DXARTS 201: FUNDAMENTALS OF DIGITAL AND EXPERIMENTAL ART

Assignment Submission Guidelines

Whenever a disk is required for hand-in, please label it in the following manner:

Name
Class
Term
Assignment #
Assignment Title (ie. Audio Cinema)

All disks should be housed in some sort of protective covering, like a plastic or paper slip-case.

Optional: include a short summary of your ideas in a text file on your disc. This file can be short, but should be descriptive of your intentions, and should more-or-less spell out what you were thinking. This will greatly help in the grading of your assignments.

Assignment 1 - Recycle

Transform a given movie sequence into a new artwork.
All students will have the same raw footage and then use FinalCut Pro to re-edit and modify the content. For this assignment you may use only these programs and the original quicktime file as your toolset. The final work should run maximum 3 minutes in length, and be a quicktime movie file. Make sure there is a title and your name at the beginning of your finished sequence. You should always save your work to your own firewire drive, computer, USB drive, or disk as the computers in MGH are not guaranteed to keep your data between sessions. It is highly recommended that you bring your own headphones to class to help with editing sound.

This assignment focuses on the nature of meaning and intervention. Your creative re-invention of the material is the method by which you will transform the original content and present a new interpretation of the work. You may choose as narrative approach, an abstract deconstruction, a surreal twist, or some other bold strategy for transformation. There is no magic formula for success, rather many potential paths and it is your work as an artist to create a compelling vision from the material at hand.

Please hand in your labeled disk with your completed Quicktime movie only (files and folders that you used during the making of your project are not needed, only the finished product).

Footage download: click here

Assignment 2 - Audio Cinema

Portray one day of your life using only sound.

You will check-out a mini-disk kit which you will use to create a short sound piece (4 minutes) with at least 7 cuts or scenes. The narration should be non-linear in nature, not in a normal chronological timeline. The complete piece should, however, make sense in terms of a document where the development of the story clearly unfolds over time. All editing must be done on-device with no post editing on the computer. This means that the "scenes" should be planned in a clear script before being recorded in the order they go on tape. No formal "voice-over" style verbal narration is allowed, but speech can be used as can any other sources of sound. The story can be real or fictitious, but should reflect one whole day in your life in some sense. Think about using the audioscape to portray emotional and/or conceptual states of being as well as the physical realities.

Download pdf manual for old recorder here.

Download pdf manual for new recorder here.

Assignment 3 - (in)materialspace

Invent an imaginary space and "document" it by constructing a creative web site.

The site should function as an archeological map of this new place as well as be an experience in and of itself. Using HTML and web tools as a structural platform, you may include media content such as images, sounds, and small videos. The content may be appropriated from another source or be of your own creation. The key, however, is that all content should be used inventively towards the goal of transforming the idea of space and the viewers interaction with it. All pages will be made public and you will evaluate each others assignments following the criteria below:

How innovative is this new interpretation of space?
Is the site aesthetically appealing?
How easy is it to "visualize" this new location online?
Were the structural constraints of web publishing used in a creative manner?

Though your projects should be published to the web and will be viewed primary online, you are also required to hand in a hard copy backup of your project on CD. Please burn all of your site files to disk and follow the Assignment Submission Guidelines posted above.

Assignment 4 - Transmission Theatre

Using live streaming video, audio and text messaging (such as iChat A/V), five teams of students will construct a peer to peer closed circuit networked loop of sending and receiving from two locations. These remote locations are merged into a single poetic internet based event that explores notions of the newly created third virtual location as well as the distance and agency between the two sites.

Each group may take up to ten minutes to "perform" their project, and the final will take place in Raitt hall where the two halves of the group are physically separated and only the net connection links them.