Collaborative Strategies in Interactive Media

(4 Credits)

Collaborative Strategies in Interactive Media (CSIM) is a semester-long graduate course that explores how interdisciplinary artistic creation through collaboration is a necessary skill to develop. This class invites artists of various genres, technologists, and researchers, to work together to produce interactive media performances that expound on modes of presentation and audience engagement. Students will experiment with programming tools, artistic practices, theoretical frameworks, and collaborative models to create shared works that integrate sound, video, text, AI and other emergent technologies into live and digital performance contexts. Experience working in and through technology is not a requirement to take this course. This course emphasizes both hands-on experimentation and critical reflection. Each week, students will engage in collaborative labs, rotating roles within teams, and structured dialogues that foreground the creative process as much as the final outcome. Students will be encouraged to bring their own artistic, scholarly, technological, and embodied practices into the making studio, situating them within broader discourses of shared authorship and social context. Central to the course is the idea that collaboration is not just a method, but a medium in itself. We will explore collaboration as a site of friction, negotiation, and innovation; fostering— collaborative ecologies. Readings, screenings, and case studies will provide structures that can contextualize both contemporary and preceding works within cultural, political, and technological landscapes. Programming-focused sessions will serve as prototyping dialogues, enabling students to test how generating and using both collected and originally composed media content can be shaped in a collective artistic voice in collaborative environments. Guiding questions include: - What determines hierarchy and can it be disassembled within a collaborative process? - How does technology expand an artist’s creative capacity beyond individual expression? - In what ways can programming languages serve as tools for communication, collaboration, and authorship in art? - How can semiotics, symbolism, and cultural context inform interactive collaborative practices? - What happens when performance extends beyond the body through technological mediation? - How can collaboration itself become a critical artistic statement?