Here is a selection of student directed final projects from Design for New Media.  These student’s excelled despite extreme material, equipment, and technology limitations due to the Corona Virus Pandemic.

Over the course of the semester you will be working on a creative project of your own design.  This can be an art installation or other media based work.  We will have at least one concept critique and one work in progress critique for this project, as well as a final critique.  The Corona Virus Pandemic has had a significant impact on this project, as both our exhibition venues and equipment lab have closed. There are now two options for your creative project, based on what technology you have access to.

Plan A:

The goal is now to make a minimum viable prototype of your project.  Something that you can do with equipment that you have at home, like a laptop and web cam.  This prototype should be built with your desired final outcome in mind.  For instance, using a laptop monitor as a proxy for a wall projection or using a built in web cam as a proxy for an overhead USB camera.  The good news is that you now have 2 additional weeks to work on it, though there are other things to work on in that time, too.  If your project just cannot be reduced in this way, or if you do not have access to a computer capable of running Max8 at home, see the alternative project below.

However, you should be prepared to invest in any materials, tools, and supplies you need to complete this project.  You will also need to prepare an application packet for at least one public call for exhibition, which includes wring an extended abstract about it.

The scope of this work is broad, but should incorporate:

  • Work should engage the “viewer” through participation / interaction.
  • Work should include sensed data from the “viewer” (motion, vocalizations, gesture, touch, etc) as input and respond with dynamic visual and/or audio output.  This input must be more compelling than a mouse and keyboard.
  • Work should fit in the genre of New Media.
  • Work should related to your own research / creative practice.

You may work individually or in pairs on this project, but my expectations of group efforts are significantly higher.

Please upload a zip archive of a folder with your code, a rendering/photoshoping of your ideal installation, and any media files needed for your project here.  You can create an archive of a folder on Mac by right licking it and selecting ‘compress…’

Archiving your work:

Without your own Max license I *think* you can still open your patch, but you won’t be able to save any changes you make.  Another option is to export your patch as a standalone application.  There is a great video series on this (parts 1 , 2 , 3, and 4) that gets into the details of optimization, creating icons, reducing file size, etc.  But really you get everything you need in part 1.  I encourage you to do this so that you have an easily playable copy of your project.

Plan B:

If you do not have access to a computer capable of running Max8 at home, you may complete this alternate assignment instead.  You must discuss your intention to pursue this path with the professor during office hours before embarking on it.

Instead of using Max8, build an interactive webpage version of your project.  This may be a real stretch, so I am only looking for a conceptual similarity to what you have been working on so far in Max.  You obviously will not be able to do things like motion tracking on the web, and will need to convert these gestural inputs into more basic things like clicking links.  (Ok, so that’s not entirely true, you can do motion tracking on the web with Processing, but that’s an entirely different coding course.)  You may use whatever website building tools you are comfortable with (Wix, Weebly, WordPress, etc), or may use this time to get up to speed with some basic HTML/CSS mark up.  Here are two short courses that are free to you via UCF LinkedIn Learning: HTML and CSS .  Your site must be publicly visible on the internet.  Your extended abstract will also be about this new web project, so make adjustments to that where necessary (i.e. use a screen shot of your webpage instead of a screen shot of your max patch).  And you should plan on submitting something to ACM Hypertext if you go this route.

Make a screen shot of your website and a text file with a link to your site, put both of those in a single zip archive and upload it here.