I teach digital art and emerging media practice at the undergraduate and graduate level, most recently at Cornell University in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, University of Venice, Italy (IUAV), Parsons The New School for Design, Design and Technology Program and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Areas of creative research and scholarship:
Computer networks as cultural form, network aesthetics
Emerging materials engineering as artistic practice
Photogrammetry and 3D modeling for reality-capture
Cloud-based computing for critical design
Distributed authorship, crowd-sourced platforms
Phenomenal/biological form in interactive media
Post-representational theory in art/design/material science
Courses Taught: (*advanced studio, contributed course to program curriculum)
Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art and Planning, (2008-2017)
Spring 2017: Empathy Academy: Social Practice and the Problem of Objects*
Fall 2016: Introduction to Digital Media; Object Empathies: Digital Sculpture Studio*
Spring 2016: Introduction to Digital Media
Fall 2015: Introduction to Digital Media; Freshman Art Seminar
Summer 2015: Introduction to Digital Media
Spring 2015: Introduction to Digital Media; EcoMeme: Media Networks and Evolutionary Impulse*
Fall 2014: MFA Graduate Seminar: Art As An Intellectual Field
Summer 2014: Introduction to Digital Media
Spring 2014: BFA Thesis Studio (team taught)
Fall 2013: Introduction to Digital Media
Summer 2013: Introduction to Digital Media
Spring 2013: Micro Materialities/Macro Forms: Art Practice and the Culture of Nano Science*
Fall 2012: BFA Thesis Studio (team taught)
Summer 2012: Introduction to Digital Media
Spring 2012: MFA Graduate Seminar
Fall 2011: Introduction to Digital Media; Art in the Age of Networks*
Summer 2011: Introduction to Digital Media
Spring 2011: BFA Thesis Studio (team taught); Mobile Media and Participatory Culture*
Fall 2010: Introduction to Digital Media; Interactive Media: Hybrid Spaces & Distributed Authorship*
Spring 2010: Technologies of Place*; Art in the Age of Networks*
Fall 2009: Mobile Media & Context Driven Narratives; Art in the Age of Networks*
Spring 2009: Introduction to Digital Media; Technologies of Place*
Fall 2008: Introduction to Electronic Media; Visual Culture Seminar: Invisible Culture*
Parsons The New School for Design, MFA Program in Design and Technology (Fall 2001- Spring 2008)
Spring 2008:Design & Technology MFA Thesis Studio; Collaborative Studio (Locative Media)
Fall 2007: Major Studio – Interface ; Design & Technology MFA Thesis Studio
Spring 2007: Design & Technology MFA Thesis Studio; Technologies of Place
Spring 2006: Design & Technology MFA Thesis Studio
Fall 2005: Design & Technology MFA Thesis Studio; Technologies of Place*
Spring 2005: Design & Technology MFA Thesis Studio; Technologies of Place*
Fall 2004:Design & Technology MFA Thesis Studio; Signs of Life: The Aesthetics of Reality in Digital Culture*
Spring 2004:Design & Technology MFA Thesis Studio; Signs of Life:The Aesthetics of Reality in Digital Culture*
Fall 2003:Design & Technology MFA Thesis Studio; Signs of Life:The Aesthetics of Reality in Digital Culture*
Spring 2003: Design & Technology MFA Thesis Studio
Fall 2002: Major Studio – Interface; Signs of Life:The Aesthetics of Reality in Digital Culture*
Spring 2002:Major Studio – Interface; Collaborative Studio (Witness)
Fall 2001: MFA Major Studio: Interface; Collaborative Studio (Witness)
Course Descriptions: Original Studios
Empathy Academy: Social Practice and the Problem of Objects
(co-taught at Cornell, Spring 2017 with Andrea Inselmann, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, HF Johnson Museum of Art)
This course offers both critical readings on the history and theory of social practice and a hands-on means to understand how this practice is expressed in art spaces globally. The course invites students who are curious about the relationship between interventionist, anti-institutional art practices and the institutions committed to preserve, protect and contextualize the cultural relevance of these practices. Through analysis of objects in the Johnson Museum of Art’s collection, workshops with invited visiting artists and the collective development of an evolving sequence of interventions within the space of the Johnson Museum’s Project Gallery, students of the course will be directly engaged with defining a meaningful and forward-looking interface between critical practice and collectability, relational aesthetics and art pedagogy, and static and durational approaches to art.
The course will be conducted as a small, research-oriented group of advanced undergraduate and graduate students and welcomes students in Art, Architecture, Urban Planning, History of Art and Visual Studies and students from any other related discipline who seek experiential ways to re-imagine the role of the museum and gallery space as a site of knowledge production that is open to forms of inquiry that lead to emergent, social forms of contemporary art.
Object Empathies: Digital Sculpture Studio
(taught at Cornell, Fall 2016)
This new studio and research course is focused on the creation of digital sculptures that question the status of the static physical object in contemporary art by suggesting a morphological approach to form that unites “crowd sourcing” and traditional art materials.
Through a weekly, hands-on process, this studio will immerse students in concepts of media ecology, phenomenal form, dynamic interfaces and digital sculpture through the construction of a single site-specific art project furthered by each student. Through the development and production of both individual and collaborative work, students will be led through an iterative process using common information platforms (social media, HTML) and 3D software (Autodesk Fusion360, MeshMixer) in conjunction with easily fabricated/found materials (wood, cardboard, plastic). To develop ideas, students will work in small multidisciplinary teams that will include research on artists, craftsmen, social media producers, ecologists, designers, landscape architects, programmers and writers whose work form the context and history of phenomenal, emergent approaches to the object in visual culture.
