Description

This module confronts one of the most urgent and elsuive problems of our day: the relationship of aesthetic to the rise of digital media. Drawing on a range of critical texts and artistic practices we will consider how fundamental aesthetic categories such as materiality and form are transformed through the radical shift from a work-oriented to a medium-oriented conception of art and reality. 

In broader terms, the module explores the rapidly mutable audio-visual environments/interfaces of the digital age and its impact on social relations, and cultural production. It also examines the tension between intimacy and distance, distraction and attention, passivity and participation that characterises image consumption within the routines of contemporary technological culture. Finally, this module offers a historical and political framework for understanding contemporary art’s seeming disavowal of the digital and the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism that underpin it.

At the same time, we will assess some of the emancipatory possibilities opened by the accessibility and affordability of digital cameras, editing software and mobile devices. As well as making use of the interpretive methods of art history this module will introduce students to tools drawn from social semiotics, media studies, anthropology, visual culture, cybernetics and design philosophy.

Objectives

By the end of the course students should have acquired:

• a familiarity with critical debates pertaining to digital technologies with an emphasis  cultural and artistic formations
• an understanding of key terms drawn from social semiotics, media studies, digital anthropology, visual culture, network theory and design philosophy
• a knowledge of the limits and the possibilities afforded by emergent technologies for both the preservation and creation of cultural products and emergent forms of social and political disobedience
• a critical framework for examining the re-organization of social relations and artistic practices practices in an expanding digital media environment

Preliminary Reading

• Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide” Artforum, September, 2012
• Lauren Cornell and Brian Droitcour, “Technical Difficulties” Artforum, January, 2013
• Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras
• Tim Griffin, “Compression,” October 135 (Winter 2011): 3–20
• Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” e-flux journal #10, 2009