LIZA STARK

This practice-based course sits at the intersection of craft and technology, textiles and electronics, softness and computation, storytelling and science fiction.

Craft is a practice underlying all cultures, unifying hand with mind, materials with tools, and high technology with low technology. Historically, craft is a means of communicating the knowledge, stories, and values of the individual and local community across generations. Likewise, technology has become our main form of mediated storytelling and contributes formatively to how we construct and perceive ourselves.

Links to past course sites: 2019, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013

Currents: Computing Textiles: A Hands-On History is an interdisciplinary course exploring the complex history and speculative future of technology by way of the history (and future) of textiles and craft.

Students in this course will develop skills in circuitry and coding as they relate to the construction of textiles. They will also develop skills in textile construction such as knitting, weaving, and dying as they relate to technology. Practical skill development will be accompanied by a deep practice in historical and theoretical research and writing. Discussions will include themes of gender, race, and society and students will be encouraged to challenge conventional history. We will examine the value society places in its tools and what that means for the objects they produce and we consume. In this course, we ask students to consider how we define technology, who can create technology and how the evolution of technology has shaped the world we live in. We seek to understand how the tools we create now will affect our relationships to each other and our environment in the future.

Taught in collaboration with Victoria Manganiello.

The MFADT thesis is a systematic creative inquiry within the fields of art, design, and technology conducted through both academic and material investigation.

Students identify an area of study, develop an understanding and point of view about this topic, and then propose a series of explorations through concept-based research, question-based prototyping, and contextually-appropriate evaluation and/or testing. By the end of the course, students should be able to outline the major questions that guide their experimentation, the values guiding their project, the methods they use to find potential answers, and their individual, personal perspective about the outcome and goals of their thesis project.

The goal of the core Studio and Lab Collaboration (Creative Technology) is for students to build and deploy a large-scale group project.

This course is an orientation to and hands-on experience of building creative technology projects in a professional setting. To accomplish this, the course is run in two parts: a studio component and a lab component, each taught by a different professor. These course sections will reflect real world scenarios by having students operate as a company or creative agency that fabricates projects for external clients or institutions. The main focus of the core lab is teamwork: how to plan and work effectively in teams. The main focus of studio is publishing and promoting: how to communicate a completed design to a broader audience.

This is not a technical, skill-based course, nor is it an entirely research-based course. It is a space for proposing, planning, documenting, building, testing, presenting, and promoting projects in teams. Various methods of planning, deploying, and presenting are used to execute projects that respond to design briefs. Students are responsible for learning any platform or technology they wish to use in a project.

Course developed with Deren Guler, Lauren Slowik, and Oscar Salguero.

The physical and the digital are often thought of as distinct and disparate. This class will be an investigation into notions of physicality and interface with respect to the computer, and an exploration of related analog and digital technology.

Students will complete a series of exercises that will encourage inquiry into these various technologies and the implications of a connection between or joining of physical and digital worlds. Basic electronics and various sensor mechanisms will be used in conjunction with toolkits such as Arduino. Students joining this class should be comfortable with code in general, have experience with one programming language or another, and be prepared to solder.

We are physical creatures that interact with the physical world. Our hands are highly evolved to give us layer upon layer of tactile feedback. While it is said we are visual creatures, it is our sense of touch that is most refined. Technology, meanwhile, has evolved along a different path. While keyboards, mice/trackpads and touch screens are efficient, they are devoid of any type of tactile feedback that we are so adept at sensing. The study of physical computing gives us a chance create interactions that capitalize on our sense of touch and hence create truly engaging and magical experiences for users.

The goal of the class is to explore the integration of new materials and electronics into paper and textile based interfaces.

The class will expose students to a series of tools and methodologies utilized to handcraft a suite of sensors and paper-textile based circuits. Students will also experiment with electronic activated inks such as electroluminescent and thermochromic inks to generate displays that are both decorative and functional. The class will emphasize craftsmanship, usability, aesthetic value, and provide basic physical computing insight through material exploration. For the final project, students collaborate to create a group or individual project.

An introduction to creative coding.

There are a variety of different tools that you can use to realize the concepts and projects you will create in MFA D+T. This course will give you a basic introduction to three toolsets (Processing, Arduino, and openFrameworks) with the objective of giving you a firm foundation in the basics of computation. By the end of this course, you will be fluent enough in the fundamentals of code to start speaking other programming languages with relative ease.