BRING THE PRINTOUTS OF YOUR ESSAYS TO CENTER HALL 105 (our regular lecture room) on MARCH 19 (Thursday) BETWEEN 7 AND 8PM.

The printouts should be on regular 8.5x11 white paper.
Please use minimum 12 pint font and 1.5 or double line spacing.
You should use some kind of reference system for all your reference - you can use footnotes, bibliography or any other system as long as you are consistent. For internet references, indicate URL.
If you are quoting or referring to one of the required readings from the class, you don't need to provide publication details - just provide the name of the author, the article title and page number. Example: ( Kay and Goldberg, Personal Dynamic Media, p.XX).

PART 1:
write an essay between 800 and 1000 words (excluding footnotes) on ONE of these topics:

1. Contrast the new artistic forms created in the early decades of the 20th century with the new artistic forms being created today.
Your essay should include example from at least 3 of the following fields: architecture, graphic/web design, industrial design, moving image (i.e., film and/or animation and/or motion graphics).
For each example, discussion one modernist work and one contemporary work (for instance: Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye vs. Frank Gerhy, Walt Disney Concert Hall.)
In comparing selected works, and/or artistic movements and/or communication techniques from the early 20th century and today, explain how they act as symbols of a new type of society in which artists were/are living (i.e., industrial society or information society.)
Your examples should include material presented both in lectures and in sections. Optional: you can include a discussion of art project not covered in class if list a web site which has sufficient documentation of this project.)

2. Write an essay which discusses some of the experimental films from the 1920s and the early computer animation films from 1950s-1970s which were shown in lectures and sections.
Your essay should cover any 2 questions from the list below:
a) What are some of the differences and similarities between the the experimental films from the 1920s and the early computer animation films from 1950s-1970s - for example, in terms of how filmmakers use technologies of their time, structure their films in time and also reflect on the new dominant technologies (industrial machines, motors, electricity in the 1920s; digital computers in the 1960s).
c) Are the early computer animated films made in the 50s and 60s in North America reflect in any way different social and cultural sensibilities of this period - or are filmmakers trying to simply continue the advantage project or creating abstract films?
d) can you point how early computer filmmakers used very limited capacities of their computer animation system to define original aesthetics of their films?
e) normal feature filmmaking involves a combination of human actions (live actors moving in front of a camera, movement of a cameraman) and a mechanical recording. In contrast, 20th century experimental animators were pushing moving images towards both extremes, i.e. completely human enacted and completely machine produced. For example, McLaren's films done via drawing by hand on individual film frames foregrounding irregularity of human hand; and, on the other end, some of The Whitney's films do not have any traces of human hand since all movement is generated by mathematical functions . Using these observations as a starting point, discuss how experimental filmmakers of the 1920s and early computer animators of the 1960s explored different techniques for making films different from whose found in narrative feature filmmaking. advantages opposition between human irregularity and uniqueness and machine's regularity, order and repetition in computer animation.

PART 2:
write an essay between 400 and 600 words (excluding footnotes) on ONE of these topics:

3. When Ivan Sutherland, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart and other pioneers of cultural computing have created computer simulations of older media, they simultaneously added many new properties to these media. Discuss a few examples of these new properties using work done by Sutherland, Kay, and Engelbart.
Can you think of some properties and techniques of physical media which were lost then media were simulated in software? Talk about some examples of such loss.

4. Briefly summarize the ideas of cultural analytics. Using cultural analytics case studies already done by Software Studies Initiative, develop a plan for a large-scale study which will involve larger amounts of data which these case studies used so far. The data can be still images or video: anything from Facebook or Flickr photos to anime and classical art will qualify. You may want to develop your ideas on particular cultural area in which are an expert or actively participate as a social media user or a fan.
What kinds of research questions will you start with?
What kinds of visual features will you measure, and/or other information will you use?
What kinds of relationships and patterns do you expect to find, and how would you visualize them? (You may want to include sketches for visualizations in your essay).
Here are some examples of such larger data sets: Facebook photographs and pages of all current UCSD undergraduates; all of Disney cartoons; all of paintings done in the 20th century which are available in digital format; all of editions of major newspapers from around the world for every day since 1995; 100,000 anime music videos (AMVs) made by fans along with anime and other sources used in these AMVs.