Beschreibung
How can we use the technologies that watch us to create new ways of seeing ourselves and each other?
Can we break these technologies open or apply them in unexpected, weird, radical ways to offer different visions of what it means to have/be/experience a body in this world?
This course invites us to think about how bodies perform with and within technological media. We will consider how bodies are represented in virtual media, from painting to photography, video, and the digital, and how the body itself is a medium and mediator. We will make and share our own experimental artworks while exploring radical and canonical artists and theorists from this multifaceted field. This course balances technical skill-building with critical inquiry, contextualizing our creative practice within the history of surveillance technologies, body imaging traditions, and contemporary issues around visibility and embodiment.
We will consider the virtual body and the virtual perspective: how we see and how we are seen within technological fields of representation. In this 1-week intensive edition, we will focus on creating interactive audiovisual artworks using real time body-tracking and image-processing tools inside TouchDesigner.
We will use the MediaPipe (Toren Blankensmith & Dom Scott) and Stream Diffusion (dotsimulate) plugins to harness machine learning capabilities to build interactions that are both playful with and critical of machine-mediated living. There are many ways to apply these tools in combination with other visual and sound based interactions for installations or performances, and participants will be encouraged to follow their own conceptual journeys applying these tools to ask questions, stage critiques, transform relations between bodies and spaces, create new kinds of visuality and embodiment, and so on!
Course Objectives
Develop meaningful understanding of tensions between subjugation and empowerment with embodied technologies
Harness motion-interactive and generative AI processing tools inside TouchDesigner for creative and critical artistic purposes
Broaden knowledge of how relationships between technologies and bodies shape identity and society, historically and presently
Share skills and ideas with other makers through deep-dive discussions, workshops, and collective studio time
In this course you will be introduced to
real-time motion tracking with the MediaPipe plugin for TouchDesigner
live audiovisual generation and processing using motion reactivity and interactivity
customizable real-time AI image processing with StreamDiffusion in TouchDesigner
connecting contemporary AI tools and embodied digital interactivity to histories of surveillance and body-imaging practices
For more info and to join: https://www.schoolofma.org/programs/p/summer2025-mediated-bodies-touchdesigner-intensive
