Art in Digital Media

Institution: [Institution Name]
Instructors: Alper Yıldırım
Semesters: 1–2

Course Brief

This course introduces digital media as a broad field of artistic production and experimentation. Students explore how photographic processes, moving images, real-time systems, augmented reality, three-dimensional capture, and interactive environments can be used as tools for visual expression.

Combining lectures, artist research, technical workshops, and project-based production, the course moves from image-based experimentation to increasingly interactive and immersive forms. Students are encouraged to treat digital tools not simply as production software, but as creative systems capable of transforming perception, time, space, movement, and audience participation.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Experiment with a range of digital image-making and time-based media techniques.

  • Select appropriate tools and processes in response to an artistic concept.

  • Create still, moving, three-dimensional, interactive, and immersive digital works.

  • Use image manipulation, video editing, real-time processing, and spatial media in creative production.

  • Translate physical objects and environments into digital forms through photographic and scanning techniques.

  • Develop audiovisual narratives through editing, sequencing, sound, and visual experimentation.

  • Design interactive works that respond to viewers, devices, movement, or environmental input.

  • Critically examine the artistic and cultural implications of emerging media technologies.

Semester 1

Experimental Image and Moving-Image Practices

Project 01

Scanogram

Students create photographic compositions by placing objects directly onto a flatbed scanner. Rather than treating the scanner as a document-copying device, they use it as a camera capable of recording unusual levels of detail, texture, depth, and light.

The project introduces alternative image-making processes and encourages students to explore the visual qualities that emerge from direct contact between objects and the scanning surface.

Selected Student Works

[Image gallery]

Project 02

Slit-Scan Photography

Students create distorted photographic images by recording a subject progressively over time. Through movement, image sampling, and computational processing, a conventional photograph is transformed into an expanded representation of duration.

The project explores the relationship between time, movement, perception, and photographic space. Students investigate how temporal change can be compressed into a single still image.

Selected Student Works

[Image gallery]

Project 03

Video Panorama

Students transform moving-image footage into an extended panoramic composition. Camera movement is analysed and reconstructed so that successive moments from a video can be combined within a single image.

The project examines the camera’s movement through space and challenges the idea of the photograph as an image captured from one fixed viewpoint and moment.

Selected Student Works

[Image gallery]

Project 04

Photogrammetry

Students create three-dimensional digital models from a series of photographs taken around a physical object, figure, or environment.

Through photographic capture, digital reconstruction, and texture processing, students explore how physical subjects can be translated into virtual objects. The project introduces questions of documentation, preservation, replication, and the imperfect relationship between physical and digital space.

Selected Student Works

[Image gallery]

Technical Workshop

Video Editing and Post-Production

Students are introduced to video-editing workflows, media formats, sequencing, transitions, sound, visual effects, motion tracking, rendering, and export processes.

The workshop prepares students to organise audiovisual material and use editing as both a technical process and a method of constructing rhythm, meaning, and narrative.

Project 05

Video Poem

Students create an experimental audiovisual work in which image, language, sound, rhythm, and editing operate together as a poetic composition.

The project may combine original footage, voice, text, animation, montage, and visual effects. Students explore how the emotional and conceptual qualities of a poem or written fragment can be translated into a time-based visual experience.

Selected Student Works

[Image gallery]

Project 06

Found-Footage Film

Students create a new audiovisual work by selecting, editing, manipulating, and recontextualising existing moving-image material.

Through montage and appropriation, they examine how meaning changes when images are removed from their original contexts and placed within new narrative, political, emotional, or cultural relationships. The project also raises questions concerning memory, authorship, originality, and media history.

Selected Student Works

[Image gallery]

Semester 2

Interactive and Immersive Media

Project 07

Live Image Processing

Students create a real-time visual system using node-based image-processing tools. Video, generated graphics, live camera input, and digital effects are combined within a system that can change continuously during a performance or interaction.

The project introduces generative composition, live visual manipulation, webcam input, and controller mapping. Students investigate how images can respond dynamically to performers, viewers, sound, or other forms of input.

Selected Student Works

[Image gallery]

Project 08

Augmented Reality

Students design an augmented-reality artwork that introduces digital images, animations, or three-dimensional objects into a physical environment.

The project examines the relationship between virtual and material space. Students consider how augmented content can alter the perception of an object, image, body, or location while developing an interaction that can be experienced through a mobile device.

Selected Student Works

[Image gallery]

Project 09

Immersive Experience with Unity

Students create an immersive digital environment that can be explored through a moving viewpoint or presented as a panoramic experience.

The project combines three-dimensional modelling, environmental design, photogrammetry, character creation, motion capture, animation, lighting, sound, camera movement, and timeline-based sequencing. Students bring these elements together to create a coherent spatial artwork in which atmosphere, movement, and narrative unfold around the viewer.

Selected Student Works

[Image gallery]