Golan Levin
The Interactive Image
June 22-28

Course Description:
This short course is an introduction to the use of interactive graphics as an expressive visual tool. It is a "studio art course in computer science," in which the goal is art and design, but the medium is software created by you. Previous programming experience is not required. Rigorous exercises in the Processing flavor of Java will develop the basic vocabulary of constructs that govern static, dynamic, and interactive form. Topics include the computational manipulation of: point, line and shape; texture, value and color; time, change and motion; reactivity, connectivity and feedback. Participants will become acquainted with basic software algorithms, computational geometry, digital signal filtering, kinematic simulation, and the application of these techniques to aesthetic issues in interaction design, information visualization, and reactive art.

Biography:
Golan Levin is an artist, composer, performer and engineer interested in developing artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. His work focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal language of interactivity, and of nonverbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. Through performances, digital artifacts, and virtual environments, often created with a variety of collaborators, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, make visible our ways of interacting with each other, and explore the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity. Levin has exhibited widely in Europe, America and Asia.

Levin's work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in a wide variety of online, installation and performance media. He is known for the conception and creation of Dialtones [2001], a concert whose sounds are wholly performed through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience's own mobile phones, and for The Secret Lives of Numbers [2002], an interactive information visualization of global numeracy. Previously, Levin was granted an Award of Distinction in the Prix Ars Electronica for his Audiovisual Environment Suite [2000] interactive software and its accompanying audiovisual performance, Scribble [2000]. Most recently, Levin and collaborator Zachary Lieberman have presented Re:mark [2002], Messa di Voce [2003], and The Manual Input Sessions [2004], a series of interactive systems which use augmented-reality technologies to create multi-person, real-time visualizations of their participants' speech and gestures. Levin is now in the preliminary research phase of a new body of work, which centers about interactive robotics, machine vision, and the theme of gaze as a primary new mode for human-machine communication.

Levin received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the MIT Media Laboratory, where he studied with John Maeda in the Aesthetics and Computation Group. Between degrees, he worked for four years as an interaction designer and research scientist at Interval Research Corporation. Presently Levin is Associate Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University; his work is represented by the Bitforms gallery, New York City.

Supplies for participants to bring from home:

• if you have your own laptop computer, it may be helpful and convenient to bring it, but, the workshop will provide computers for those that don't have their own.