Project 1

This is the First Upkit Intensive.
It is designed to exercise your skills in dealing with parametric form. It has the following parts:

In addition to the above, you also have due three Looking Outwards assignments:

  • Looking Outwards: New-Media Arts/Design (Due 1/16)
  • Looking Outwards: Self-Quantification Tools (Due 1/21)
  • Looking Outwards: Information Visualization (Due 1/23)

The purpose of this assignment constellation is to ensure that you have had a practical exposure to, and that you are comfortable working with, several core arts-engineering environments and protocols — Processing, JavaScript, and OpenSCAD. As usual, there are Looking Outwards posts associated with this assignment as well, whose purpose is to immerse you in the social, cultural and artistic contexts in which these environments are used. Please note:

  • You are cautioned to begin this project early, and work on it in regular increments.
  • Even if you are already familiar with a given tool, I doubt you are expert. You can still deepen your knowledge of each toolkit, and strengthen your aesthetic and conceptual skills, by giving yourself new challenges.
  • Even if you are already expert with a given tool, you can should still use this exercise as an opportunity to invent. Few things are more disappointing than perfunctory work; if you already know a toolkit well, then your work should be even more interesting or well-crafted.

One final caution: most of the “course materials” for IACD — environments like D3, Processing and OpenFrameworks — are free, open-source tools developed by a small number of unpaid individuals in their spare time. Though they are intended to be both useful and learnable, these environments are not premasticated commercial products developed for a lowest common denominator of consumers by well-capitalized Fortune 500 companies, with rounded edges and safety assurances. These tools are buggy and documentation can be spotty, and it doesn’t take much to find yourself at the bleeding edge of the recently possible. Yet it should be obvious that people deal: and so will you.