ICAM 40 / VIS 40: Introduction to Computing in the Arts


midterm notes

Midterm is an "open book."
Bring Paul's Digital Art, printouts of class lecture notes, your own notes, and printouts of the assigned texts.
You can also use your laptop during the exam and to access the web.
You are not required to memorize any names or dates (this is why it is an open book exam.)
All factual information which will appear in the exam can be found in class notes.
However, since you will have to answer a number of questions during the limited time, you should be able to navigate through all the material you will have with you quite quickly.
Therefore you need to carefully review all the materials before the exam so you will know there to find the answer.

The main goal of the exam is to test your understanding of class material. You should be able to describe the general concepts covered in the class and and relate them to particular digital art and media projects.

The exam consists from multiple choice questions, a set of questions which can be answered in one sentence, and two short essays (2 pages each).
The questions cover both the lecture materials and assigned readings.


What are you responsible for ?
- being able to define the concepts covered in lectures. In some cases lecture notes contain definitions; in other cases I provided the links to the outside pages (typically Wikipedia) which contain the definitions.
-being able to talk about all projects shown in lectures in relation to the general concepts. We will not ask you directly about particular details of any projects. However, you should be able to describe how a particular concept or concepts work in the projects. In some cases you will have to rely on your notes; in most cases i provided the links to the web pages which describe a project and usually contain images and/or movies with documentation. You should study these descriptions to make sure you understand how the project work. If you dont have a laptop, you are advised to bring with you printouts of these web pages.
-understand and be able to talk about the main ideas contained in the assigned readings.
-some of the material covered in Friday discussion groups from the history of computers.
-you are not responsible for the details of the works discussed in Digital Art book, so you do not need to research these works online beyond their descriptions in the book. However, some questions will be about the general ideas in the sections of the book which were assigned; in answering these questions you will need to also refer to some of the projects described in the corresponding section of the book (which projects will be up to you). Therefore you are should make sure that you understand at least two projects discussed in each of the assigned section of the books (these maybe projects which were also shown in class, or not). If you feel that you need to do look up information online about these projects so you really understand them, you should do this.