework. Technologies and projects are presented in conversation with visual design fundamentals, and a wide variety of historical and contemporary art and design works. Digital technologies for publishing and exhibiting work online are also introduced.

The proliferation of digital media since the early 2000s has shaped the way that we engage with every aspect of society. New social, political, economic, and creative forms have emerged, and so have our ways of relating to technology and each other. This course surveys a variety of digital media works, learning to analyze the expressive potential of a wide range of creative technologies. By the end of this course, students will have gained a deep understanding of the digital media landscape and its capacities (and limitations) toward creativity and social impact. (Formerly Issues in Digital Expression.)

Introduction to basic programming skills, including computer language tools and visual-interface programming tools for creative expression. Introduction to web authoring, image creation and editing, sound editing, and user experience design fundamentals, through skills acquisition-focused approach to individual and/or collaborative creative project(s). The final project is a work of playable media art/design, documentary media, interactive journalism/pedagogy/curation, or multi-media art/performance. Languages and applications will vary by instructor.

Explore media technologies by directly engaging digital platforms, transmission, and storage, as direct rather than indirect practices. Topics covered, through lenses of both theory and practice, include global circulation of media—emphasizing the contemporary digital image, relations between sound and mobile-technology media and the environment, and the technical infrastructure of digital interfaces and data visualization. Critiquing data collection, representation, and curation, student projects build a vocabulary for critical engagement with cultural production and conditions.

Cross Listed Courses

Enrollment is restricted to proposed and declared art majors.

The study of power in contemporary media environments. How do audience, genre, medium, and other contexts impact our reception of a message? Explores contemporary theory and practice of media, applied to commercial and institutional promotion, advertising, and activism. Enables critical views of media in social, cultural, and political contexts. Projects combine scholarship and creative work to invite students' imagination of a media world in which learning, dialogue, contemplation, fun, and play can help enable flourishing and just communities.

Project-driven practicum in arts and design applications of computer languages. Students apply new approaches to ongoing individual and collaborative projects. Students learn to code "from scratch," rather than through the modification of prototype examples. Explore how programming languages function not only as tools but as institutional frameworks, sometimes invisibly shaping social norms and contemporary art and design practices; learn conscientious uses of code that can contribute to accessible technology and the empowerment of audiences, users, and media consumers.

Project-driven practicum in technology-engaged creative collaboration in a range of hardware, software, and media contexts. Students develop a project while reimagining and questioning assumed relationships between technology and application. Course materials traverse creative collaboration comprehensively: from envisioning a project scope, to grant-writing and other fundraising. Students may use their final project in this course as a basis for their “capstone” project in the Senior Studio Production course.

Introduction to machine intelligence and creativity, contextualized historically and applied to contemporary problems, ranging from commercial “AI,” large language models, opaque and transparent algorithms for representation and creativity, and arts practices vulnerable to exploitation by corporate and state practices of information and data. How should consumers and producers of technology interpret AI production, as art , as design, and as entertainment? Students survey practices and outcomes of machine creativity for cultural production writ large, synthesizing them in collaborative scholarship and curation.

Introduction to computing for physical and sensory interaction, including machine-based sensors for audio, vision, and motion, and their uses in designed participatory experiences. How do sense-like functions in hardware and software compare and relate to the physiology of sensation and perception on which they are modeled? What are the implications of sensory interaction, ableism, disability, and accessibility? Student projects explore collaborative approaches to the production of interactive digital art and design. (Formerly CT 110.)

Story-building, participatory creativity, and performance in a wide range of time-based arts and design. Models for storytelling are drawn from film, television, music, theater, gaming, and other media, including collective improvisatory practices, mixed transmission environments from game-based narration to hip-hop. Special emphasis is placed on activist, experimental, and counter-hegemonic narration, Black, Indigenous, feminist, and queer contributions to contemporary arts, design, and performance practices.(Formerly CT 161.)

Introduces and develops literacy in queer arts practices and subcultures, exploring vital queer art communities as cultural phenomena. In the face of rising homophobia and transphobia locally, nationally, and internationally, this course affirms queer artists and students’ transformative work, in solidarity with Indigenous, immigrant, non-white, and disability justice communities. Students read critical perspectives on varied media, conduct interviews, and examine media collaboratively to generate novel and generative dialogue on queer arts practices in their contexts. (Formerly CT 163, Queer Art.)

Studio seminar elective covering a range of topics on sound and listening. Includes a practical component on recording, editing and composing using emerging audio software and is complemented by theoretical research into historical and contemporary theories of sound, listening, social practice, and the environment. (Formerly CT 165.)

This course is focused on voice, labor, and gender. Students research various forms of assistive technologies with a special focus on voice-based interactive platforms. Themes of automation, feminized labor, machine learning, and biotechnology are examined against a backdrop of a post-pandemic landscape. Students analyze and engage with science fiction, documentary, interactive media, and games. Each class includes seminar discussions, film screenings, creative prompts, and collaborative and participatory exercises based on assigned readings.

Students culminate the creative technologies degree by assembling artist/designer statements, curating their portfolio, learning a range of professional practices in the presentation of a body of work. Prepares graduating seniors to share creative findings, voice, and vision, commencing public life as artists, designers, and curators who take leadership in the complex communities and information landscapes of the 21st-century.