Introduction

Rather than simply looking at a series of "political artworks" or "political artists", this course aims to encourage students to reflect on their own role as culture producers within a contemporary cultural condition increasingly defined and mapped by new media technologies. The place and impact of the artist within society will be examined. The course will ask how choices made by individuals play a role in charting political and ethical vectors within a complex system.

Grading

Attendance & Class Participation15%
Assignment 120%
Assignment 230%
Final Project35%

Links to sessions 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, 9,10,11,12,13,14,15

Course Schedule


Class 1

  • Review of course objectives, assignments, and projects.
  • Instructor Introduction
  • A definition of Ethics
  • A definition of Politics
  • A definition of New Media

In Class Project: Curriculum Olympics

  1. Divide into three groups, distributing people identifying themselves as "competitive"
  2. Design a week-by-week syllabus for this class in 14 parts (approximately 15 minutes)
  3. Afterwards, each group will present its lesson plan (approximately 15 minutes)
  4. Finally, a demonstration of instant runoff voting
  5. Discussion


Class 2 (Thursday, January 24, 2008)

http://www.branding-democracy.org/?theme=red&q=node/2

Oratory and Ethics

Readings:

  • Gorgias by Plato


Class 3 (Thursday, January 31, 2008)

Computers and Education

Readings:

Quotes:

Wendell Berry Recollected Essays 1965-1980. p.34. North Point Press, San Francisco, 1981.

And, as I think of it now, school itself was a distraction. Although I have become, among other things, a teacher, I am skeptical of education. It seems to me a most doubtful process, and I think the good of it is taken too much for granted. It is a matter that is overtheorized and overvalued and always approached with too much confidence. It is, as we skeptics are always discovering to our delight, no substitute for experience or life or virtue or devotion. As it is handed out by the schools, it is only theoretically useful, like a randomly mixed handful of seeds carried in one's pocket. When one carries them back to one's own place in the world and plants them, some will prove unfit for the climate or the ground, some are sterile, some are not seeds at all but little clods and bits of gravel. Suprisingly few of them come to anything. There is an incredible waste and clumsiness in most efforts to prepare the young. For me, as a student and as a teacher, there has always been a pressing anxiety between the classroom and the world: how can you get from one to the other except by a blind jump? School is not so pleasant or valuable an experience as it is made out to be in the theorizing and reminiscing of elders. In a sense, it is not an experience at all, but a hiatus in experience.

Joseph Weizenbaum "Once More: The Computer Revolution". p.445. From: The Information Age. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979.

The use of large-scale computer-based information systems induces an epistemology within which reigns an extremely poverty-stricken notion of what constitues knowledge and what is to count as fact. Unfortunately, this same notion — a kind of pragmatic positivism bordering on scientism — dominates much of the thinking of modern intellectuals and political leaders. It has also, in my view, profoundly infected the thought of ordinary people. It has no necessary relationship to the computer; it existed, after all, long before there were computers. But the computer is its starkest symbolic manifestation. It is the instrument that, more than any other force, reifies it.


Class 4 (Thursday, February 7, 2008)

Power Politics and the Media

Readings:

Screening of Why We Fight (2005)
A Film By Eugene Jarecki
About the anatomy of the American war machine, combining personal stories with commentary by military and political insiders.
98 minutes

Topics include

  • Documentary
  • War
  • Militarism

Quote:

Carl von Clausewitz

[War is the] continuation of politics [Politik] by other means.


Class 5 (Thursday, February 14, 2008)

Technology

Readings:

  • Handout: "The Moral Significance of Material Culture" by Albert Borgmann
  • Handout: Introduction to Theory of Technology by Andrew Feenberg
Screening of Our Daily Bread (2006)
A Film By Nikolaus Geyrhalter
The film shows the industrial production of food as a reflection of our society's values: plenty of everything, made as quickly and as efficiently as modern technology permits.
92 minutes

Quotes:

Victor Margolin, "The Struggle for Utopia," University of Chicago Press (1997)

The triumvirate of artist, scientist and industrialist becomes the model for collaborative social action. The artist's role is to envision the future of society and lead, as part of the avant-garde.
Art is not separate, not isolated to the interior artistic vision, but is linked to the real world and to the social life. The artist exploration of inner meaning has new potency when externalized as social action.
The role of the artist thus becomes a participant of the social and political life, a significant player.
The utopian proposal as articulated by the artist functions as a model for new ways of seeing and new social and political structures.

Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media," MIT Press, Boston, MA (1964)

The artist is a barometer of the social condition. In regards to technology, the artist provides "immunity" from the impact of technology by nature of his sensitivity to the social transformations brought about by the changing media.
The artist perceives himself as a significant player, not locked up in the studio or the academy. The artist, perhaps more than anyone, grasps the implication of his own time, through the analysis and critique inherent in the artistic process.
How does the artist enter into the mainstream of social activity? By inventing new forms which place him in the dialogue, raise the appropriate questions, and further stimulate the dialogue.

