History

A documented history of COMP1720/COMP6720 Art and Interaction Computing at ANU: its roots in the new-media courses of 2005–2010, its creation in 2011, the move from Processing to p5.js, and its convenors up to the final offering in 2024.

COMP1720/6720 was taught every Second Semester from 2011 to 2024, and is currently paused. Throughout that time it was a collaboration between the ANU School of Computing and the ANU School of Art & Design: a course where art students learned to code and computing students learned to make art.

This page is compiled from the ANU Undergraduate Handbook (2005–2012), the ANU Programs and Courses catalogue (2014 onwards), the recollections of staff who taught it, and earlier versions of this website. Where the record is incomplete or contradictory, we say so rather than guess.

Before COMP1720: the new-media courses (2005–2010)

From 2005 the (then) Department of Computer Science ran a sequence of three “new media” courses:

At the same time, Tim Brook and Henry Gardner were running a subject offered jointly to Art School and computing students under the title Art and Interaction in New Media: Synthesising Visual Culture and Computer Science. Brook’s approach set the pattern the course kept for the rest of its life: creativity flourishes under constraint, so every student made a major project in response to a single brief (his was “Secrets”, built as Java applets), and code art demands more discipline than ordinary programming, because code that is constantly reworked must stay transparent and well structured.

The art turn in the catalogue happened in 2010. The Handbook entry for COMP2720 had been word-for-word identical from 2005 to 2009; the 2010 entry was rewritten around the idea that in the modern art world “the computer is not just another medium, it is a whole other range of media”, and the assessment shifted from a portfolio, assignments and a 40% exam to 80% assignments and a 20% exam. This followed Henry Gardner winning an ANU Teaching Enhancement Grant for COMP2720 in 2009 and staging a student exhibition, Works on the Web and Works on the Wall, in the CSIT Building that November.

2011: COMP1720 is created

In 2011 the school restructured its first-year electives into a block of parallel courses: COMP1710 (renamed Web Development & Design), COMP1730 Programming for Scientists, and a new course, COMP1720 Art & Interaction in New Media.

COMP1720 was COMP2720 moved down to first year. It kept COMP2720’s description, semester, workload and assessment, and the Handbook lists it as incompatible with COMP2720. The one substantive change was that the prerequisite was removed. That decision is what opened the course to art students with no computing background, and it is the reason the course could serve as one of the two computing courses in the BA (New Media Arts), which Tom Gedeon, then Head of Department, had helped to establish.

The Handbook does not record convenors, but we think the early convenors were Henry Gardner and Tim Brook, probably with help from the ANU School of Art. Henry Gardner is the earliest recorded convenor on Programs and Courses in 2014. Which language the course used from 2011 to 2013 is also undocumented; by 2014 the prescribed text was Reas and Fry’s Processing (Reas & Fry, 2014), and it is likely Processing was used from the start, since Processing is Java with a 2D graphics layer and so continues the COMP2750 line directly.

In 2015, Charles Martin, then a PhD student at the ANU Research School of Computer Science, was a tutor and created the original lecture and lab content on sound and music computing.

Ben Swift and the move to the browser (2015–2019)

Ben Swift took over as lecturer and convenor in 2015, working with Kit Devine from the School of Art as artist in residence.

For the 2017 offering Ben ported the course from Processing to Lauren McCarthy’s p5.js, moving everything into the browser and into JavaScript. Most of the course as it stands today, including the slides and the “build it up, break it down” labs, traces its roots to that rewrite. Ben also started the practice of weekly guest lectures from practising computational artists.

In 2017 Kieran Browne wrote and delivered the art theory strand of the weekly lectures. In 2018 that role passed to Tony Curran, who expanded it considerably and remained artist in residence for several years afterwards.

Charles Martin (2020–2022)

From 2020, Charles Martin convened the course, with Tony Curran continuing as artist in residence. Charles convened again in 2021 and 2022, streamlining and integrating the art history aspects and developing more advanced material to challenge the cohort. This included the lectures on recent developments, data art, artificial life, and creative machine learning.

The course title changed in 2021 to Art and Interaction Computing with a new set of learning outcomes that emphasised interactive art as the major focus of the course rather than new media art.

In 2021 and 2022 the COMP1720 material was also used by Ben and Ushini Attanayake for the ANU’s first Extension Course in Creative Computing, taught in ACT colleges.

2023 and 2024

In 2023, Charles handed the course to Anne Ozdowska, who served as convenor, with teaching by three lecturers drawn from the COMP1720 community: ANU alumnus Brent Schuetze and then-PhD candidates Yichen Wang and Ushini Attanayake.

In 2024 the course was convened and delivered by Michael McCullough with a team of tutors who had all been involved with COMP1720 before. These versions of the course maintained Charles’s materials with adjustments based on what had and had not worked.

Semester 2, 2024 was the most recent offering of COMP1720/6720.

Programs the course served

COMP1720 and COMP1710 formed the compulsory core of the IT in New Media minor, followed by a choice of ARTV2619 Digital Compositing, COMP3900 HCI Design and Evaluation, or COMP4610 Computer Graphics. COMP1720 was also accepted in place of ARTV1032 Foundation Computer Studies in the Bachelor of Visual Arts, and appeared as an elective in the Bachelor of Computing and in the Digital Humanities major and minor.

The postgraduate version, COMP6720, appears in the catalogue from 2014 (the earliest year it covers) and was always taught together with COMP1720. The only documented difference was that COMP6720 students submitted an additional short reflection on recent developments with their major project.

In 2023, the Human Centred and Creative Computing (HCCC) minor, major, and undergraduate and postgraduate specialisations were launched, with COMP1720/6720 as a core element of each one.

To the future

Like the Ship of Theseus, COMP1720 changed year to year, but kept the spirit Tim Brook gave it: interdisciplinary work that stretches both artists and coders to learn new things.

Across almost 20 years of teaching history, counting its predecessors, COMP1720/6720 was part of life for thousands of ANU students. Its ideas continue in the HCCC programs, and the course itself is paused rather than finished.

References

Reas, C., & Fry, B. (2014). Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (2nd ed.). MIT Press.