Assignments

/participation 15%. Your participation grade covers your attendance and your upbeat, dynamic engagement in classes and class activities. Major points for actively referring to specific excerpts from that week's reading! If you are generally quiet in class, or otherwise concerned about how I might perceive your engagement, come see me so we can strategize your participation so that it is comfortable yet challenging to you, and trackable for me.
Another note on participation: Learning digital tools and processes can be hard and sometimes intimidating. We have to ask questions, and yet for some reason we are scared to (why?). In this class I will reward you if you keep asking questions until you get it, and those of you who are eager to help your peers. We often need to hear something explained in a different way in order to understand.

/a1. 5% Website to hold work for the semester. Full assignment here

/a2. 15% Online Dataportrait (Self Portrait for a Spy)
Online Dataportrait (Self Portrait for a Spy): For this assignment, you will create a self portrait of who you are with no 'selfie' images of yourself; rather, this self portrait will be made up of metadata, ip addresses, links, and/or other kinds of codes that paint a picture of who you are on the internet.... Please 'hand code' using your new html and css skills. javascript, php, etc. optional. No Dreamweaver or packages. Full assignment description here

/a3. 15% Nonlinear or interactive narrative: Stories for our time.
You will be making an interactive story that informed by data and database aesthetics. In a2 we worked with our own metadata to tell a story; in a3, you are invited with work with a larger data set to construct a different, more complicated, or unexpected interactive narrative. We will explore work with images, text, databases, form elements, and some interactive javascript elements to generate a dynamic narrative that is built with data. Work with video is also possible. Full assignment here

/a4. 5% Copyright and the commons
Put a Creative Commons license on each of your project pages: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/ (and required for all subsequent projects). Please complete by Weds March 27.

/a5. 15% Spider
A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing. Full assignment here

/a6. 20% Kits for a Better Future. Drawing from both the work of Fluxus artists and also modeled from the science fiction novels we read, we will work with fabrication technologies to make kits and multiples.Full assignment here

/a7. 10% Reading responses and Sketchbooks. Reading responses (to most of the artworks and readings each week) are due the Friday after the reading is due, by 11:59p. Reading responses can be both visual and/or written. It must be clear that the text has been read; if the primary response is through visual material, consider adding bullet points that connect the image to the reading so it is clear your are grappling with the works. We will try to make time each week to write about assigned art and writings in class. You may skip two weeks of responses.

I also want to see ongoing 'sketches', experiments with code, notes and mock-ups to develop each project -- this visual and written material can manifest however your creative process works, but it should be ongoing, and I should see development. You are encouraged to draft out ideas, patterns, art projects, pseudocode, etc. prior to implementing anything in code. You will be a better digital artist because of this practice!

I will collect or view your sketchbooks a 2-3 times during the semester to see your thought process, and responses. If there are certain pages you would like to keep private you can tape them off or otherwise indicate that they are private