- processing.org
- arduino/wiring
- Quartz Composer and VDMX
- Pure Data
- Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit
- Supercollider
- Jquery/Javascript for interaction design, burst engine, processing.js
- Inform 7
Why can't I? Because this tech-centric oasis of creativity is stuck in the stone ages when it comes to hybrid art and technology programs. The University of Texas at Austin is still lugging around ACTLab, and art/tech incubator that still busies itself with a lot of completely outmoded Mondo 2000 bullshit 1993 raver theorizing, and Austin Dorkbot, which as far as I can tell is primarily made up of a few actual techies and a lot of random burning man aficionados who's idea of the co-mingling of art and technology is making bikinis out of old circuit boards.
Why is this stuff all important? Because for the first time in a long time, the game industry is being cracked open by micropayment download services on major consoles- WiiWare on Nintendo, Xbox arcade, the iPhone App store - and we are preparing for what is going to be a torrent of "one crazy guy in his basement with a vision" games that are going to mutate our expectations of interactive media and usher in a new era of art and entertainment. There are a ton of new technologies that allow artists to begin to design interactions and play with logic and active narrative as they would with paint or video, but the tech scene in Austin seems to be very focused on traditional roles of technology. We have a lot traditional computer science nerds and traditional game programmers, a lot of musicians dicking around in protools and ableton live, a lot of traditional web designers, and a lot of 'artists' who would never lower themselves to have to actually learn a 'technical' skill. Very very rarely in this town do I meet hands on, full experience designers who are building the kind of art that is becoming very common in the major cities and abroad. The kind of stuff we see at the Royal College of Art or CalArts, Carnagie Mellon or NYU.
Is there anyone else in town that is as frustrated about this stuff as I am? Is there some secret resource that I am missing out on? I really feel like this is the direction I want my 'career' to go in, but I am not going to move at this point in my life.
8 comments:
"Traditional" web designers? The field is, what, 15 years old, practically speaking?
Could we have just a few more years of gainful employment before being decreed obsolete and consigned to the dustbins of history along with telegraph operators and alchemists? Pretty please? :)
Hey, I'm a traditional web designer, don't get your panties in a knot. What I am saying is I would rather be learning to do stuff like this and this.
How'd you know I was wearing panties?! That is SO eerie....
Not being as much of a technophile as you, I'm leery of any suggestion that technology drives design and art, which is putting the cart before the horse. I'm not saying you're doing that, I'm just sayin'. Don't get yer knickers inna twist!
BTW, if you think Austin is provincial, thank your lucky stars you don't live someplace really dead. It's like being a plant trying to bloom in a desert.
Al (clinic)
I've been saying the same things about finding a community that's playing with the things I want to play with. As I have time, I'm playing with processing, and salivating on every createdigitalmotion post.
I think you and I are 6-7 years apart, so we somewhat fall in the same generation category. One of the things I'm starting to realize (that you may or may not also recognize) is that I am missing the boat on borderless communities. "The kids" are leveraging Skype and YouTube (and...oh, god...MySpace) to create social networks that actually work.
I'm watching a lot of Nerdfighter related content. Wizard Rock bands, Vlog Brothers, Five Awesome Girls, Song Fu competitions -- they draw people together who have a common goal and provide a virtual support system that is bringing new media/art in a way that hasn't happened before. I don't know how to start or get into those communities, but I know they can exist and thrive.
p.s. This is as far as I've gone with processing: http://is.gd/pvQz -- now that I've shown I can make it work, I'll probably get distracted by the next shiny thing and not come back to it.
I found it interesting that all the examples you gave were in Academia with a capital A. IMO, that is barking up the wrong tree.
I totally agree that some "semi-structured group" exploring the potential of these ideas in Austin would be very cool. I've heard other people express similar sentiments.
In my experience, when I was learning the rudiments of what is now known as "web design" in 1995, there was nothing interesting going on in academia or big corporations. It was all small scale, grass roots. If I hadn't pursued relatively casual information sharing down in the trenches, and a handful of small random conferences, I would have learned nothing. Pretty much the same situations helped me learn interaction design, supercollider, and how to cobble together sensors and sound producing devices with a soldering iron.
Austin is just smaller than London, etc. and fewer people (statistically) are working on this stuff. (Also fewer creatives living in closets scraping half eaten lobster off dinner plates to make rent). Those people are here though -- and there are no magic properties about big cities which allow people to make better stuff. It's just a matter of getting like minded people in the same room with you to teach/learn/inspire/collaborate. I wonder what would be needed to prime the pump on the tiny "institutions" in Austin that would fill the void you mention.
But it's not the wrong tree in the places I suggested. All of those schools have completely badass interaction design programs that are the hotbeds of where this stuff is getting turned out. There's access to tools and the people who are inventing a lot of the technology are teaching. now /= 1993.
I have no intention of getting into school this late in the game, so I am trying to start an informal meetup here for processing. First tentative attempt was this week, I'll post when the next one is to occur.
Here, this isn't at a school.
Oop, but it's in London.
http://www.pawfal.org/openlab/2009/03/31/openlab5/
Well, sometimes you gotta just do stuff yourself:
http://austincreativecode.com
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