Michael
Century century@rpi.edu
Office hours
Wednesday 12-2 pm and by appointment
There are three essential parts to this seminar: reading,
discussion, and writing. All are
necessary to prepare you for professional careers in the arts, whether along
academic lines or not. Discussion
in class is meant to be open-ended and generous; you are encouraged to question
and speculate, not just react to and expound on the assigned texts. You are especially encouraged to bring
in examples of creative works, either your own or by others which you want to
share. This enrichment of the
historical and theoretical material is fundamental. Writing will be required of
both a formal and informal type.
The formal work will need to conform to the rules of correct academic
prose, whereas the informal writing can be looser and more speculative,
allowing you to develop your ideas through the process of articulation.
Readings are provided in electronic
form, and links to them are given at the class web-page (see above). There is one exception New media in art by M.
Rush, London, Thames & Hudson; this is a recommended purchase, but also
available on reserve in Folsom Library. Assigned readings range from 50-75 pages/week.
Attendance and participation in class
discussion (25%)
Short
response papers and informal commentaries posted to the course LMS (learning
management system) site (40%). Every week one person will be designated to initiate the
online discussion with a response paper of up to 500 words. The paper must be
posted by the Thursday before the upcoming Monday seminar. The others will
comment these response papers, by adding commentaries or critiques, posing questions,
and pointing to other resources, that they think will be helpful for people to
know about before the seminar.
Both the short response papers and the online discussion and
commentaries can be written in an informal prose style, meant to get ideas and
dialog flowing more than following academic niceties. In sum, you will each write two response papers over the
semester, and you will be expected to participate in the online discussions
every week.
Final
project: an essay on a topic
related to the material encountered in the course (12 pages, double spaced using 12 point font). (35%)
Grades for the
course will be assigned as follows:
A = 90-100, B = 80-89, C = 70-79.
A
confidential writing and discussion site for Electronic Arts Overview is set up
on the RPI online-course learning management system. You will need to become a registered user of the RPI
LMS. You will do this using your
RCS id and password. The course is
already laid out at the RPI LMS blog site by topic, and for claritys sake and
ease of navigation, you should be careful to post your writing under the topic
week by week. You are all already
entered in the system so all you should need to do is log in and you will see a
link to the course content (Electronic Arts Overview), then click on
Discussion. The link that will get you started is: http://rpilms.rpi.edu/
Relationships
between and students and professors, as well as those between students and
their classmates, are built on trust.
Acts that violate this trust, such as cheating or plagiarism, will
result in a failing grade for this course. The Rensselaer Handbook defines various degrees of
academic dishonesty, plus the responses available to address it. Students should familiarize themselves
with this portion of the handbook.
Williams, R. (1984). Keywords.
A vocabulary of culture. London.
Art,
Creative, Technology, Science.
Bennett, T., L. Grossberg, et
al. (2005). New keywords : a revised vocabulary of culture and society.
Malden, MA, Blackwell Pub.
Art, Science, Technology.
Required Reading
Rush, Michael (2005). New
media in art. London, Thames & Hudson. [2nd edition]
N6494.M78 R88 2005
Read from page 7 – 167.
About $15.00 from Amazon; a copy is on reserve at the Folsom Library.
Required
Reading
Manifestos of Futurism, Dada,
Surrealism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, Situationism, from Harrison, C. and P. Wood,
Eds. (1992). Art in Theory 1900-1990.
An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford, Blackwell. Futurism 145-149 Dada 248-255 De Stijl
278-279 Surrealism (Breton)
432-439 Bauhaus, 338-343, Constructivism 265-268 Situationism 693-700
Required Reading
Benjamin, Walter. (1936 (1969)).
The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.
Illuminations. H. Arendt. New York, Schocken: 217-251.
Mitchell, W. J. T.
The Work of Art in the Age of
Biocybernetic Reproduction, Modernism/modernity - Volume 10, Number
3, September 2003, pp. 481-500
Way of Seeing, by John Berger,
first episode, view in 4 parts on
Youtube
Required Reading
Eco, Umberto. (1989). The Poetics of the Open Work
Rokeby, David. (1995). Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive
Media.
Critical Isses in Electronic Media. S. Penny. Albany, N.Y., SUNY. 133-158
Dinkla, Soke. (1996). From Participation to
Interaction. Toward the Origin of
Interactive Art.
Clicking In. Hot links to digital culture. Ed. L. H. Leeson. Seattle, Bay
Press. 279-90
Required
Reading
Porter, Roy, Introduction to Rewriting the Self: Histories
from the Renaissance to the Present. London and New York:
Routledge, 1997.
Foucault, Michel. (1979
(1984)). What is an Author?
Kelty, Christopher (2008). Two Bits: The Cultural
Significance of Free Software,
page 1-18
Social media: Clay Shirkey lecture on his 2008 book
-- "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of
Organizing Without Organizations"
Compilation of short texts
by: Varse The Liberation of Sound, Cage The Future of Music: Credo, Nyman
Toward a Definition of Experimental Music, Bailey Free Improvisation,
McClary Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-century Culture, Reich Music as
a Gradual Process
Oliveros – Quantum Improvisation: the Cybernetic Presence
Required
Reading
Ong,
Walter. Orality, Literacy and Modern
Media. Communication in History.
Crowley and Heyer (1994), Longman Addison Wesley. 64-70.
Conner,
S. (1997). The
Modern Auditory I. Rewriting the Self:
Histories from the Renaissance to the Present. R. Porter. London and New
York, Routledge.
Christoph
Cox From Music to Sound: Being
as Time in the Sonic Arts
R.
Murray Schafer, Tuning
of the World
Sound Art Links at Onlyonepixel.org (Seth Cluett)
Required Reading
Bruce
Sterling (2008). The Life
and Death of Media, in Sound Matters: Sampling Music
and Digital Culture, MIT Press.
Kern, S. (1986). The Nature of Time, The culture of time and space.
Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Pp 10-35
Zielinski,
S. (2005). Introduction, Deep time of the media : toward an
archaeology of hearing and seeing by technical means. Cambridge, Mass., MIT
Press.
McLuhan , M. –McLuhans
Wake – DVD/video on reserve in Folsom library
Haraway, Donna. (1985). A Manifesto for Cyborgs.
New York, Routledge.
Nell Tenhaaf (1992), Of Monitors and Men and Other
Feminist Mysteries: Video Technology and the Feminine,
in Robinson, H. (2001). Feminism-art-theory : an anthology, 1968-2000
Ede, Sian, (2000). The Scientists Mind: the
Artists Temperament,
in Strange and Charmed. Science
and the Contemporary Visual Arts. London, The Gulbenkian Foundation.
Vesna, Victoria. (2001). Toward a Third Culture: Being In
Between,
Leonardo, 34(2).
Da Costa, Beatriz. and Katia
Philip (2008). Introduction, Tactical biopolitics : art,
activism, and technoscience. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Required Reading
Theodor W.
Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) "The
Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception"
from Dialectic of Enlightenment www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
Lovink , G., Garcia, D. (1997) ABCs
of Tactical Media,
at www.nettime.org http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors2/garcia-lovinktext.html
Chris Anderson (2006) The
Theory of the Long Tail. Refutation
of LongTail theory (2009)
Individual
meetings on final project.
Lovink, G.
(2008). The
Cool Obscure: Crisis of New Media Arts. Zero
Comments, Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York, Routledge.