An experiential introduction to telepresence and interactive digital media performance. Demonstrates how a shared space constructed through media and computer technology can become a site for "temporary physical interaction" across a distance, considering how performative acts become transformed by such interaction. Includes coverage of interactive media design software such as Max/MSP/Jitter.

This course emphasizes hands-on experience and creative production. Working in teams, students are responsible for completing a series of interactive digital media performance projects. Effective collaboration between team members is an important part of the course.

We use the term "embodied telematics" to describe a process that links human physical activity between two or more geographically dispersed sites, through the mediation of an interactive system, creating a shared environment of mutual influence and responsive behaviors.

Originally formulated by the artist/theorist Roy Ascott, telematics is "a term used to designate computer-mediated communications networking between geographically dispersed individuals and institutions that are interfaced to data-processing systems. It involves the technology of interaction among human beings and between the human mind and artificial systems of intelligence and perception."

As described by UCI software researcher/theorist Paul Dourish, "interaction is an embodied phenomenon", taking place in a setting that "is not merely background, but a fundamental and constitutive component of the activity that takes place."

Max/MSP/Jitter is a media design environment for the creation of music, audio, and visuals. In use worldwide for over fifteen years by performers, composers, artists, teachers, and students, Max/MSP is a graphical programming environment, which means you create your own software using a visual toolkit of objects, and connect them together with patch cords. The basic environment that includes MIDI, control, user interface, and timing objects is called Max, which can be extended with software components called "objects." Two important collections of Max objects are MSP and Jitter, hence the collective name Max/MSP/Jitter. MSP is a set of audio processing objects that perform a wide range of audio tasks, from interactive filter design to hard disk recording. Jitter is a set of matrix data processing objects optimized for video and 3D graphics.