courses
The Social Web | website
Is it feasible to live ethical, meaningful lives in the context of the Social Web today?
This course formulates a critique of the Social Web. Based on the rapid growth of participation in social life online and in mobile space-- from social news, referral, social search, media sharing, social bookmarking, tagging, virtual worlds and social networked games, social mapping, IM, social networking, blogging and dating, this class formulates a critical analysis of the international Social Web with regard to privacy, intellectual property, and the utilization of social creation of value through the lens of a small number of case studies in the areas of education, political activism, and art. The course starts with a history of computer-facilitated networked sociality. We’ll discuss the preconditions, motivations, and typologies of participation in order to then start to debunk the Web 2.0 ideology. The course concludes with an examination of the future of the Internet (mobile social space, net neutrality, and the changed nature of the digital divide) in order to then locate fields of possibility for social change.
Key theoretical texts that we’ll study include Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks, Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture, Trebor Scholz’ What the MySpace generation should know about working for free, Jurgen Habermas on the Internet and the public sphere, Fred Turner’s Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy, Jeff Jarvis’ “Who owns the wisdom of the crowd? The crowd.,” Nicholas Carr’s “Sharecropping the long tail,” Michael Hardt’s “Affective labor,” Olga Goriunova’s “From Art on Networks to Art on Platforms“ and Adam Arvidsson’s “The Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy.” This is a theory-based course that also teaches you to participate, discuss and analyze practices on the Social Web (e.g., the use of Facebook, Twitter, IM, blogs, SecondLife).
Graduate Reading Seminar | website
DMS603, fall 2007
This reading group investigates the realities of the Social Web from a cultural studies perspective. At the bi-weekly meetings graduate and Ph.D. students present, read, and discuss drawing on texts out of the fields of cultural theory, sociology, philosophy, and art. Readings include Paolo Virno (Grammar of the Multitude), Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture), Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone), Lawrence Lessig (Code 2.0), Tiziana Terranova (Networkculture), David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous), Andrew Ross (Fast Boat to China), Don Tapscott
(Wikinomics), and Andrew Keen (Cult of the Amateur). The group proposes an ethics of participation (on the sides of users/producers and corporations alike) by focusing on topics like immaterial labor on the Social Web, lateral surveillance, ambient intimacy and social alienation.
Sociable Media. Democratization and the Networked Public Sphere | website
This course will argue for the potential of sociable media such as weblogs to democratize society through emerging cultures of broad participation. Over the past ten years the public spheres have been dramatically expanded by participatory web-based technologies. “Democratization and the networked public sphere” will focus on various arguments for and against this central claim by examining historical and present-day understandings of the public sphere, ranging from theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Alexander Kluge to Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler.The course will investigate the democratizing potential of the Internet by examining the political participation of citizens who contribute news reports to weblogs and wikis, knowledge repositories such as the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia or the open source software archive Freshmeat, web-based platforms for artistic expression, and mobile wireless devices that allow for political participation such as the organization of protests.
Reading Group on Participation, Reciprocity, and Generosity in Art | website
This reading group argues for a participatory turn in sociable (web) media. At the bi-weekly meetings graduate students in the Department of Media Study present, read, and discuss the offered material that approaches the issues with texts out of the fields of cultural theory, sociology, and art. The small group considers issues like generosity and participation in art, dialogical aesthetics, and the precariousness of contemporary labor.
The Grammar of Technologies for Collaboration | Spring 2006 | course website
In the Internet, weblogs, wikis and other cooperation enhancing tools are increasingly used as participatory publishing environments, as openly accessible, free knowledge repositories, as platforms for collective organization, and challenge to intellectual property. In communal online spaces people meet to interact with friends and strangers. Bloggers challenge dominant content put forward by main stream news media and online knowledge pools such as the free encyclopedia Wikipedia are too vast in quantity for corporations to compete with. This theory and practice course examines a variety of examples ranging from sites like Slashdot and Kuro5hin, to Indymedia and Technorati. Throughout this class we investigate tools for collaboration and work with weblogs to present our research.
Death, Data & Desire Spring 2006 | course wiki
Fall 2005 | course website
Death, Data & Desire (DDD) consists of two joint classes, which in tandem offer an experimental, and flexible setting for collaborative , socially aware media art production. This intensive class is about the production of artwork, the production of process documents, and the production of texts that relate your specific research interests to contemporary art. Final projects vary in media: from sound to radio, interactive online work, and installations, to performance, video or essays. Often in art and technology courseses there is not enough time to focus on ideas and technology. "Death, Data & Desire" gives you a context to get exposed to art, discuss, read, learn the principles of programming (if this is needed for your project) or other necessary production skills during skill-sharing-workshops. In individual conferences instructor and participant design research tracks for each of you. The proposed readings will draw from texts in art history and cultural history, sociology and philosophy. In our work with these texts, we aim to link the texts to our own critical artworks. An exhibition and performance program at the UB Art gallery will end the semester. Instructors will facilitate critiques with students from other universities.
