Exhibition Piece
The capstone — an instrument staged to run unattended, for a viewer who gets no explanation and no help
Due: 21 May 2027 · Weight: 50%
The brief#
Take the instrument this semester built toward and stage it to survive a room full of strangers with nobody there to explain it.
The realistic scope here is a deepened, staged version of First Instrument — not a new build from nothing in the last two weeks. Twelve weeks concentrated one continuous idea (gesture, constraint, decay, many hands, a chosen failure, a small family of outputs); the exhibition piece is the version of that idea that can finally stand in a room without you. A brief that quietly assumes a fresh build in the time remaining is the most common way a capstone like this goes wrong — start from what you already have.
What you submit#
A link to the deployed build, the source repository, and whatever staging notes a marker needs to run it the way it ran in the final studio (screen size, whether it needs a keyboard or a pointer or both, how long it runs before it needs a reset). The due date sits after the final studio on purpose: the piece is judged on what ran unattended in that room on the day, and the days after are for writing the staging notes down properly, not for changing what ran.
This assessment is judged holistically rather than against a weighted table, because “does this read as one coherent instrument” is a whole-piece judgement, not a sum of separately-scored parts.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- submitted by the deadline as a deployed, running build plus the source repository
- runs unattended for at least the length of the final studio, with no input it doesn't document
- a first-time viewer can start using it with no spoken explanation
- you can state, in one sentence, what the piece is actually about — not what it does, but what it is for
How it is marked
Judged as a whole against the brief, with particular weight on whether the piece survives running unattended for the length of the final studio, and whether the semester's constraint, decay and failure-as-material work (or a considered subset of it) reads as one coherent instrument rather than a list of features bolted together at the end.