Web Art
Instructor: Judd Morrissey
Monday, 9-4

Course Description

This course will provide an introduction to coding and creating art for the web. While realizing individual and collaborative projects, the class will also be focused on developing clean coding practices with special attention to new and emerging standards. Through presentations and outside readings and viewings, we will work to cultivate a critical discourse around emerging web art forms. Topics examined will include net.art, electronic writing, recombinant poetics, and database aesthetics.

Emphasis will be placed upon the concept of encoding: how do we encode our selves, our memories, and our responses to the real and virtual spaces that we inhabit? We will consider code as a language through which we translate our ideas into works and begin to develop literacy in the grammars and syntaxes of our networked culture.

Course Requirements

assignments: Students are required to complete all weekly exercises and to present substantial work for critique at mid-semester and at the end of the term. Assignments are due at the beginning of the class following the one in which they are assigned. You will upload homework to your personal directory on the artic.edu server and make a link to each assignment from the index.html page of your directory. If you want to put your homework on another server that's fine but I will still need you to make a link from your index.html page.

research and practice: Students will be asked to give two presentations during the semester. These presentations will focus on an articulation of the student's own developing creative and technical practice in relationship to other web artists, works, concepts, or internet phenomena. The goal will be for the student to define an area of research and artistic and technical concern as the semster progresses and the student begins to formulate a final project.

skills checks: Because of the technical demand of the course in terms of web-based tools and especially languages covered, students will be given occassional skills checks to insure that everyone is learning at a satisfactory level.

individual meetings: Periodically, I will schedule time for each student to address project specific questions and gauge progress. In general, I will often work one-on-one with students during lab sessions.

Attendance

It is very important to attend every class. Most topics build on previous lessons and discussions, and missing a session will reduce your ability to successfully complete assigned projects. We will begin promptly at 6pm, as we will have a lot to cover each week. If you arrive later than 6:30, you will be marked as absent. If you accumulate three absences, an automatic No-Credit will be given. Please also keep in mind that it is expected that no absences will be unexcused, that is, if you cannot make a session, it is your basic responsibility to contact the instructor in advance. More than one unexcused absence may result in a failing grade.

Presentation and participation in midterm and final critiques:
* For both critiques, I expect that your scripting practice will be compliant with the latest XHTML standards whenever possible. If you do use deprecated HTML I expect that you will be conversant in why you made the choice to include it (for example, some code may not widely supported by your targeted browsers)
* For the final critique you will need to hand in a stand-alone versions of your project(s) burned to a data cd. I will be keeping this disc so please make additional copies for yourself.

Syllabus: Please note that the syllabus is updated weekly and, while it provides an overall framework, it is by no means a static document and should be referred to often.

Resources

Texts

A hard copy text is NOT required for the class as the latest information on the *evolving* XHTML1.0 standard and browser support is available online. Plus you can cut, paste and repurpose the example code when working online. If you do opt to purchase a a text I recommend spending some time at a bookstore browsing what's available to find one that is written and organized in a style that will be helpful to you. Some use tutorial style teaching while others assume a deeper understanding of the underlying technology.

Weekly Schedule

week 01

1/28
course overview
introductory exercise: collaborative hypertext
topics: mark-up languages,introduction to xhtml, data and representation, associative navigation, file transfer

screenings: internet as material
JODI
the shredder

assignment: Hacked Web Site

technical links:
html/xhml elements
deprecated tags

FTP help file and directory structure

introductory resources:
Vanevar Bush: As We May Think
How the Internet Works
An Internet Timeline
Alternate Visions: Way Out of the Box
New Media Concepts
City of Bits

week 02

2/4
Visual Composition
introduction to cascading style sheets
in-class exercise: a lexicon of practices

screening:
UBU: Concrete Poetry

CSS Resources:
Avoid deprecated tags
Basic CSS syntax
CSS Measurements
CSS Property Reference
W3C Property Examples
Sample Code

assignment: visual text composition

week 03

2/11
hypertextuality
cascading style sheets: box model and flow-based layout

reading:
handout: Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

hypertext links:
My Body
Electronic Literature Directory

assignment: a hypertext in nine fragments

week 04

2/18
encoding space
css intensive

assignment: encoding space

advanced css/xhtml resources:
the noodle incident
gish
alistapart
bluerobot layouts
review of three methods of attaching style: external, embedded, inline
div and span elements
The CSS box model and basic positioning
webmonkey: the wonderful div tag

