Required Readings:

By Jan 26

* 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 Feb 2

Rovira, Jim. Baudrillard and Hollywood:subverting the mechanism of control and

The Matrix, pgs. 1-3.

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 23

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 30

Senie, Harriet F. & Webster, Sally, eds.

Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy. 1

Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy. 2

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

By April 3 to April 10

Read your approved Final Project Bibliography which will help you develop your ideas further.

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