Required Readings:
Due:
By Jan 22/ 20 (for section 02):
* Hurlbert, Alan, The
Design Concept
*Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, 'Introduction' Practices of Looking: an Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001)
How images--paintings, prints, photographs, film, television, video, advertisements, news images, the Internet, digital images, and images from science--gain meaning in different cultural arenas, from art and commerce to science and the law. The images are analyzed in relation to a range of cultural and representational issues (desire, power, the gaze, bodies, sexuality, and ethnicity) and methodologies (semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonial theory).
*****create a short reaction paper
By Jan. 26/27:
* Rush, Michael. New Media in Late 20th Century Art London, Thames & Hudson, 1999.Chapter 4:Digital Art, pg. 168-21.
By Feb 2/3
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1994, The Precession of Simulacra.
French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that our "postmodern" culture is a world of signs that have made a fundamental break from referring to "reality." Baudrillard's concept of simulation is the creation of the real through conceptual or "mythological" models which have no connection or origin in reality. The model becomes the determinant of our perception of reality-- the real. Homes, relationships, fashion, art, music, all become dictated by their ideal models presented through the media. Thus the boundary between the image, or simulation, and reality implodes (breaks down). This creates a world of hyperreality where the distinctions between real and unreal are blurred. Because simulations and simulacra ultimately have no referents, the social begins to implode. This process of social entropy leads to the collapse of all boundaries between meaning, the media, and the social- no distinction between classes, political parties, cultural forms, the media, and the real. Simulation and simulacra become the real so there are no stable structures on which to ground theory or politics. Culture and society become a flux of undifferentiated images and signs.
*****create a short reaction paper
By Feb 17/20
Postman,
Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.
Postman has emerged in recent years as one of America's most eloquent and outspoken
critics of technology and in this book he elaborates on themes that will no
doubt be familiar to readers of his earlier books -- most notably Amusing Ourselves
to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985). Here Postman
contends that "the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital
sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without moral foundation,"
and reorders our fundamental assumptions about the world at large. New technologies
alter our understanding of what is real, which is another way of saying that
embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct
the world as one thing rather than another.
*****create a short reaction paper
By March 1/2
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of
the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Mass,:
MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990
Crary aims to provide a different
perspective on the visual culture of the 19th century, reassessing problems
of both visual modernism and social modernity. This is an analysis of the historical
formation of the observer and an account of the prehistory of "the society
of the spectacle".
*****create
a short reaction paper
By March 15/16
Lunenfeld, Peter. Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures, Boston, The MIT Press, 2000. Chapter 5: Digital Photography: The Dubitive Image, pg 55-69.
Many times writers will fail to address or recognize the potential of hypertext
as a medium, or will discuss virtual reality in some naively science-fictionesque
manner. Peter Lunenfeld embraces these issues and more in a way that is hard
to accomplish without chronological distance. Without attempts at all-encompassing
rhetoric, he makes strong, undeniable observations of where our culture is,
with reference to the digital media that encompass it. Particularly exciting
is the point that virtual reality is only significantly present as an "object
to think with", a sort of prophetic idea which influenced society greatly
without ever being fully achieved. Its a more productive look in the mirror
instead of the usual look to the supposed future.
By March 22/23
Senie, Harriet F. & Webster,
Sally, eds. Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy.
New York: HarperCollins Publishers. 1992.
Collects essays on different public
art issues including traditional categories of public art, patronage, controversies,
and new directions from the 1970s onward.
*****create
a short reaction paper
Other Recommended Readings:
Visual Quickstart books: http://peachpit.com/books/vqs.html
Spalter, Ann Morgan. The Computer
in the Visual Arts. Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media http://www.manovich.net/
Jean Baudrillard, other works