Project 2

Description

For this project, you will produce a digital design work that critically engages with the project's theme. You will also develop a design concept, production process, and a well-articulated work statement to explains your work to a wide audience. Your work will then be collectively displayed in a class-wide online exhibition.

Avoid basing your proejct around existing intellectual properties (movies, comics, games, etc.) unless you do something conceptually sophisticated like a parody, deconstruction, etc.

Project Theme: Cyborgs

Cybernetics: Control and communication in the animal and the machine

– Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics (1948)

The relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. [This] is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.

– Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto

In her 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century, Donna Haraway uses the term "cyborg" as a metaphor for contemporary existence and it's blurry boundaries. Her idea of a cyborg is "a condensed image of both imagination and material reality" and "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and per- versity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence." Haraway believes that tradtional dualisms like natrual/artificial are no longer relevent; she describes traditional Western science and politics as "racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture." Her cyborg manifesto is an attempt to describe citizens of the future.

She uses these concept words to illustrate how cybernetic beings or products differ from their predecessors:

Traditional (Past) Cybernetic (Future)
Representation Simulation
Realism Postmodernism
Organism Biotic component
Depth, integrity Surface, boundary
Heat Noise
Sex Genetic engineering
Labor Robotics
Mind Artificial Intelligence

Project Description

You can interperate the theme of cybernetics and cyborgs however you see fit. Besides literal cyborgs like Darth Vader or people with prosthetics, consider a variety of boundaries that you can or interfer with, blend, or exploit:

  • Human/machine
  • Natural/Artificial
  • Analog/Digital
  • Visual/Auditory
  • Interior/Exterior
  • Micro/Macro
  • Personal/Public
  • ???

Further Inspiration

Deliverables

  1. Production blog (Canvas)
  2. Concept pitch (Canvas, production blog)
  3. Production Reports (Production blog)
  4. Work statement that uses design language (Canvas)
  5. Project files: (Canvas)
  6. Project documentation (Canvas, production blog)
  7. Online exhibition information form: See on Canvas

Project media

If you are unsure of what types of digital projects are available to create, please have a look at the project categories. This is not a comprehensive list, but you should be able to locate your own creative interests within.

Online Exhibition

Project two will culminate in an online exhibition of student work. Exhibitions typically have a central theme—a conceptual thread that links the work together. Your instructor will coordinate the online exhibition and will be accessible to anyone with Penn State login credentials.

Rubric

All project deliverables must be met for the project to be graded. A non-submission or non-completion for any part of the project is considered an incomplete project.

  1. Met all deliverable requirements: 20%
  2. Project outcomes:
    • Concept: 20%
    • Craft: 20%
    • Work Statement: 20%
    • Participation in online exhibition: 20%

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