COURSE SCHEDULE

In this class, we’ll be reading a variety of theoretical & historical texts. Additional reading suggestions (non-required reading) will be presented in class. We will also look closely at art projects that relate to these themes and URLs / documentation of these works will be distributed in advance of class discussion. This schedule is subject to change.

9.7
Introductions
Roland Barthes, "Toys," Mythologies
Umberto Eco, "The Multiplication of the Media," Travels in Hyper Reality

9.14
Attend Conflux Events (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
3:00- 3:45pm, Régine Debatty, We Make Money Not Art, We Like to Peep; 4-6pm, Visit installation and workshop at The Change You Want to See

Recommended Reading: Louis Althusser, "Ideology & Ideological State Apparatuses"

9.21
Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message," Understanding Media; Vilem Flusser, "The Apparatus," Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Reader)

9.28
David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, Toward an Aesthetics of Transition, Rethinking Media Change

Week of Oct 1-5: Screening of 8-Bit (TBD)

10.5
PROPOSALS DUE: First projects (must be emailed prior to the beginning of class)
Christiane Paul, Introduction, Digital Art (Reader); Marcin Ramocki, DIY: The Militant Embrace of Technology; Recommended Reading: Alexander Galloway, Social Realism in Gaming, Game Studies

10.12
Read excerpts from Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach: Sterling (11-22); Ippolito (47-53 and 108-114); Recommended Reading: Bruce Sterling, "Dead Media Manifesto" & "Dead Media Working Notes"

Guest Lecture: Mona Jimenez, Associate Director,
Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, NYU

10.19......First Round Presentations
10.26......First Round Presentations, Cont.

11.2
Carolyn Marvin, "Introduction," and "Inventing the Expert," When Old Technologies Were New; Recommended Reading: Lisa Gitelman, "Media as Historical Subjects," Always Already New (Both in Reader)

11.9
Jean Baudrillard, Requiem for the Media, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign; Guy Debord, "Time and History," Society of the Spectacle (Reader)

11.16
PROPOSALS DUE: Second projects (must be emailed prior to the beginning of class)
Critical Art Ensemble, Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production, The Electronic Disturbance; William Gibson, "God's Little Toys: Confessions of a Cut & Paste Artist," Wired, July 2005; Recommended Reading: Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, Modernist Myths

11.23......Thanksgiving Break

11.30
Matthew Fuller, "How This Becomes That," Media Ecologies (Reader); Martha Burkle Bonecchi, "Technology Has Forgotten Them: Developing-World Women and New Information Technologies," Women, Art, and Technology (Reader); Donna Harraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

12.7......Second Round Presentations
12.14......Second Round Presentations, Cont. (Final Class Session)