Powder Room

Catalog description

Powder Room empowers artists to become architects of their own creative infrastructure. Using large language models and AI coding assistants, with a focus on Claude.ai, students will design and build custom software tools tailored to their individual artistic practices, without requiring a traditional programming background. Rather than adapting work to fit existing platforms, students will learn to articulate their creative vision and translate it into functional software: generative video processors, live performance controllers, custom editing pipelines, interactive installation engines, experimental notation systems, and beyond. In the Powder Room we will treat AI not as a creative collaborator, but as a fabrication partner - a means by which artists can build the exact tool or machine they need, on their own terms. Through hands-on projects spanning performance, video, emerging media, and cross-disciplinary work, students will develop fluency in prompt-driven development, rapid prototyping, and iterative tool-building. Critical discussion will examine what it means for artists to own and author their own technical means of production. Our goal will also be to open source our tools, contributing to a growing commons of artist-built software freely available to other artists and the general public.