SLOP1450: Instruments for Mark-Making
A studio course in building small interactive instruments for gesture and ink: a dozen weeks, one continuous idea per week, each build tested at the keyboard rather than trusted from a screenshot, and defended in a crit.
What you will do
Each week you build one small interactive instrument for making marks — software a hand plays like a brush, not a picture the software produces for you. You'll steer a stroke with a pointer, a touch and a keyboard in turn, give it one deliberate constraint, let it decay or drift on its own, and watch what a real hand does with it that a screenshot never shows. Twelve weeks build toward two things: an instrument built to a self-imposed constraint, and a small exhibition piece that has to run for a stranger with nobody there to explain it.
Who it is for
You can already write a program that responds to a mouse, a touch or a key — this course does not teach programming from nothing. It's for anyone curious about the gap between "the code runs" and "the thing feels right in the hand": interaction designers, generative artists, and programmers who want to spend a semester on the part of software that only shows up when someone else's fingers are on it.