NM 420
Interactive Physical Computing (New Media Performance)

Instructor: Curt Cloninger / curt at lab404 dot com

New Media Performance is performance art which incorporates new media elements: video/audio, networks, and computation. This course explores the history, theory, and practice of New Media Performance. Students will read historical and theoretical texts, and will respond by creating and performing their own experimental work. Topics incude identity/body, time/space, immediacy/mediation, artist/audience, algorithmic composition, and VJ culture.

The projects and assignments required in this class are time-intensive and require an average of 9 hours per week on the computer, either in a campus lab or on your own computer that contains the software used in the class.

Student Learning Objectives
In this course you will:

• Gain insight into the historical evolution of performance art and its relationship to 20th Century culture.
• Understand performance art in the context of 20th/21st century art and "new media" art.
• Develop artistic methods that take creative advantage of new media forms in a live performance context.
• Produce original artworks that address a variety of conceptual topics.
• Recognize and utilize your body as an artistic medium.
• Recognize your own agency as a new media artist, and become confident exercising that agency to modulate and change the world.

• Interactivity
• Time
• Space
• Bodies

Required Materials:
Bulldog email account -- check regularly
Student web hosting space (for posting work)
flash drive, notebook or sketchbook, graph paper, pencils, and pens