NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS (UNA): Department of Visual Arts

Specialization in Media and Technologies for Pictorial Production

Tirigall Chair

Foundation

New media arts occupy a leading place in the panorama of contemporary artistic creation. This leading role is not based solely on the breadth and variety of current creation, but also on the importance of its history and that of the technological arts in general. Many interactive works incorporate specific techno-scientific paradigms, which constitute paths of aesthetic exploration that transcend the field of traditional aesthetic reflections, proposing new questions and challenges to think about current art. This situation has led them to develop their own theory and aesthetics, thus conceiving their own language. Since the late 1950s we can observe a diversity of productions by artists-engineers who use various analog technologies as media or supports for their works. With the arrival of digital technologies, these practices became more frequent in time and space. An important area of ​​this production is the so-called Multimedia Generative Art. Today we can find expressions of this Multimedia Generative Art with other names: Multimedia Art, Digital Art, Electronic Art, Media Art, Hypermedia Art, Art and New Media, etc. The contents of this curricular area intend to go through, differentiate, analyze and criticize the various productions of Art linked to New Technologies and their corresponding producers, ideologues and thinkers, and also carry out concrete production experiences in generative systems and interactive installations with processing. image and sound in real time.

UNIT I: Multimedia Arts and New Media

From electronic to digital technology. The origins of computer art, infographics and the art of engineers. From analog to digital media. Historical works based on interactive installations, virtual reality, artificial life and intelligence, augmented reality, net-art, robotics and bio-art. The principles of new media. What do we mean by interactivity? The concept of technology: contributions from the Philosophy of Science. Technology and aesthetic thought. Aesthetic peculiarities of technological artistic productions. The concept of multimedia art: its specificity. Aesthetic properties of multimedia arts. Aesthetic consequences of the transition between analog and digital technologies. From video art to interactive installations and online productions.

UNIT II: Programming for Artists

Algorithm concept: Definition of algorithm and problem. Memory and arithmetic and logical operations. Programming concepts: Programming languages. Coding of an algorithm. Computation program. Algorithm coding using artist-oriented programming languages (Processing). The source code file. The integrated development environment (IDE). Data types, variables and constants. Expressions, statements. conditionals Arithmetic operators. Logical operators. Logical expressions. Control structures, repetition and recursion.

UNIT III: Real-time sound and video control

Color theory for digital systems. Vector images and bitmaps. Image file formats. Use of libraries for video manipulation and capture with webcams. Sound libraries, spectral analysis of the sound signal. Using the microphone and audio input as a sensor. Introduction to computer vision, types of cameras, infrared and depth cameras, image analysis.

Videos of student practical work