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The University of Texas at Austin

Foundations of Arts and Entertainment Technologies

The University of Texas at Austin via Kadenze

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

  • 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, and Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails will serve as case studies. When and how should multimedia technologies be utilized to enhance a concert experience?
  • Theater, Spectacle, & Robotics in Art
    • This session will examine how a wide range of new theatre performance genres have flourished alongside the exploding growth of high-precision, expressive, programmable technologies.
  • New Modes of Gaming and Entertainment: Mobile Gaming, Virtual Reality
    • This session will look at how new technologies are used in increasingly sophisticated ways to enhance the gaming and/or entertainment experience and blur the lines that divide us from our experience of the world around us.
  • Commercial Music Technologies I: From Pipe Organ to Cloud-based Streaming
    • This session will lead the student through the history of music technology, from the pipe organ to the modern day digital revolution, and also address sociological trends and implications that emerge with the evolution of digital music technology.
  • Gaming II: The Sociology and Culture of Gaming
    • This session will explore significant historical and contemporary sociological trends and issues raised uniquely in the rise of video gaming over the past several decades, including gender portrayal issues and the recent phenomenon of organized eSports.
  • Technology Today: Makerspaces and Subversive Technologies
    • This concluding session will explore cutting-edge trends and applications of technology within the very recent past and show how technological developments continue to impact the society we live in.
  • The Moving Image
    • This session will look at how software from the Adobe Creative Cloud can be used in nontraditional ways—from the creation of recursive animated GIFs in Photoshop to kinetic text in After Effects—as well as the application of cutting-edge visual effects technology in the film industry.
  • 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.
  • Commercial Music Technologies II: The Digital Audio Workstation
    • This session will introduce the student to the digital audio workstation and the digital signal processor as a means of exploring the power and scope of digital audio technology today.
  • Gaming I: History and Development Principles
    • This session will focus on the history of video games and explore how that history parallels and, in many cases, promotes new innovation in entertainment technology.
  • The “Do-it-Yourself” Technological Revolution: Podcasting and Arduino
    • This session will focus on ways that the digital revolution has “democratized” content creation, from the ease of making a Podcast to the vast potential of “do-it-yourself” electronics such as Arduino.
  • New Trends in Interactive Art
    • This session will focus on how technology may create a new level of audience engagement and immersion in interactive art and educational installations using powerful and versatile programming languages like Max/MSP.

Taught by

Jack W. Stamps

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.

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