A project-oriented course for creative coders wishing to take their computational art practice to the next level. Lectures will address aesthetic, conceptual, and technical concerns arising at the intersection of creative coding, interactive media, and software art. This six-credit workshop will focus on key techniques in programming visual, textual and aural media including recursion, compression, data-mapping, rule-based systems, stochastic processes and machine learning. Students will complete assignments and create mini-projects, building toward a publication-worthy final project of their choice.

The course will be run as a studio (project-driven, production-oriented, critique-based) augmented with regular lectures. Early lectures will introduce the core ideas of software art, theoretically, historically, and technically. As the course progresses, discussions will focus on differing conceptions of software art and the core debates that have driven the field. The final section of the course will focus on large-scale, student-initiated projects. Here students will develop, document, and present works-in-progress for critique, as they learn to develop original artworks and to enhance their practical awareness of software as a medium. In class presentations and critiques, they will be asked to contextualize their work, and the work of their peers, in the larger theoretical and historical frameworks of software art.