Courses

Stanford Courses 1996-2001

My first new media courses were on Computer Animation and Digital Art in Public Spaces. Computer Animation was a three-quarter sequence of courses which resulted in students producing small animation films, some of which are still accessible online here. Many of the students entered the professional CG world. The course Digital Art in Public Spaces engaged students in the social practice of making a work of art for a specific group of people. Many times, we worked together with CalTrain and installed artwork on trains, and the final installment of that course presented an open air video game for the city of Redwood City. The game allowed players to reenact portions of Redwood City history.

Berkeley Courses 2001 to Present

My early courses at UC Berkeley were all about teaching Computer Graphics in an Art Department. The courses were called The Illusion of Life, a fancy name for CG animation and Interactive Images, a fancy name for website development with Flash.

Out of the flash courses grew a game design course, offered through Film Studies, which yielded such elegant student projects as Irene Chien's "How Bright the Stars", which is playable here. The game design course is gradually developing a good balance between game studies and game design. Game studies is concerned with how games affect the human experience. Here we discuss how games allow people to explore, learn and create rules for human interaction. As such, games are the origin of culture. Game design is concerned with methods for formulating gameplay. We study how game rules, game assets, and game engines contribute to specific human experiences, and we learn how these elements sustain the Holy Grail of game design, replay value.

The most lively course in my UC career grew out of a Mellon Teaching Institute and Townsend Center-sponsored collaboration with Prof. Charis Thompson. The course, called American Cybercultures (Art 23 AC), aims to teach students to become new media citizens and explores how class, race, gender and ethnicity are performed online. In the course, students produce websites for people who are adversely affected by the digital divide. The course syllabus is linked here, and UC Berkeley is also podcasting the lectures here.

The new Townsend-funded course I started this fall with Prof. Dan Garcia was called CNM 190: Advanced Computer Graphics. The course is open to all students with sufficient qualifications in CG, per instructors approval. In the course, we will discuss procedural modeling, animation, and shading. Procedural Computer Graphics rely on algorithms to control simulations of events instead of relying on a person to control simulations of events. Of course, the algorithms have to be just right, so what we teach is how to make procedural CG sing. We also discuss what the cultural agenda is behind procedural CG.The course is also co-taught with Pixar artists and technical directors. It represents UC Berkeley's first curricular effort to partner with its prolific neighbor and entertainment giant.

Techniques of Instruction

In the past two years, I modified two aspects of my teaching practice significantly, critiques and assignments. In past years, much of the teaching I did occurred in critiques, where students presented their artwork, and I attempted to inform them about ways to improve it. This technique seemed to benefit the accomplished students more than those who were facing a steep learning curve.

Instead of emphasizing the individual and momentary performance in a critique context, I now focus my teaching on the transformation a student experiences during a semester of coursework. I declare the intended transformation at the beginning of the semester. I structure weekly assignments carefully to ensure a gradual and constructive learning experience. Each assignment builds on  previous assignments. All assignments together create a learning rhythm, which is sustained by my lectures and by collaborative exercises. I grade student work based on how many assignments a student completes on time. I am less concerned with the particular expression of an assignment, but instead with its degree of completion and its function in the process of reaching a final learning goal. This process, which I believe feels more like an exploration than a performance, allows students to see learning goals as personal goals.

The rigor of my courses comes from the frequency of my  assignments. The students who are fully engaged in a course usually can sustain the frequency, and  those who are less engaged quickly realize that they are falling behind, and choose to catch up through peer support. I still conduct  critiques of student work. I use them to encourage my students and to help them develop a learning community. I also rely on peer to peer reviews to make the point that students are not working for their professors, but instead for their peers. This shift in focus seems to create a stronger learning community, and also allows the course learning goals to reflect what is relevant to students, not only to professors.

Lectures

I lecture on New Media topics including Open Source, Game Studies, and of course I give the artist's talk. The artist talk I enjoyed giving most was Greg Niemeyer w/ Ripening Tomatoes, given at New Langton Arts and curated by Rick Rinehart. The talk involved me and a panel of ripening tomatoes. When tomatoes ripen, they release Carbon Dioxide, which I measured with a CO2 sensor, and transposed into sounds with PD or MaxMSP. These sounds set the tone for the whole presentation and started the dialog with the Tomato panel. Here's a link to the only picture of the event.