Students will learn mobile 3D scanning techniques called “reality computing” that lead to their adaptation of existing forms in nature and/or objects from the university’s art collections to create synthetic, hybrid form rendered in software and fabricated in Rand Shop. Critical readings in aesthetics, evolutionary theory, media ecology and systems theory will provide the context for thinking and discussing the work in class.
EcoMeme: The Evolutionary Impulse & Media Networks
(taught at Cornell, 2015)
This course is focused on the collaborative production of a large-scale digital media project that connects the natural environment and online networks. In his 1985 book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” – a neologism that conflates “media” and “gene” to describe the evolutionary principle at work on the web and through analog-to-digital, digital-to-analog forms. This combined digital media and sculpture course takes Dawkins’ idea of media evolution and places it in the context of the landscape.
Through a daily, hands-on process, this digital/sculpture studio will immerse students in concepts of media ecology, phenomenal form, dynamic, data-driven interfaces and digital sculpture through the construction of a site-specific art project. Through the development and production of the project, students will be led through an iterative process using common software (social media platforms, HTML/PHP, KML, Fusion3D) in conjunction with naturally occurring materials (wood, dirt, wind, sun, water). Students will work as part in small multidisciplinary team that includes research on related artists, craftsmen, social media producers, ecologists, herbalists, designers, landscape architects, programmers and writers whose work forms the context and history of phenomenal, emergent form in contemporary art.
Art in the Age of Networks
(taught at Cornell University 2011, 2012, 2013)
As Spanish economist Manuel Castells observes in his influential, “The Rise of Network Society”, the key characteristic of today’s globalized and fragmented world is that our societies “are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self”. For artists who have historically understood their work as a response to the social and cultural protocols of their time, this opposition asks that contemporary artists transcend this bipolarity by either absorbing or reproducing this split.
In response, artists increasingly work on the subject/object fault line. As the web makes us hyper-conscious of the mechanics of our own production, we willingly work between multiple poles of identity and understand authorship as distributed – between locations, identities, media, time zones, people, disciplines and cultures. This fractured sense of authorship challenges the notion and practice of art as a poetic, symbolic, or formal summary that can be singularly expressed.
This class seeks, through selected readings, discussion and studio projects, to investigate the outlines of a network aesthetic and how web and related telecommunication forms contributes to a “new” media. We will do this by contextualizing this “new” within the history of media art, telematics, wireless networks, systems theory, and contemporary net art practices. The end result of class will be the development of a collaborative art project that exists between physical and networked space.
Technologies of Place
(taught at Cornell University, 2009, 2010; Parsons 2005, 2007)
The course looks at the relationship between the reach of information networks and their impact on our identification with place. Working from an understanding of how we currently use information networks and communication technologies to dislocate and “virtualize” ourselves as citizens and people, we will investigate how artists and others use the same networks to re-inscribe and elevate our sense of physical proximity, immediacy and materiality.
In conjunction with course readings and discussion, we will use the class to develop a location-aware, mobile media project that works in tandem with an immersive digital environment built for public space. Class readings and discussion are directly applied to the conceptualization, development and implementation of a final collaborative art project to be made available on campus. Through the development of a final project students will learn how to take an interactive idea from concept to installation.
Mobile Media and Participatory Culture
(taught at Cornell University, 2011)
For many, mobile technology is part of the environment of daily life and human interaction. Yet it is also an emerging art form/media with its own history and discourse — one simultaneously linked to the evolution in network and personal computing, social theories of public space, avant-garde movements in the art of the 60s/70s, information design, and geospatial technologies. It is an art practice that blurs traditional binary distinctions between author/audience, art/design, private/public, information/expression and occupies a third space where rational separations between art and life are problematic.
While much has been written about the impact of mobile technology on society, this course will focus on the artistic trajectories and cultural currents that fuel the ways in which mobile media – ephemeral, context-driven, location-based, ubiquitous – has become a radical, participatory form of contemporary art and institutional critique.
The studio provides both the theoretical/cultural constructs that inform mobile media art and practical instruction in interactive media, mobile web coding and wireless computing. In-studio developments will be structured as small assignments that build on competency in fundamentals of HTML, CSS, Javascript for the “third screen”, while looking at these fundamentals through the lens of networked art and tactical media in the public realm. Assignments will lead to the completion of a final project for mobile media based on individual research and proposal. Projects will be developed for iPhone using PhoneGap Open Source Mobile Framework.
Micro Materialities/Macro Forms: Art Practice and the Culture of Nano Science
(taught at Cornell University, 2013)
This course is an exploration of the ways in which contemporary artists incorporate developments in nano science into their practice to express new affinities between life and art. Through a series of guest presentations, hands-on workshops and independent research, students will gain knowledge of how nano science is changing the way we see and understand material reality. These shifts in perception of reality have led to changes in how artists work, —allowing them to use the biological, molecular and chemical realms that underpin life as the raw material or platform from which to create new cultural forms. Research in areas such as self-assembly, nano-fluidics, and meta-materials are providing ways for artists, architects, designers, musicians and other creative minds to define their work as emergent and transformational rather than rely on historical and aesthetic criteria centered on static form.
Taught in colloquium format and organized around a line-up of Cornell’s top nano researchers presenting their area of practice, the course intends to provide new ways to look at both art practice and the discipline of science. Periodic demos by visiting artists, technologists and media professionals will provide examples of how different art practices overlap with the techniques and ontologies in nano science. Although both art and science share aspects of creative thought, the course will emphasize the critical, aesthetic and cultural manifestations of this creativity in contemporary art, architecture and design.
Course Descriptions: Required Studios (coming soon)
Freshman Art Seminar
MFA Graduate Seminar
Introduction to Digital Media
Visual Culture Seminar