Jon Chambers Email & Phone Number

New Orleans, La, Us

New Orleans, Louisiana, United States

Chicago

Data and The Networked Body: Through a combination of lectures and workshops, this class explores how data has been used, both historically and contemporaneously, to control, manipulate and influence the body and how artists, writers and activists have responded to issues of privacy, representation, gender and identity. Students will consider how the physical body is reduced to data, surveilled and analyzed through our online behavior, mobile devices, CCTV, 3D scanning, computer vision and machine learning algorithms. Topics include media consumption, surveillance, climate change/global warming, labor, the anthropocene, representation, gender and identity, intimacy, sustainability, and how the physical body fits into the increasingly digitally networked world.Media Practices: a class that teaches students how to utilize and develop skills with various moving image techniques, while screening contemporary and historical examples and reading relevant texts. These techniques range from using a 16mm Bolex camera to creating animated GIFs and webpages.New Media Crash Course: This Introductory course focuses on screen-based new media works, their historical contexts and their specific aesthetics and theoretical concerns. Students gain an understanding of the emerging cultures and histories of new media through lectures and workshops, while creating their own weekly projects. Interactive, game, networked and web-based technologies are introduced from the perspective of media art making and history.

Chicago

Game Play: This hands-on course offers an exploration of art works constructed as games and investigates methods by which game authors extend the visual traditions and conceptual ideals of contemporary art into the gaming medium. Games represent a rapidly emerging medium, the history of which must be analyzed through the lenses of art history, new media studies, and game studies in order to be fully contextualized. Students will explore different game genres while gaining the technical skills needed to create their own games as well as analyzing, developing, and playing games in order to gain an understanding of their frameworks and programmatic strategies. Introduction to New Media Arts: A studio based course that provides an overview of the theories and practices of New Media Arts. Students learn fundamental practices of electronic arts including but not limited to circuit design, basic to intermediate electronics, hacking, and programming for interactivity. Through hands on workshops, students will explore basic electronic techniques and use of programmable microcontrollers (Arduino) to control interactive art, sound, light, and environments. This course encourages experimentation, research, and copyright ethics through sharing sources, skills, and insights on a class blog and IRL.Introduction to Creative Coding: A studio based course that introduces students to computer programming with an emphasis on creative design and data visualization. Students learn techniques to translate raw data into compelling audio and visual projects. Composing a series of projects throughout the semester, students experiment and develop their own strategies to creatively write code. Students complete the class with technical skills that will lay the foundation for more advanced programming, scripting, and web development. This course encourages experimentation, research, and copyright ethics through sharing sources, skills, and insights on a class blog and IRL.

Chicago

Embodied Data and Gamified Interfaces: We produce caches of data within our networked lives, from social media interactions to mass surveillance systems, mostly to the benefit of corporate or state entities. The aesthetics of many of these interfaces uses gamification as a guise to data collection, relying on dopamine rushes from “winning” likes, shares, and views to keep us coming back. Through a combination of lectures and workshops, we will explore data and games as artistic mediums and how they interface and exchange with each other. We will look at how the physical body is reduced to data, surveilled and analyzed through our online behavior, mobile devices, computer vision and machine learning algorithms. Students will learn how to incorporate the aesthetics of this embodied data into 2D and 3D networked spaces, while considering how the physical body fits into the increasingly digitally connected world.

Evanston, Il

Computer Code as Expressive Medium: A senior to graduate level class that introduces the expressiveness of computing to visual artists. Students learn the basics of the open sourced software Processing to create their own tools for interaction, animation, game design, movement, and form. Students are encouraged to establish interdisciplinary collaborations stemming from their own field of research, while thinking critically about these software spaces. In addition to weekly code assignments, we explore various games and digital art works via lectures along with assigned readings. Designing for the Internet: This studio course covers the principles of graphic design as they apply to the interactive world of the web. Sensitivity to the visual elements of online interfaces is developed through analysis of existing site designs. HTML and CSS are introduced along with software such as Dreamweaver, Sublime Text, Photoshop and the mobile framework Bootstrap. Students eventually conceive and create their own web-based project.

Chicago

Co-taught a class called Info Aesthetics. It was an interdisciplinary research studio utilizing an Interdisciplinary Research Studio methodology to research and generate new concepts in civic innovation for the city of Chicago. Multidisciplinary student teams consider the city as a resource (data & research) and lab (exploration & prototyping) for translating data into fully activated projects or proposals for civic services or critical social interventions. Main prototyping tools include Processing and Arduino.

Chicago

Worked as a front-end web developer for the College of Architecture, Design and the Arts at UIC. My responsibilities include: HTML5 and CSS3 development, JavaScript development, light PHP/MySQL development, Drupal theme development, and Custom CMS development.

Was the front end developer for EVL's website and responsible for audio and video documentation of EVL’s research projects. Specific activities included: worked with a back-end web developer to redesign EVL’s website look and function; made touch-screen applications using Processing for Cyber-Commons, a 20-foot LCD tiled display wall with PQ Labs touch overlay; 3D video workflow; documented projects created by EVL faculty, staff and students.

Assisted professors and students with technological problems, such as updating websites, video conversion and editing and using digital video cameras.

Mfa, New Media Art

Bfa, Sculpture

Summer Study Abroad Program, Art