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Instructor:
Dr. Diane Gromala & Invited Experts
[email:gromalal@sfu.ca] IMPORTANT: title your emails, beginning with <811>
to ensure that they will not get lost among massive amounts of email effluvia.
Office hours: Thursdays, 4-5pm & by appt.
Dr. Gromala can be located M-Th in the BioMedia Lab or her 14th floor office (across from Desiree's, in the admin area).
Location:
SFU Surrey
Thursdays, 5:30–8:20pm, Room 3040
Course Description:
This graduate level course is a critical exploration of interactive art history, theory and practice.
Students will learn to identify and explore major issues that artists and designers face in interactive art,
interaction design and their emerging critical discourses through readings, seminar discussions, writing,
experiences of interactive art and media in galleries, museums and theatres, along with conceptual
explorations and material or performative experimentation.
This course prepares students to identify, contextualize, analyze and critique emerging directions in
what is variously termed interactive art, media art, computational art and interaction or speculative design.
It enables students to question assumptions, locate values and determine and design tools through which
they may communicate, express, witness, challenge, embody or represent. Issues are explored in relation to
the diversity of interactive art as both practice and theory.
Particular focus is given to the intersection of computation, science and art through a comparative historical
survey of knowledge construction (epistemology) and practice (ontology).
This includes emerging interdisciplinary, philosophical and cultural influences that shape and reflect
contemporary interactive art practices. Students will select and investigate a relevant topic related to
their research and present a conceptual framework of their findings in the form of writing and/or other media,
co-determined by the instructor and student.
3 credit hours
Evaluation
25% Participation: class attendance, out-of-class attendance (visits), 2 presentations
Presentation 1: beginning of the semester, work-in-progress
Presentation 2: end of the semester: formal (conference practice)
Note: depending on your goals as a grad student, the final presentation may take another form, but you need to discuss that option and gain my written approval.
25% Experiments & mapping
50% Writing, mapping & taxonomy assignments
Readings & media
All readings will be available online.
Symbiogenic Experiences in the Interactive Arts
Please temporarily refer to the <Current Events> link for the other readings.