works / topic resources:
Maider Lopez
pixels-to-inches-to-pixels
Taxonomy of My Room
apartment
Wake
Amazon concordance of 'The Production of Space'
Transfers
Internet Mapping Project
traceroute
packets
ip to location #1
ip geo-mapping
carnivore projects

week 05

2/25

data-aesthetics preview: translation, mining, and mapping
CSS continued, box model, div tag, floats and clears

screenings/resources:
Lisa Jevbrat, "The Infome Imager"
Amazon.com concordance feature
Text Concorder for macintosh
John Cayley's "Translation" (some setup required)
W. Bradford Paley, Textarc
Ben Fry sketches and projects
atlas of cyberspace
wordnet
UBU Concrete Poetry
xhtml character codes

assignment: textmining, datamapping

week 06

3/3
Code and Language
javascript intensive exercise: cut-up compositions

screenings
Sondheim
Cayley
Warnell#1
Warnell #2
Cramer
http://www.digitalcraft.org/iloveyou/catalogue_alessandro_ludovico_virus_charms.htm

week 07

3/10
lab time for development of mid-term projects, individual tutorials

week 08

3/17
midterm critique

week 09

3/24
Code and Environment
introduction to the Document Object Model

composing with windows
Bonfire Bitumin

week 10

3/31
Code and Time
javascript for motion and timed events

screenings
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

week 11

4/7
Recombinant Poetics
composing and mixed media

sites
Bill Seaman

week 12

4/14
Data-driven and Collaborative Environments

sites
Info-Aesthetics

week 13

4/21
critique week -- NO CLASS

week 14

4/28
work day

week 15

5/5
final critiques

History
W3C

political/subversive:
http://www.rtmark.com/
http://rtmark.com/gwbush/

concrete & digital poetry
http://www.ubu.com

MISC
language/code/identity: http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/
trade centers: http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/teaching/classes/honors98_f01/frames.htm
referencing games: http://www.jodi.org -- download a game
generated text: http://directory.wordcircuits.com/browse.php?t=5
artbyte net picks: http://www.artbyte.com/web/net_pick/np_050101.html
blogging (push-button publishing for the people): http://www.blogger.com/

Net Art Collections and Shows
www.rhizome.org Collection of net.art, history of net.art, reviews, interviews, articles, criticism. Weekly updates also distributed via e-mail as 'rhizome digest' mailing list.
010101.sfmoma.org '010101 - Art in Technological Times'. Recent gallery/online show at SFMOMA.
www.file.org.br FILE 2001 Electronic Language Festival. Gallery/online festival in Sao Paulo.
www.walkerart.org/gallery9 Walker Art Center's Gallery 9 - online gallery sponsors net.art projects.
www.eliterature.org The Electronic Literature Organization, a collection of hypertext works and related material.
www.aec.at/festival2001/ Ars Electronica, venerable Austrian tech-art organization sponsors annual festival.
turbulence.org

A few popular works
potatoland.org Mark Napier's web-reconfigurations, including Digital Landfill and Web Shredder.
worldofawe.net World of Awe, poetic travel postcards inside a found laptop.
jodi.org creators of the popular style of formalist web chaos.
rtmark.com net.art business model, brokerage house for hacktivist projects
airworld.net corporate site reconfiguration
www.0100101110101101.org Life Sharing
entropy8zuper.org collaborative art projects
www.unknownhypertext.com The Unknown, hypertext road novel.

Online References and Useful Sites
example code used in class
2600.com
cultdeadcow.com
webmonkey
Electronic Frontier Foundation
SlashDot
CSS properties Reference

Downloads
BBEdit Lite: Free version of BBEdit, popular Mac text editor.
MMKEdit: A free Mac text editor with HTML extensions. Also comes in Japanese.
EditPlus: An excellent text-editor for Windows
macromedia.com: 30-day trial downloads of Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, Director, etc.
Savitar: Mac MUD/MOO/MUSH Client