CAMS/MAS 216: Creative Media Manipulation

The arts and humanities are infused with media, from the printed word to digital images, videos, and sound. Knowing how these media are constructed at a fundamental material level means that one can be an active producer of digital artifacts, rather than a passive consumer who cedes creative control to someone else. In this course students will learn programming skills that allow them to create and manipulate images, text, video, sound, and the physical world. Programming languages and environments may include Processing, Python, Arduino, and Lilypad. Lectures, assignments, and programming experiments will ensure that all students understand the material regardless of experience or background. We will regularly illustrate the intersection of the arts and humanities with computation and digital technologies through the reading of historical texts and the close examination of specific works. Skills learned in the course will be useful for future work in the digital humanities among other domains.