Thursday 6:00 Ð 9:00 pm
Classroom: West Hall 321
Prof. Michael Century
century@rpi.edu
276-2302 West Hall 115
Office hours Wednesday 1:00 to 3:00 pm
Hot Properties: Cultural Policy in a Digital Age is an interdisciplinary seminar for artists and designers, cultural and social theorists and analysts, technologists and managers, on the relationships between policy, technology and creative expression in our network society. Key topics will be intellectual property debates and interventions, critical analysis of innovation policy and the ideology of "creative industries", and the emerging concept of "cultural rights" linked to citizenship and to new forms of multimedia literacy
50% Seminar Participation and Presentations
50% Final Project
Toby Miller, and George Yudice. Cultural Policy. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2002, Plus articles to be distributed in class.
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.
5. DRAFT Schedule |
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Assignment or Deadline |
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1 |
Thu 1/20 |
Introduction, Objectives, Seminar Agenda |
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2 |
Thu 1/27 |
What is Cultural Policy? Culture and the State in America. |
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Miller Intro & chpt 1 |
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3 |
Thu 2/3 |
Other Histories of national cultural policies |
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Miller chp 3 |
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4 |
Thu 2/10 |
Art and Agency: analyzing the social distribution of creativity |
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See bibliog.. |
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5 |
Thu 2-17 |
IP/1 Histories and Concepts of cultural property |
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See bibliog |
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6 |
Thu 2/24 |
IP/2 The Copyright Wars ; Free Culture |
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See bibliog |
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7 |
Thu 3/3 |
IP3 Patent System & Inventive (subversive) Art Works |
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See bibliog |
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8 |
Thu 3/10 |
IP4 Cross- and Inter-cultural Constructions of Cultural/Intellectual Property |
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See bibliog. Miller chp 5 |
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March 14-18 Spring Break |
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9 |
Thu
3/24
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Innovation and culture 1 The Hacker Ethic versus the Creative Class Ð who is ÒcreativeÓ? when is ÒcreativityÓ |
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See bibliog |
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10 |
Thu 3/31 |
Innovation and culture 2 Techno-cultural policy after aesthetics |
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See bibliog |
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11 |
Thu
4/7
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InnoCult3Lock-in. Technical standards and trajectories, irreversibility and cultural practices |
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See bibliog |
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12 |
Thu 4/14 |
Institutions and Futures Ð (select topics from among museum, theater, publishing, |
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Miller ch 4 (museum) |
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13 |
Thu 4/21 |
Institutions and Futures |
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14 |
Thu 4/28 |
LAST CLASS |
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Gell, A. (1999). The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology. The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. London, The Athlone Press.
Martha Woodmansee. "On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity." Cardozo
Arts and Entertainment Law Review 10.2 (1992).
Michel Foucault. "What is an Author?Ó
James Boyle. A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net? 1996?
Available: www.james-boyle.com.
Marilyn Strathern. "What Is Intellectual Property
After?" Property, Substance and Effect. Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London and
New Brunswick, N.J.: Athlone Press, 1999.
Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture : How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Downloadable from www.lessig.org
Stefan Merten. Gnu/Linux - Milestone on the Way to the
Gpl Society. 2000. Available: http://www.oekonux.org/texts/index.html.
Raymond, E. (1999). The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Open Sources :Voices from the Open Source Revolution, O'Reilly Publishing. Downloadable from many sites.
Siva Vaidhyanathan. The Anarchist in the Library : How the Clash between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Robert Thill. "Intellectual Property: A Chronological Compendium of Intersections between Contemporary Art and Utility Patents." Leonardo 37.2 (2004): 117-24.
Catherine Richards, Patent Application, ÒMethod and apparatus for finding loveÓ
Marilyn Strathern. "The Patent and the Malanggan." Manuscript, unpublished
Rosemary J. Coombe. The Cultural Life of Intellectual
Properties : Authorship, Appropriation and the Law. Post-Contemporary
Interventions. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
Marilyn Strathern. "Imagined Collectivities and Multiple Authorship." Code - Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy. Ed. Michael Century: MIT Press, forthcoming.
James Boyle. A Manifesto on Wipo and the Future of Intellectual Property. 2004. Available: http://blah.blah.blah.
UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
Pekka Himanen. The Hacker Ethic: A Radical Approach to the Philosophy of Business. New York: Random House, 2001.
McKenzie Wark. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004.
Richard
Florida, America's Looming Creativity
Crisis. Harvard Business Review,
Oct 1, 2004 http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/includes/search/search_results.jhtml?_requestid=22428
Century, M. (1999). Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture. MIT Press, Leonardo Electronic Almanac.
Mitchell, W., A. Inouye, et al., Eds. (2003). Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity. Washington, DC, National Academy of Sciences (National Research Council).
Harris, C., Ed. (1999). Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program. Cambridge, MIT Press.
David, P. (1985). "Clio and the Economics of
QWERTY." American Economic Review 75(No. 2, May).
Lessig, L. (2000). Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace.
New York, Basic Books.
Callon, M. (1991). Techno-Economic Networks and Irreversibility. A Sociology of Monsters. J. Law, Routledge. Sociological Review Monograph 38.