Stewart Home, "The Assault on Culture," AK Press, Stirling, England (1991)

The integration of art and politics (and art and life) has tended towards the utopian, by nature of its yearning for extreme modification of existing conditions. This form also has a tendency towards the totalization of art, the blurring of boundaries of genre and media, tending towards the theatrical and the transformative. This form often takes shape as the gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork).
Utopianism is thus a striving for the unattainable, the creation of impossible models to which mankind aspires in its idealism.


Class 6 (Thursday, February 21, 2008)

Propaganda

Readings:

  • Handout: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Industrialization of the Mind (1962)
  • Handout: Eugenics exhibition pamphlet
Screening of Manufacturing Consent (1992)
A Film By Achbar and Wintonick
A documentary about Noam Chomsky and his propaganda model, an analysis of of global communications and the ways it operates to minimize dissent..
First hour only

Topics include:

  • Propaganda vs. information
  • Future of education


Class 7 (Thursday, February 28, 2008)

ASSIGNMENT 1: PRESENTATIONS

  • 10-20 minutes per student, approximately.
  • Hand in scripts for presentations (2 pages).

There may be some time for follow-up discussions of propaganda.


Class 8 (Thursday, March 6, 2008)

Future Visions - Artificial Intelligence and Nanotechnology

Readings

UNESCO report

NANOTECHNOLOGY could become the most influential force to take hold of the technology industry since the rise of the Internet. Nanotechnology could increase the speed of memory chips, remove pollution particles in water and air and find cancer cells quicker. Nanotechnology could prove beyond our control, and spell the end of our very existence as human beings. Nanotechnology could alleviate world hunger, clean the environment, cure cancer, guarantee biblical life spans or concoct super-weapons of untold horror. Nanotechnology could be the new asbestos. Nanotechnology could spur economic development through spin-offs of the research. Nanotechnology could harm the opportunities of the poor in developing countries. Nanotechnology could make the molecules in ice cream more uniform in size. Nanotechnology could enable a digital camera to work in the dark. Nano- technology could clean up toxic waste on the atomic level. Nanotechnology could change the world from the bottom up. Nanotechnology could become an instrument of terrorism. Nanotechnology could lead to the next industrial revolution. Nanotechnology could transform the food industry. Nanotechnology could repair the ozone layer. Nanotechnology could change everything. (Source: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001459/145951e.pdf)

Spring Break


Class 9 (Thursday, March 20, 2008)

Intellectual Property, Open Source

Maurice

Readings:


Class 10 (Thursday, March 27, 2008)

Tactical Media

Ricardo

Readings :

Tactical Media Definitions : Definitions

Reference : Art:

Independent Media:

Lynn Hershman Leeson :

Projection :


Class 11 (Thursday, April 3, 2008)

Art market

Rita

Readings:

Articles online:

Podcasts:

Video:

(Past) Exhibitions Related to the Subject:

Curiosities:


Class 13 (Thursday, April 17, 2008)

Technologies & The Future

Claudia
“The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent.
The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.”
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
Marshall McLuhan

Considerations:

  • Utopia (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary)

1: an imaginary and indefinitely remote place often capitalized; 2: a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions; 3: an impractical scheme for social improvement.

  • Dystopia (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary)

1: an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives; 2: anti-utopia.

  • Luddite (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary)

1: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly; 2: one who is opposed to especially technological change.

refers to a set of reprogenetic technologies that, currently or that are expected to in the future, allow parents to influence the genetic constitutions of their children. This could be done through genetic screening of blastocysts (early embryos), or through germline engineering, which refers to human genetic engineering used to alter genes in the first cells of the blastocyst.[1]

In somatic cell gene therapy, the gene is introduced only in somatic cells, especially of these tissues in which expression of the concerned gene is critical for health. Expression of the introduced gene relieves/ eliminates symptoms of the disorder, but this effect is not heritable as it does not involve the germ line. At present, somatic cell therapy is the only feasible option, and clinical trials addressing a variety of conditions have already begun.

is a highly multidisciplinary field, drawing from fields such as applied physics, materials science, interface and colloid science, device physics, supramolecular chemistry (which refers to the area of chemistry that focuses on the noncovalent bonding interactions of molecules), self-replicating machines and robotics, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, biological engineering, and electrical engineering. Much speculation exists as to what may result from these lines of research... Two main approaches are used in nanotechnology. In the "bottom-up" approach, materials and devices are built from molecular components which assemble themselves chemically by principles of molecular recognition. In the "top-down" approach, nano-objects are constructed from larger entities without atomic-level control.

(sometimes symbolized by >H or H+),[1] a term often used as a synonym for "human enhancement", is an international, intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as stupidity, suffering, disease, aging and involuntary death.

is a way of classifying how technologically advanced a civilization is. The scale originally ranged from Type I to Type III, although in recent years Type 0, Type IV and Type V civilizations have been informally added.

Readings:

Complementary Readings:

Screenings:


Class 14 (Thursday, April 24, 2008)

Topic

Dustin