This semester, you will periodically be asked to “look outwards” — to browse various blogs and feeds or other resources in order to deepen your knowledge of the field, and familiarize yourself with the current state of the art. You will then be expected to report on your findings, as described below — hopefully, with a critical perspective. Some weeks, the “Looking Outwards” deliverables may be thematically oriented. There is no restriction on the sources of information you may use for a “Looking Outwards” report.
A “Looking-Outwards” report is a brief post that reports on a new media project that interests you. Your job is to browse blogs and other sources, and then report on an artwork or other project that you haven’t seen before. Blogging about a project of which you’re already aware defeats the point of the assignment, which is to deepen your familiarity with the fields of new media arts and creative technology — and develop your own personal research practice.
Try to find things that you aspire to make yourself. If you’re not finding projects that interest you, ask your professor or teaching assistant for advice. You probably just need to find the right search terms. For this course, it may be most appropriate to select projects that are made by individuals or small teams, rather than large companies, but that’s not a strong requirement.
In a posting,
- write a paragraph (~150 words) about the project that interested you, and
- embed relevant images and/or video documentation of the project.
In the paragraph you write, you should:
- Explain the project in a sentence or two (what it is, how it operates, etc.);
- Explain what inspires you about the project (i.e. what you find interesting or admirable);
- Critique the project: describe how it might have been more effective; discuss some of the intriguing possibilities that it suggests, or opportunities that it missed; explain what you think the creator(s) got right, and how they got it right.
- Research the project’s chain of influences. Dig up the ‘deep background’, and compare the project with related work or prior art, if appropriate. What sources inspired the creator this project? What was “their” Looking Outwards? Please be sure to label your blog post with our WordPress “category”, Part of the purpose of your Looking Outwards documentation is to increase the documentation, in the world, of noteworthy but vulnerable media artifacts. Therefore, when including video documentation of projects:
Each Looking Outwards report can receive one of two marks:
- 0 points. You did not do the report.
- 1 point. You did the report.
After completing the sequence of Looking Outwards reports, you will be able to:
- Demonstrate familiarity with historic and/or contemporary new-media projects relevant to that student’s specific research interests;
- Demonstrate familiarity with new-media projects that exemplify cultural practices that use widely-used arts-engineering toolkits and/or with specific technologies.
In normal times, you would be encouraged to do research at our university’s library. It has books, films and other media that are not online. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, it is likely that you will conduct this research online. Below is a list of some prominent online feeds that present current work in new media art. This list can be used as a starting point for preparing your regular Looking Outwards reports. Highly recommended:
In a group of approximately a dozen students, the likelihood that two people would choose to write Looking Outwards reports about the same project ought to be infinitesimally small, given the thousands of interesting projects that exist. Yet it happens. How is this possible? It seems some students are satisfied to select something from the first page of results returned from a search. That is not especially deep research. To encourage students to dig deeper, at the professor's discretion, two students who both submit reports about the same project may each receive no credit.