Numeric Photography
MIT's Media Laboratory course pairs low end digital cameras with weekly programming assignments that treat photography as a computational medium. Students build Java applets exploring scene capture, image manipulation, and interactive display, producing more than a hundred small software works over the term. The exercises push into signal processing and interaction design as artistic tools rather than purely technical ones, and the course culminates in a public exhibition of the finished pieces. Materials on MIT OpenCourseWare include the project briefs and a record of the resulting applets and exhibition work, giving a clear sense of how each weekly assignment builds toward the final show. The course sits at the intersection of art and engineering, useful for anyone curious about what happens when a camera becomes a programmable input rather than a fixed capture device.