Upskill with Tech Giants for Free!

Class Central is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The University of Texas at Austin

Foundations of Arts and Entertainment Technologies

The University of Texas at Austin via Kadenze

Go to class Write review

Overview

This course explores the primary entertainment vehicles that students are exposed to on a daily basis through a series of interlinking concepts such as the digital audio workstation, a Kraftwerk 3D concert, interactive toys, robotics in art, 3D projection mapping, Pokémon Go! and much more.

This examination is supported by a critical evaluation of the various kinds of technologies that have emerged along the continuum of entertainment technology.

How have these technologies shaped and even created new art forms? How have these transformations informed styles and genres across theater, recording music, feature films, integrated media events, game play from consoles to hand-helds and the explosion of commercially accessible virtual and augmented realities?

Information will be synthesized through an understanding that the common thread has been the ever-expanding role of computing technologies in all forms of commercial and popular art.

Syllabus

Session 1: Introduction To Arts And Entertainment Technologies
This session will present an overview of the course, the three pillars of AET and numerous of examples of how they intersect, cross-pollinate, combine and deliver.

Session 2: Popular/Commercial Music Technologies
This session will introduce the student to the digital audio workstation and various other music technologies and examine the intersection of music, technology and culture.

Session 3: The Range Of The Concert Experience
This session will examine how technologies – ranging from amplification to motion tracking – combine in modern, multi-sensory concert experiences. The German electronic band, Kraftwerk, will serve as a case study.

Session 4: Theater, Spectacle, Robotics In Art
This session will examine how a wide range of new theatre performance genres have [developed] alongside the exploding growth of high-precision, expressive, programmable technologies.

Session 5: New Trends In Interactive Art & Education
This session will focus on how technology affords a new level of audience engagement and immersion in interactive art and educational installations.

Session 6: The Moving Image
This session will look at how software from the Adobe Creative Cloud can be used in nontraditional ways such as the creation recursive animated GIFs in Photoshop to kinetic text in After Effects, to name a few.

Session 7: Gaming
This session will focus on the history of the video game and how that history parallels and, in many cases, promotes new innovation in entertainment technology. There will be an additional look at gender issues in gaming.

Session 8: Virtual And Augmented Realities
This session will look at how new technologies are used in increasingly sophisticated ways to blur the lines that divides us from our experience of the world around us.

Session 9: New Media
This session will focus on the convergence of mobile media, storytelling and bewilderment. What has the podcast done to distort the line between entertainment and information?

Session 10: Makerspace And DIY Electronics
This session will explore the world of maker culture. With 700,00 units of Arduino products in circulation and counting, what does this crowdsourcing of innovation mean for the future of entertainment?

Session 11: Gadgets And Interactive Toys
This session culls from many of the previous sessions to present a wide variety of gadget and interactive devices that currently entertain the next generation of thinkers and innovators.

Session 12: Subversive Technologies And Wrap Up
At what point did Photoshop become a verb? Before wrapping up the course, this section will look at the history of how technology has been perverted to misrepresent, enhance, and even change history. How has technology ultimately redefined what entertains us?

Taught by

Jack W. Stamps

Tags

Reviews

5.0 rating, based on 1 Class Central review

Start your review of Foundations of Arts and Entertainment Technologies

  • Anonymous
    Great to learn about the history of all these contemporary artists who use technology as part of their practice. Very well produced course. Lectures are very well written.
Go to class

Never Stop Learning.

Get personalized course recommendations, track subjects and courses with reminders, and more.

Sign up for free