Interactive Media Arts

Fall 2019

Room 824

T/Th 3:15–4:30 PM

Course Description

People use their bodies in the workplace whether they are dancers or athletes, managers or engineers. Physical wellbeing, social teamwork, and cognition may be affected by our movement practices. How do people use physicality and motion to think? What is the interaction between body, motion, place, and goals? We will explore these questions by building physical-computing-based systems that encourage us to bring movement into new times and places in daily life, that coach users and develop learning environments for movement practices, and that test our understanding of ways that we “think with the body”.

In this course we will bring practices such as fitness, dance, sports, and martial arts into a series of interactive installations, movement learning projects, and workspace modifications built on computing, sensing and actuator technologies. In this course we will also explore these questions throughreview of existing creative projects in this area, readings, presentations, and knowledge-sharing sessions.

If you do parkour, dance, soccer or any other movement practice…you would have an opportunity to explore that in depth. Or you could pursue a project around a more stationary physical experience, like sitting on a sofa.

Prerequisite

Application Lab, Interaction Lab, Communications Lab, or programming experience.

Instructors

Margaret Minsky creates multimedia artifacts exploring learning, improvisation and thought. Her recent investigations concern embodied interaction with technology aimed at increasing cognitive, social, and physical wellbeing. She recently completed a residency at the ATLAS Center, an interdisciplinary laboratory at the the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Her core research has been in the field of haptic interfaces (computational interfaces that simulate objects that you can touch and feel), as well as in computer graphics and educational technology. She developed the first technique for creating haptic textures as part of her doctoral research at the MIT Media Lab. Her publication areas are in computer graphics, haptics, mechanical engineering, and educational computation, and she has served on conference program committees including Siggraph. Dr. Minsky previously directed research at Atari Cambridge Laboratory and Interval Research Corporation. Her interests include circus trapeze performance and textile fabrication.

Oliver Steele has worked in industry, where he held positions at Apple Computer, AOL, Nest Labs, and a variety of startup companies as a CTO, engineering manager, product manager, and software architect. He has built web, embedded, and operating system products in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Common Lisp, and other languages, and collaborated on the design of a programming language (Dylan). Previous to his position at NYU, he taught at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts. His interests include juggling and woodworking.