courses
The Social Web | website
Prompted by the precipitous growth and celebration of participation in online social life, this class formulates a cautionary, historically informed analysis of the international Social Web with regard to privacy, intellectual property, and the utilization of networked peer production. Aiming for a fair-minded balance between dystopian and utopian views, our discussions will probe web-based phenomena like media sharing, bookmarking, social news, referral, tagging, virtual worlds, games, social mapping, social networking, blogging and dating. We will evoke the history of people-to-people communication and investigate preconditions and motivations for online participation. Together, we will debunk the Web 2.0 ideology, discuss the changed nature of the digital divide, and explore mobile social space. The course will conclude with an examination of issues at the heart of the future World Wide Web and Internet: net neutrality.
We will study excerpts from texts by Jürgen Habermas, Yochai Benkler, and Michael Warner about the changing nature of the public sphere. For questions about labor in relation to the Internet we will read sections from books including Andrew Ross’ No-Collar, Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine, Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code, and Adam Arvidsson’s The Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy as well as essays by Nicholas Carr, Trebor Scholz, and Olga Goriunova. Our discussions about the history of the Net and World Wide Web will be based on Timothy Berners Lee’s Weaving the Web, Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Richard Barbrook’s Imaginary Futures, Robert Cailliau’s How the Web Was Born, and Katie Hafner’s Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
This is a theory course with practice components. The course will require regular in-class use of a laptop. You’ll analyze practices on the Social Web from the perspective of the participant.
Global Internet Activism
Net cultures have radically internationalized over the past five years. The hegemony of English-language content no longer rules the Web. User-submitted Brazilian, Russian, Indian, and Chinese content is in the process of taking over. The digital divide is not what it used to be: while the Internet is not accessible to the vast majority of people in economically developing countries, these populations have a larger density of mobile phones than those in the “developed world.”
In this course we will specifically examine the way rappers and bloggers influence politics in Senegal and citizen-media-makers in totalitarian regimes like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Malaysia challenge the ruling powers. We will study the influence that the South Korean “citizen journalism” site OhmyNews had on politics in that country and explain how the social networking site Facebook helped to track suspected war criminals in Darfur while the global mapping program Google Earth and the virtual world Second Life were used to give visual evidence of the crisis in that country. Together, we will also read the anonymous Iraqi blogger Salam Pax who received considerable media attention prior and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Collaboratively annotated Google maps of Indonesian prison camps made the living conditions in those institutions transparent to an international public. Mobile phone video in Malaysia captured police excesses. Google maps in Bahrain led to fierce discussions about land distribution. Citizens in the Philippines used mobile phone ring tones as an activist tool in the context of a political scandal and electoral crisis. Online social milieus like blogs or social networking sites become tantamount to real life situations.
This course will examine activist projects from outside the United States and Europe and discuss texts books including Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, edited by Megan Boler, Baghdad Burning: A Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend, We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs by Nasrin Alavi , Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi by Salam Pax, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering by Brian Holmes, A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark, We the Media by Dan Gillmor, Zero Comments by Geert Lovink, Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice by Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers, and the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents by Sylvie Devilette, Anne Martinez-Saiz, and Nuit de Chine.
This is a theory course with practice components. This course will require regular use of a laptop. You’ll analyze practices on the Social Web from the perspective of a participant.
Participation Literacy
This course will provide an introduction to the effective, critical use of various milieus of the Social Web for your professional and personal lives. It will encourage you to thoughtfully and creatively participate in social networking sites such as Facebook, blogs (and micro-blogging sites like Twitter), mailing lists, podcasts, virtual worlds like Second Life, media sharing sites like Youtube and Flickr, social bookmarking sites like Delicious, video forums such as Seesmick, and wikis such as Wikipedia. We will work on establishing a participation literacy, and consider themes of labor, surveillance, and “community.”
Balancing face-to-face discussions with online exchanges, we will draw on readings including Paolo Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude, Ted Purves’ What We Want Is Free, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Armand Mattelart’s The Invention of Communication, Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, Mark Andrejevic’s Reality TV, and Ray Oldenberg’s The Great Good Place.
This is a practice and theory course that requires frequent use of a laptop. It does not require you to be an Internet socialite.
Graduate Reading Seminar, fall 2007 website
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.