courses :: mas 966   arts practicum :: an introduction to contemporary arts practice and theory :: chris csikszentmihalyi   this course is an introduction to contemporary arts practice, combining readings in contemporary theory around art, science, and technology, a series of incremental assignments leading students through designing and producing increasingly more sophisticated art works, and a modest historical survey of 20th century art. the purpose of the course is to introduce media lab grad students to working in the fine arts, allowing them to develop proficiency in authoring for various media. twentieth century experimental practices in film, audio, and sculpture/installation will be investigated as a counterpoint to commercial motion pictures, music, and product design. students will work to master terminology and techniques of film, radio, and sculpture with a view towards understanding general issues around media technologies and authorship, old or new. iIn particular, we will discuss the notion of inventing new media that may produce the “complex pleasures” often associated with literature, film, and music.   assignments ::   clay :: james for this assignment we were to spend two hours sculpting a bust of a live model. i worked on this for about 2 1/2 hours total and below is my take on my classmate james' cranium. not too shabby(i think immodestly) for my second time ever using clay...     box :: fish this week we were asked to construct our own interpretation of a joseph cornell box. cornell was famous for his meticulously arranged boxes containing memorablia from journeys he never made, homages to ballet dancers and edwardian children and other weird and wonderful deitrus he assembled over the years. the box i made contains various puns on the word fish - drink like a fish; fisher of men; couldn't shoot a fish in a barrel; hook, line and sinker; sleep with the fish; a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle; fishing for compliments.     radio :: sleep this assignment involved making a 5 minute piece for radio. i choose the topic of sleep, an issue close to my insomniac addled heart. i interviewed my friend josh who is narcoleptic and interspersed his stories of crazy dreams, aliens and falling asleep at the wheel with some envious commentary of my own. music by neil halstead, belle and sebastian, the beatles and her space holiday. listen to the mp3 here   video :: sense of place our second video project was to produce a five minute movie. i am very interested in the process by which a filmmaker interviews their subject and how that impacts the final edited film. i decided to conduct audio interviews with people, asking them to describe to me their favorite place: where they liked to go to think, to escape, to relax, to dream. i then took my camera to these places and shot footage to accompany their words. as i navigated around the various locations, i listened to the interviews on headphones, using the words to guide the shots captured. the locations described in the movie include places that have greatly changed, have been destroyed, are somewhat dangerous and are replete with strong memories. sense of place :: view the quicktime or real player version   final project :: worrier i spent a long time ruminating over what to do for my final project, to the extent that i seemed to be worrying about it all the time. eventually, one desparate sunday afternoon, i realized what i really needed: some way of recouping the time i was losing by worrying and fretting. what if you could input your worries to some device that would do your worrying for you? i didn't want it necessarily to attempt to derive a solution, rather to simply invest time and effort to my worry, toss and turn that anxiety endlessly over and over in an ultimately fruitless activity. this device or application would be even more appealing if it involved some human element, some form of community sharing or collective worrying. i began to think about creating a website where you could upload your worries. someone else could then download your anxieties and devote their computer time to mulling over them while remaining blissfully unconcerned by the actual worry itself. meanwhile, you could choose in exchange to download someone elses concern and so the fretting cycle would begin. the worrier application and website was put together as a gently probing questioning of theraputic procedures and the ability of computers to be in anyway affective. once launched the application sits on your desktop in various stages of alertness. the application can hold a maximum of 5 worries at a time, either individual concerns input directly by the user or shared worries download from the website. once initiated, the worrier application will deal with the loaded worries for a two day period, after which the worries will be declared sufficiently cared for. during any activation period, additional activity will be initiated if the computer user happens to type any of the words contained in any of his/her input worries. for example, if i had declared to the worrier that i was concerned about the environment, and i subsequently sent email to my colleagues using the word environment("which java environment are you using?) then the worrier application would go into super alert mode i am currently working on making this application more broadly available for download. in the meantime, here's a screengrab of the worrier application and an animated gif of the worrier itself in medium worry mode. this little guy would pop up periodically on your desktop and by double clicking on him, you could open the application itself. in the screengrab here, there are two worries stored in the user's application - one input by themselves represented by the green square on the left, and one belonging to someone else that they have kindly downloaded from the web, represented by the dark blue square. there are three empty slots which the user is filling up with their ice-cream worry or they could select the fetch button to retrieve another worry from the online database. for further information and updates, please visit the worrier website