Questions from the August 26 Exit Ticket.
My responses are in italic.
What will we be talking about?
- How much of the class will be lecture in coding? Some, to be sure, but not very much.
- What will we be spending most of our class time doing? The course time will be primarily spent on lecture and discussion -- talking about meaning-making strategies. What's worth making, and why.
- How much will art be taught in this class, versus is it more so something that is already a precedent of knowledge and/or experience to be expected of this course (as it is an art course)? I'm not sure what you mean by "How much will art be taught". There are a lot of lectures where I will show you projects by previous artists, so you hopefully get a diverse appreciation of practices in new media art.
What if I need help?
- Lots of specific questions about Java because I've never used it before! But I will probably figure them out with tutorials. Technically, we're using JavaScript, which is a related but different language. There will also be some C#. I'm glad you realize you can find tutorials online.
- More than particular question about the course/info we discussed, I'm just worried about being familiar to coding again. I haven't coded for the entire summer and just worried with a new language! It takes regular practice, just like any language.
- Will I need an extensive knowledge of mathematical concepts for this course? It can certainly help, but it's not essential. Some mathematical concepts are just visual concepts with a different description.
- Are we required to use P5 for the first few projects? Yes, though you're welcome to use other environments in addition.
- How much guidance can we expect to receive throughout the course, independent of critiques? Do you mean technically, conceptually or aesthetically? There will be plenty of opportunities to discuss your projects with the professor, the TA, and your peers.
- Just main thing I am nervous about is not being as technically skilled in coding as maybe some other students but I do have experience and just wondering how TA / office hours work and how I can get any help I may need along the way. The professor maintains office hours two afternoons a week. Come to the STUDIO and talk. We also have group work nights where you can work alongside your peers.
Specific projects and tools
- can we talk a bit more about projection art in the future? I'll show some. We don't have a projection assignment, but that shouldn't stop you from borrowing a video projector and doing some experiments.
- When can I do Virtual Reality stuff as part of this class? We'll look at VR projects in early November. Although we don't have a unit on VR, we will be learning Unity and making projects with AR, which is technologically very similar. The last month of class will be spent on this.
- How in-depth will we be going into AR? will we be using Vuforia with Unity? Not sure what you mean by "in depth". We'll be using ARFoundation in Unity, which abstracts ARCore (Android) and ARKit (iOS). We may additionally have a Vuforia template for people to work from, no promises yet.
- How much will we be working with computer vision? We'll be using high-level toolkits (face trackers, machine learning processing kits for images) in a practical way, and we will be looking at a lot of art that uses input from cameras. But learning computer vision techniques from scratch (OpenCV, etc.) is beyond the scope of this course.
- Can we use projects in this class for a larger project (senior studio)? The answer is not 'no'. But you should be aware that overall, I'm more concerned about this class being an opportunity to enhance your creative fluency through regular practice, than being a vehicle for making portfolio projects.