Description

In this module we will explore the relationships between art and the Internet, from the birth of the World Wide Web in 1989 to the present day. Beginning with an analysis of the construction of the digital as fundamentally ‘immaterial’, together we will think about how and why this gave rise to a model of the Web as a utopian arena of promise. In the first half of the course we will survey some of the earliest artistic practices to engage with the Web – including Net.Art, Tactical Media and Cyberfeminism – and consider both their aims and limitations in addressing questions of representation and identity, witnessing and surveillance, and authorship. In the second half we will focus primarily on the emergence of so-called ‘post-Internet Art’ in the last decade, and the shift to re-thinking the digital as ‘material’ through an attention to embodiment, infrastructure, and the environmental effects of new technology. This course will draw on a wide range of theoretical debates, from the discourses of postmodernism to the recent theories of the Anthropocene.   

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
• Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” e-flux journal #10, 2009
• Boris Groys, "Art Workers: Between Utopia and the Archive" e-flux journal #45, 2013
• David Joselit, After Art, Princeton University Press, 2012