The “Artist’s Guide to Useful Technology” is an ongoing project of workshops, performances, symposia, consultations, tutorials and problem-solving forums taught by Harvestworks staff at art and music centers in the US, to demonstrate Interactive Art. These events give participants hands-on knowledge and instruction, and Harvestworks will be tailoring the event to the needs of the audience. Students from all skill levels are encouraged to attend. The presenters – composers and visual artists themselves – will also include an audio-visual performance as part of their workshop.
Interactive Art is an umbrella term that includes works ranging from kinetic sculpture that reacts to the presence of viewers, to a live VJ performance that automatically changes in realtime to subtleties in the music; from dancers who can make sound and images change as their bodies movies, to a robot programmed with artificial intelligence to react to people’s emotions by reading their faces.
The “Artist’s Guide to Useful Technology” is an ongoing project of workshops, performances, symposia, consultations, tutorials and problem-solving forums taught by Harvestworks staff at art and music centers in the US, to demonstrate these techniques. These events give participants hands-on knowledge and instruction, and presenters will be tailoring the event to the needs of the audience. Students from all skill levels are encouraged to attend.
Step 1: Interactive Art Workshop
In this workshop participants will see various works of Interactive Art. Furthermore, the presenters will demonstrate some of the techniques used to create interactivity in a simple step-by-step instruction.
Step 2: Master Class
The Presenters – composers and visual artists themselves – will evaluate student’s works and give technical as well as artistic feedback. Feedback can be extended to outlining project resources, timelines, skill needs and financial estimates for new project ideas.
Step 3: Performance
Art has to be experienced. The presenters – composers and visual artists themselves – will also include an audio-visual performance as part of their workshop, that incorporates interactive arts techniques.
Workshops have been held at Stevens Institute, Hoboken, NJ; Ramapo College, NJ; Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, NY; Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; Megapolis Festival, Baltimore, MD; Newsound Festival, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY; Stonybrook University, NY; SUNY Fredonia, NY; White Plains, NY; Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
If you want to host one of our workshops, send inquiries to carolp@harvestworks.org
Over the past 30 years Harvestworks has become a leading center of interactive arts technology and is home to artists and instructors who are experts in their practice. Computer driven media is changing the fabric of our daily lives. These complex mechanizations and databases deliver sound, images and kinetic objects with increasing speed and personalized accuracy. As art becomes more dependent on technology, a thorough understanding of both the possibilities and implementation becomes increasingly important for artists in all fields. Without this information, it can become increasingly difficult for them to realize their vision. Harvestworks’ “Artist Guide To Useful Technology” is intended to give active and inspiring artists orientation in the field of Interactive Art.
See bios of our current presenters, Hans Tammen & Adam Rokhsar at the bottom of this page.
Adam Rokhsar is a multimedia artist with degrees in psychology from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Music Information Retrieval Laboratory, and the head coordinator of NYU’s Music Technology student research groups. Adam designs sound for interactive installations, teaches computer music and video programming, and is working on a Master’s thesis on machine-learning algorithms. His sound design work can currently be heard in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, and his video work was displayed in the Jakopic Gallery as part of multimedia project Senza Televisione.
Hans Tammen was Deputy Director at Harvestworks, and was responsible for the oversight of all projects related to Max/MSP/Jitter and Physical Computing, as well as managing the education program and the studios. In this position he encounters the projects of approx. 250 clients, students and Artist In Residence per year. After an initial degree in Adult Education in 1988 he taught as an adjunct at Kassel University, and as part of his works as a union technology consultant from 1992 to 2000 he held about 120 one to five-day seminars using modern seminar techniques like metaplan, role-plays, and others. As a composer/guitarist he is best known for his “Endangered Guitar” works, interfacing his guitar with Max/MSP. Signal To Noise called his works “…a killer tour de force of post-everything guitar damage”, All Music Guide recommended him: “…clearly one of the best experimental guitarists to come forward during the 1990s.”
Flickr API error: Invalid API Key (Key has invalid format)