Art and Design Commons^™

Creating With Code: Critical Thinking And Digital Foundations, Brad Tober

Mid-America College Art Association Conference 2012 Digital Publications

While students are often attracted to opportunities to learn how to use software applications commonly employed by digital artists and designers, the fact remains that time spent on purely software-based instruction in the classroom is time that could arguably be better spent on exploring the broader conceptual issues of making digital work. This presentation begins to frame an argument for the comprehensive integration of code-based technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Processing/Java, openFrameworks/C++, and Objective-C, into digital art and design foundation curricula. This integration holds the potential to position code-based technologies as new media for teaching art and design alongside …

Design & Communication: The Future Of Service-Learning, Ulrike Gencarelle M.A., Laura Gabiger Phd, Deana Marzocchi

Computer Graphics Department Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Poster for a presentation at the Eastern Region Campus Compact Conference 2012.

Depicted are online writing class projects, as well as web and print design examples created by Johnson & Wales (Providence Campus) Digital Media department design students for non-profit organizations in Rhode Island communities.

Light, Data, And Public Participation, Dave Colangelo, Patricio Davila

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

As practices in reactive architecture and locative media converge and urban screens and projection technologies proliferate we are becoming increasingly able to interact with data in public space. This confluence presents us with modes of digitally mediated participation in urban space that highlight bodily and architectural relationships with data rich environments as well as new sets of problems and possibilities regarding aesthetics, poetics, and politics. The article will analyze works by Alfredo Jaar, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, as they respectively exemplify the efficacy of the key components of public data visualization: mapping, expanded presence through architecture, and the ‘incompleteness’ …

The Culturator: Film Noir Meets Bike Culture, Daniel Dean

Art & Design Faculty Research

Part of this weekend’s nuit blanche Northern Spark festival, project Mobile Experiential Cinema invites goers to embark on a rambling, bicycle-mounted, multi-location cinematic experience that blends bike culture with locally-bred film. Created by artists Daniel Dean and Ben Moren, the project launched alongside the inaugural Northern Spark fest last year as an interactive projected film-focused group ride featuring live performance elements and urban exploration embodying all plot twists and theatrical curve balls we’ve come to expect from the mystery genre. We caught up with Mobile Experiential Cinema collaborators Dean and Moren to chat about the project’s creation, its noir influences …

Dismantling The Monolith: Post-Media Art And The Culture Of Instability, Nora Almeida

Publications and Research

Art that falls under the “new media” paradigm is problematic, or rather, it renders many traditional assumptions about art as problematic. In a practical sense, new media art raises fundamental questions about the nature of curation and preservation and the role of cultural heritage institutions as stewards of digital assets. Curation and preservation challenges, while significant, are fundamentally a symptom of a more catastrophic failure of concepts and language to adequately address changing relationships between art, materiality, and audiences. This article explores how burgeoning concepts in information and media theory may help shape curation contexts and redefine approaches to preservation. …

500 Year Documentation, Francis T. Marchese, Phd, Maninder Pal Kaur Shergill

Wilson Center for Social Entrepreneurship

Museum visitors today can regularly view 500 year old art by Renaissance masters. Will visitors to museums 500 years in the future be able to see the work of digital artists from the early 21st century? This paper considers the real problem of conserving interactive digital artwork for museum installation in the far distant future by exploring the requirements for creating documentation that will support an artwork's adaptation to future technology. In effect, this documentation must survive as long as the artwork itself -- effectively, in perpetuity. A proposal is made for the use of software engineering methodologies as solutions …