Tiffany Holmes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she teaches courses in interactivity and the history and theory of electronic media. Please visit her course links.

Above: VOID exhibit at GardenFresh Gallery, Chicago, IL

NEW SPRING 2011 | DIY ECOTECH: Art + Design Strategies for Sustainability

DIY Ecotech is a hybrid studio/seminar course that initiates a critical conversation about low-cost, do-it-yourself (DIY) platforms to promote sustainability in art and design. The seminar component of the course exposes students to both “high-tech” and “low-tech” art and design projects that prioritize ecological content. Studio demos investigate DIY modes of promoting environmental stewardship: via the usage of sustainable materials, via eco-monitoring strategies, and via public engagement on the WWW. New technologies potentially useful to artists will be demonstrated in the course: DIY solar panels, carbon dioxide sensors, water quality monitoring equipment, etc. All students in the course are required to keep a research blog on their own DIY discoveries,successes and failures.

ARTHI 3512 | NEW MEDIA EARTHWORKS: STICKS, STONES, BITS, BYTES (Fall 2005, click for course website)

This art history course surveys the impact of emerging technologies on art works that ask questions about technology and nature. We begin with an initial study of early earthworks that use nature as material or setting such as Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” and move on to consider contemporary works that contain a social or cultural message about the environment. Fusing technology with earth art produces questions to be discussed in the course: How can technology highlight environmental issues? What is technology’s role in preserving nature?

ARTTECH 5015 + NAJ 5220 | WIRED WRITING: CULTURE AND COMMUNITY ON THE WWW (Fall 2008, click for course website)

Delve into HTML, blogging, Web 2.0 technologies and the vast possibilities that online media tools offer! This fourteen-week graduate-level studio-seminar course introduces the basic strategies and techniques associated with using the World Wide Web as a tool for creative activity, research, and critical writing. The course begins by introducing the basic syntax (HTML) for publishing word and image on the World Wide Web. Some advanced programming techniques in JavaScript will be introduced. The course will also present a basic history of the WWW as well as analyze and test contemporary tools for research, collaboration, and production online. All students will produce websites or blogs as final projects.

MFA 5010 | GRADUATE SEMINAR: ELECTRONIC MEDIA COLLOQUIUM (Fall 2009, click for course website)

This graduate seminar explores questions of community, research, practice, and documentation for artists—especially artists working with electronic media. The course will examine the online resources and tools available to media artists and organizers to promote their work, seek grants, participate in symposia and festivals, while simultaneously making connections with other artists across the globe working in similar areas of research. The final project consists of (1) art-related website used for either practice or research, (2) a current artist or mission statement, and (3) a working proposal for a grant or exhibition opportunity as well as (4) an online archive of user-tagged web resources.

DIGITAL LITERACY FOR FIRST YEAR STUDENTS | SAIC WIRED (Fall 2005, click for course website)

This 1.5 credit hour (90 minutes weekly) course is intended to enhance the first year program curriculum by providing structured, targeted tutorials that introduce students to basic and advanced imaging and web authoring techniques in an academic context that is both critical and celebratory of the new media tools —both proprietary and open-source—to facilitate art production. The tutorials are also designed to assist first year core faculty in encouraging students to document and share their research and studio projects online with their peers. The web is a medium that now must be understood and managed by artists from any field; for this reason, the curriculum is focused on imaging for the web, and authoring (HTML) for the web. The course also provides a survey of new online collaborative research tools.

ARTHI 3511 | HISTORY OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY (Spring 2005)

This art history lecture provides an overview of post-WWII artists and scientists who catalyzed the blurring of boundaries that exist between the artistic and technological disciplines. The course will survey the work and ideas of artists who explore new interactive and interdisciplinary forms, as well as that of engineers and mathematicians who develop software, hardware and philosophical ideologies that influence the arts and culture at large.

MFA 5010 | GRADUATE SEMINAR | PERFORMING INTERACTIVITY

In this graduate seminar, students will investigate the central questions surrounding the notion of interactivity in our culture. In particular, we will address the complex web of relationships that evolve among artist, audience and environment in an interactive art experience as well as the political, social, and cultural implications of different models of interactivity.

ARTTECH 3005 | PROGRAMMING FOR AUTOMATIC DRAWING (Spring 2005)

In this studio/seminar course, we will juxtapose traditional practices of analog drawing with the process of sketching in code. We will develop digital images starting from the level of the code that defines them. Studio tutorials will be based in: Processing (JAVA-based OOP shareware) and Lingo (Director). Studio demonstrations will include: creating a drawing that responds to environmental changes (temperature, oxygen, light), producing an animation that changes based on viewer interaction, etc.

ARTTECH 4125 | ART OF SURVEILLANCE

In this hybrid studio/seminar course, we will investigate how and why artists have subverted traditional modes of surveillance for creative and critical discourse. In the studio component of the class, techniques such as video tracking, audio monitoring, data tagging, and web camera maintenance will be demonstrated.