1. Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program UC Santa Barbara MAT 256 Visual Design through Algorithms Winter 2006 MAT 256: Visual Design Through Algorithms Professor George Legrady, legrady@arts.ucsb.edulegrady@arts.ucsb.edu Professor Jerry Gibson, gibson@mat.ucsb.edugibson@mat.ucsb.edu Winter 2006, e-studio, Art 2220 Tuesday 1pm-2pm, Jerry Gibson Lecture Thursday 12pm-1pm, George Legrady Lecture Thursday 12pm-1pm, Lab TA Will Wolcott, wolcott@umail.ucsb.eduwolcott@umail.ucsb.edu Course Web Site : http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/

2. Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program UC Santa Barbara MAT 256 Visual Design through Algorithms Winter 2006  What is MAT 256? Course Definition  An interdisciplinary team-taught course with goals to foster engineering-level research in conjunction with the experimental approach of the visual arts.  Course consists of weekly lectures by both engineering and arts faculty

3. Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program UC Santa Barbara MAT 256 Visual Design through Algorithms Winter 2006  Course Goals  Engineering component: understanding of the scientific premise of the algorithms  Artistic component: to aim for aesthetic richness and visual/conceptual innovation  The course is meant to function as a resource and reference for future research

4. Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program UC Santa Barbara MAT 256 Visual Design through Algorithms Winter 2006  Student Workload  3 multimedia projects that explore mathematical visual processes, interactivity and visual perception: 1) Visual FFT, 2) Randomness, 3) Final Project  Lecture and lab attendance  Directed reports on readings posted at course mailing list  Projects to be documented online

5. Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program UC Santa Barbara MAT 256 Visual Design through Algorithms Winter 2006  Interdisciplinarity  Students will be paired based on different backgrounds (artist, engineer, social science, etc.)  Goal is to hybridize, exchange problem solving methods, ideas, empirical results  We will study how we work in teams, how we share knowledge, and arrive at results  Comparison arts and engineering research methods

6. Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program UC Santa Barbara MAT 256 Visual Design through Algorithms Winter 2006  Engineering Course Content  Filtering, sampling, and reconstruction  Fourier Series, Orthogonal Series, and Approximations,  Randomness, Markov Chains  Noise & Information  Convolution and System Response  Transfer functions  Discrete Transforms

7. Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program UC Santa Barbara MAT 256 Visual Design through Algorithms Winter 2006  Arts Course Content  Discussion of what is art research  overview of computational aesthetics  a review of the function of images  principles of visual communication  chance, noise, and information  art examples of the implementation of algorithmic processes in contemporary arts and architecture  algorithmic visual design and iterative processes as a form of image production experimentation

8. Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program UC Santa Barbara MAT 256 Visual Design through Algorithms Winter 2006  Student Projects  Projects will be experimental but show an understanding of lecture material covered  Flexibility in content, technologies, materials  Emphasis on the visual, and possibly interactivity  Driven by research methods, structures, systems, etc.