I ❤ NY

Thanks to our Media Dual Master’s Degree at the -Universität Weimar and the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, I am currently staying in Western for an academic teaching staff exchange. While Mark Shepard (artist and architect whose work addresses contemporary entanglements of technology and urban life) is visiting Weimar and teaching at the -Universität, I am humbled and thrilled to take his place here at SUNY UB for the fall term.

SUNY-Buffalo-Logo

I am teaching two courses, one in the Faculty of Architecture / School of and Planning called “Überblick”: this course is embracing the superficial and trying to give an excessive overview about existing tools and technologies, from geolocation to microcontrollers, from git to Kinect, from soldering to writing genetic software. One day we were looking at 18 programming languages in less than one hour. No kidding! But so far I feel this experiment is quite successful in revealing the greater structures behind technologies seeming overly complex to anyone who’s not a supernerd.

Another course “Mobile Media with HTML5” is part of the Department of Media Study on UB’s North Campus (right: UB has two campuses – try to translate that to German…) is focusing on mobile media development with HTML5 and JavaScript as up to date tools for media artists.

The Media- program is not about the Architecture of Media, it’s about Architecture _and_ media, thus an interdisciplinary study somewhere between architecture, media arts, public space, urban art and possibly even sociology and ethnology. Obtaining the Master’s degree requires staying one year here in Buffalo and a second year in Weimar.

I am so glad to have come here, the people are so nice and welcoming and Western and the Buffalo/Niagara Region are really beautiful, esp. in the fall. And it’s certainly very interesting from an academic point of view: There are many things that I learned and which I will hopefully be able to apply back in Germany.

Further Readings:
* Mark Shepard
* Media Architecture, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
* CAST (Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies),
* DMS (Department of Media Study),

Posted on 18. November 2014 by . This entry was posted in Articles in English, Arts/Kunst, Teaching and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.