2023 Fall // Interactive Art 1: Creative Coding

🏆 = Featured Projects

Critical Design, Speculative Design, and “User (un-)friendliness”

In this project, students were challenged to create an interactive artwork/experience that involves the user in an activity of looking critically at technology and their relationship to it. The user interface is the site of the critique.

Examples of relevant topics that we discussed and read about in class, in both Hertzian Tales and Speculative Everything (Dunne & Raby), include:

• Focusing on “user-friendliness” as a means to mask underlying political ideology, and bringing that ideology to the surface for scrutiny
• Challenging notions of effiency and speed as the primary objectives of user interfaces
• Imagining alternative-presents and future possibilities, with respect to our relationships to technology, that challenge the current status quo of design/technology
• Using speculative design methodologies (eg: reductio ad absurdum, speculative fiction, counterfactuals, etc) to achieve the above creating a user interface that contrasts ideas of user-friendliness, by focusing on poetic interactions, inviting the user to complete the construction of meaning, or taking advantage of other ideas from critical design such as defamiliarization, functional estrangement, etc.

Tools used: p5.js, git, GitHub, Visual Studio Code

• 🏆 Grams Saloon by Natalie Lusk [GitHub Repo]
• 🏆 Séance by Andy Mills [GitHub Repo]
• Emily Butler [GitHub Repo]
• Kate Casey [GitHub Repo]
• Surveillance by Sydney Graham [GitHub Repo]
• Gloop by Lily Crocamo [GitHub Repo]
• Adpocalypse by Braden Elwell [GitHub Repo]
• Alisha Galarza [GitHub Repo]
• Sydney Colvin [GitHub Repo]
• Instagrad by Caroline Hamon [GitHub Repo]
• Flashlight 2.0 by Ashley Harrop [GitHub Repo]
• Trumon Latimer [GitHub Repo]
• Web Score Counter by Craig Moore [GitHub Repo]
• Evil AI by Christian Rice [GitHub Repo]
• Route Pals by Jack Seamans [GitHub Repo]

Games

In this project, students created artwork using the medium of videogames. Discussions centered around readings from Rise of the Video Game Zinesters (Anthropy) and How to Do Things with Videogames (Bogost). Students were encouraged, when appropriate to the concept of the game, to consider ways of interacting with the game that go beyond the default interfaces of keyboard/mouse/gamepad/monitor. The idea for the artwork must take advantage of the unique opportunities that the medium of videogames afford for both the artist and the audience.

Tools used: p5.js, p5play, bitsy, git, GitHub, Visual Studio Code

• 🏆 mg/dL by Braden Elwell [GitHub repo]
• 🏆 Death Vignettes by Natalie Lusk [GitHub repo]
• 🏆 Spike by Kate Casey [GitHub repo]
• 🏆 Okay Today by Jack Seamans [GitHub repo]
• 🏆 OwART by Craig Moore [GitHub repo]
• That’s Life by Emily Butler [GitHub repo]
• girlsim by Lily Crocamo [GitHub repo]
• Sydney Colvin [GitHub repo]
• Caroline Hamon [GitHub repo]
• Ashley Harrop [GitHub repo]
• Somewhere Beyond the Sea by Christian Rice [GitHub repo]