Media Archeology | Fall 2005 | course website
Media Archeology is a course that gives you an overview of ideas by cultural producers and scientists who bridge(d) discourses between the arts and computer science. We focus on historical, sociological, technological and political arguments, and analyze media art projects. Media Archeology, an evolved form of my earlier course Introduction to Media Theory, gives you a framework for the interpretation of evolving forms and themes in media art.
On Collecting | Spring 2005 | course website
If you are an obsessive collector just like Andy Warhol, a video aficionado who collects gestures, an art history student interested in inventory cultural practices, a computer science major or a picture-phoning location-based blogger-- this is your class. On Collecting connect recent discourses related to databases, locative media and cartography to primary readings of the archive, memory and forgetting.
Web Production, Art, Theory | Spring 2005 | course website
Over the past ten years compelling artwork for the Internet and the World Wide Web has been created. Artists use the Internet as a medium for their conceptual art practice, and to create interactive work. Through discussions, lectures, screenings/ viewings, technical and critical readings, visitor presentations, required readings, structured and unstructured in-class work this course gives an overview of the wide range of Internet art practices and introduces students to web authoring. Students create websites for local artists and a non-profit institution.
WebCamTalk 1.0 | Spring 2005 | website
WebCamTalk 1.0 was a weekly guest speaker series on new-media arts education held in the spring of 2005 in the Department of Media Study. Every Wednesday I interviewed speakers from across the United States and abroad about their thoughts on media art education. These conversations, conducted via web cam and projected in the conference room were transcribed and sent out to the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity. The interviews also served as preparation for the "Share, Share Widely" conference.
Cultural Theory and Data-based Art | Spring 2004 | course website
Cultural Theory & Data-Based Art is a co-taught, cross-disciplinary course that brings together instruction in data-based computer programming for the Internet (php/MySql), art that employs databases, and critical media theory that examines concepts and politics of the database such as surveillance and control. Cultural Theory & Data-Based Art empowers students with the necessary technical, theoretical and historical understanding to produce media artwork in this field.
Introduction to Media Theory | 2004 | course website
Introduction to Media Theory consists of lectures and discussions of readings, screenings of films, CD-ROMs, web sites, guest presentations, software, and new media installations. Introduction to Media Theory is a lecture course that gives you an overview of ideas by artists, writers and scientists who bridge(d) discourses between the arts and computer science.
Screen Theory | 2004 | course website
Screen Theory examines critical concepts and theories of netcultures, from web-based cultural practice to theoretrical discourses. The course looks at technical, historical and political issues in new media such as cultural and artistic reactions to problems of the digital network have and have-nots, border politics, as well as issues of representation and ethnicity online.
On Community | Spring 2003 | course website
Understanding today's tools is not enough. In the Internet, much of the content has been flattened by technological hype. This course critically addresses this problem by way of approaching net cultures with both, the due euphoria and the necessary criticism. We will investigate the potential for creative, innovative and surprising uses of the Internet. We will learn about networks and communities and examine conditions of immaterial labor in the new media economy: from (net)workers, digital artisans, and virtual intellectuals, to precarious 'pixel pushers.'Networked Art Practice | 2003 | course website
This course aims for the collaborative creation of a departmental web publication. The focus is on technical and content related issues. The publication will bring together content-oriented summaries, interviews with artists, activists, engineers, students, a resource list including grant and exhibition opportunities for digital artists, reviews of web sites, software art, and games.
Netcultures: Art, Politics and the Everyday | Spring 2002 | course website
For artists, employing new empowering tools such as hacking, communication became more important than representation. This is not a how-to web-design class. Networked collaborations among artists often replace traditional object making. The objective of this survey-like course is to provide a social framework for the Internet and to point to transient places of resistance within it. Topics for discussion in this class include access, privacy, e-letism, history of net art, commodification, identity, creation and eradication of public spaces, community building, narration online, sound, and biotechnology. Netcultures joins the love of thinking with the joy of making.
Social Histories of Contemporary Art | 2001 | course website
This survey lecture course provides an overview of artworks from 1960 to the present. The course stresses the interpretation of artistic production within historical, socio-cultural and theoretical frameworks. One of the foci of this course is the changing role of the artist in society. Social Histories of Contemporary Art gives you an introduction to contemporary art, art historic terminology, also touching on issues in philosophy, architecture, film, and political science.
Art as Social Practice | 2001 | course website
This seminar and studio course will familiarizes you with histories of politically engaged work in the public sphere. Each class meeting is divided into a seminar segment and work on a site-specific group project. The art project will be a collaborative work on an interventionist project. Art as Social Practice is linked to the demographics of the class because the raised issues are based on what is urgent to students. In the prevailing atmosphere of the disenfranchisement of critical interventionist art practices this course argues for a critical practice that is based on a socio-economic analysis of societal processes that is inclusive of pleasure and desire as well. Areas we considers include gender, queer politics, and race. Also discussed are related questions of memory structure, community, site specificity, and institutional critique.