PIMA 7010 (first semester) still from a weekly in-class performance: Jay, Leah Coloff & Donghwi Han
PIMA & Technology
In the PIMA curriculum, technology is explored primarily as a tool for collaboration: collaboration between organic systems (people), collaboration between organic and non-organic systems (people and computers), and collaboration between machines.
Much of the study of technology in PIMA is the study of a single programming language in which all PIMA students become proficient, or, if entering the program with proficiency, have the opportunity for advanced study. While this language serves as a means of communicating with and through technology to achieve live performance goals, most importantly it serves as a language for the exchange of ideas across disciplinary boundaries in the form of functional code.
Artist, author, and theorist of digital culture Lev Manovich writes of the PIMA technology curriculum:
Artists from different disciplines seeking to work in a non-hierarchical, collective collaborative mode always face the difficulty of finding a common language in which to share and develop ideas. By proposing a computer programming language as this common language of collaboration, the program both literally addresses the problem of a lingua franca for artists trained in different fields, and expands the notion of the functionality of language: that ideas expressed in programming are not only readable, exchangeable, and editable as they would be if expressed natural language, but are executable, linkable, and have the capability of being nonlinear, recursive, self-modifying, pseudo-random, and interactive. These qualities of computer languages allow, if the students are able to achieve sufficient proficiency, a level of communication between artists that very much enriches what is possible in the realm of natural language.
Max
The language studied in common in the program is Cycling74’s Max/MSP, a node-based visual programming language created for artists and by artists that has been continuous development since the 1980s. It is among the most versatile and robust languages for interactive live performance and installation work, and has many features that facilitate collaboration in multiple forms. As it is equally capable in image, sound, physical computing, and networked computing, it is particularly well suited for interdisciplinary work and the exploration of new performance forms.
You can get started with Max before starting the program, and we encourage that. The tutorials in the PIMA 774x course sequence are all available online on John’s YouTube Channel. Below are the first few tutorials. Here is a link to the PIMA 7741 (introduction to interactive media in performance) playlist.