Digital Sense: An Experimental Course in Advanced Technologies for Art and Design
How can timeless human activities such as drawing and painting, relegated to the realm of the analogue, meaningfully engage modeling platforms like Rhino and contemporary output technologies such as 3D Printing? How can we learn to intuit in the realm of the virtual, and what are the boundaries of this experience? Why is there a perceived divide between the physical and the digital, and what does it mean?
RISD has created a new course that looks at the interdisciplinary potential of programming languages, rendering interfaces and the universal accessibility of rapid prototyping platforms. The course represents a crossover between the systemic and the intuitive, the planned and the felt, and how familiarization with advanced technology can augment the creative voice. The course also explores the increasingly porous membrane of visual work traveling into and through computational space to re‐emerge in the world, engaging questions about liquidity, transformation, new nature and ideas of the "the real."
Class co-creators Joy Ko and Brooks Hagan will speak about the class, concepts that it introduces, and a range of student work.
Associate Professor
Rhode Island School of Design
Brooks Hagan is a textile designer, researcher, and artist. He works with numerous industry leaders, including Pallas Textiles, S.Harris, Valdese Weavers, and Mulberry Silk. His recent project with computer scientists at Cornell University and Stanford University investigates advanced visualization for the design of constructed textiles and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Hagan collaborates with many fine artists and works with the Dieu Donne Papermill in Manhattan to explore the fusion of paper encasements to industrial textile materials. He received his BA from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He has taught at RISD since 2006 and served as graduate program director and acting head of the Textile Department.
Architecture Critic
Rhode Island School of Design
Joy Ko received her PhD in Mathematics from New York University. A design computation specialist and educator, she has worked in computation for twenty years. Starting as a developer at Bell Labs, she is currently a critic of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, helping to bring computation into the curriculum across disciplines and divisions. She has developed computational libraries for exploration in diverse areas, from image processing to water waves to design application. Her upcoming book, The Architect’s Field Guide to Computation (with Kyle Steinfeld), traverses the terrain between fundamentals of code and geometry and domain-specific application. She has organized symposia at the intersection of design, computation, and pedagogy and has consulted for Gensler, JGA, CSIR, the Angiogenesis Foundation, and iOWH and has collaborated globally with artists, designers, and architects.
