Class Digital and Interactive Arts

This class fosters experimental creative approaches, while promoting the acquisition of methodological and projectual skills. It unfolds through several work stages. The first stage (TP#1) consists of an investigation about pioneering artistic practices, including the use of a parametric visualisation model that facilitates the analisis of perceptual experience. In the second stage (TP#2) the students create sounds related with those analysed works, while considering the parametric model. Those same sounds are subsequently employed in interactive compositions, made in URLs (TP#3) and Unity (TP#4). Finaly, the students form groups in order to develop more complex projects (TP#5) using digital, analogical or hybrid components. The work culminates with the presentation of interative systems, performances and instalations.

• Theoretical frame
  • Notions of agency and interactive composition. Simple vs. complex mappings.
  • Digital analysis of sound vs. human perception.
  • Levels of communication: determined vs. undetermined purpose. ‘Open work’.
  • Parameters for the analysis of perceptual experience:
    • interaction design/ cognitive effort
    • dynamics/ attention
    • audio-visual relationship/ multisensory integration
    • semantics
    • physical space
  • Spatial presence and performative arena.
• Practical work
  • Individual
    • URL with research about two pioneering artworks. Parametric analysis of those works. 
    • Creation of multiple sounds related with those works. Analysis of that relation.
    • Interative composition for URL (image mapping).
    • Interativa composition in Unity (with template).  Articulation with analogue inputs (optional). Online documentation.
  • Collective
    • URL with planification and contextualization of a performance/ installation/ interactive system.
    • Concretization of the project.

It is permitted to use Chat GPT (similarly to Google and Wikipedia) in order to find bibliographic sources. - as long as those sources are properly consulted and referenced. It is always crucial to evaluate and select the results of any search, to consider different information sources, to make use of critical thinking, and to extrapolate further. Chat GTP can equally be used to revise spelling and gramar, as long as that revision is subsequently verified by the student. 

• Bolter, J. D. & Gromala, D. (2003). Windows and Mirrors, Interaction Design, Digital art, and the Myth of Transparency . Mit Press.
• Blackman, S; Wang, J. (2014). Unity for Absolute Beginners. Springer Science + New Media New York.
• Paul, C. (2015). Digital Art (3th ed.). London: Thames & Hudson.
• Sá, A. and Tanaka, A. (2022). A Parametric Model for Audio-Visual instrument Design, Composition and Performance. In S. Gibson, S. Arisona, D. Leishman, A. Tanaka (Eds.) Live Visuals: History, Theory, Practice (pp. 240-266). Routledge.  https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003282396
• Sá, A.(2024). Transdisciplinarity, Composition, Expression: Reflections of a Spherical Way of Thinking. In Leonardo, 57(1), 33-39.  MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02472