Society of Networked Things

Projektmodul
Lecturer(s): Mark Shepard, Visiting Professor from the State University of New York at Buffalo
Credits: 18 ECTS, 12 SWS
Date: Tuesdays, 9:15
Venue: Marienstraße 7b
First meeting: 14.10.2014

Description

By the year 2020 the number of network-enabled “things” is projected to reach 50 billion, or 7 for each person on the planet. As networked things become more commonplace, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications will outnumber those of human-to-machine (H2M) and human-to-human (H2H) communications over the Internet. This has profound implications for the nature and place of things in human habitats and our interactions with and through them in the course of our daily lives.

• What happens when humans become a minority on the Internet?
• What new qualities might this emerging society of networked things exhibit?
• How might we imagine alternative relations between people and things within such a society?

This studio will investigate the social, spatial and political implications of these questions through the creation of a collective installation composed of individual, network-enabled things. We will explore and problematize simple behaviors of responsive things (for example: plants that tweet when they need water, a light bulb that indicates a coming storm by changing color) and study how these behaviors gain complexity not only in their networked interactions with each other, but also though embodied interactions with people in space.

German description

n/a

Topics

to be announced

Admission requirements

Basic knowledge of (or co-registration in courses on)

• electronics,
• physical computing (Arduino YUN),
• programming (Processing),
• server-side programming (Node.js).

Registration procedure

Please send your application by email with the Subject Society of Networked Things to: shepard6 (ät) buffalo.edu

• Your full name
• Your study program and semester (Studienprogramm und Fachsemester)
• Student number (Matrikelnummer)
• Valid email address @uni-weimar.de Why?
• A paragraph describing:
  • why you want to take this course,
  • what technical skills and experience you have in this area, and
  • what other courses you plan on taking this semester

Grading

• Conceptual development and realization of a working prototype (70%),
• regular and active participation in studio critiques and discussions (15%),
• documentation of all work in digital formats (15%)

Eligible participants

Master students in Media Architecture, Media Art & Design

Syllabus

1. October 14, 2014:

Literature

to be announced

Links

to be announced