课程概况
We tend to think of art and technology as two separate, almost opposite things. But what if we showed you that the development of technology owes its debt to artists? And that art would not be what it is, without technology? “The digital age”, born out of the scientific and technological revolutions of the last 500 years, exposes the artificial divergence of disciplinary categories.
It is an exciting moment in art and design history. On the one hand, technological tools change what we are capable of doing – and contemporary artists/designers indeed use those technologies with much imagination: from image processing to immersive virtual environments; from social networks to flash mobs and cyber-attacks; from fake news to surveillance systems – art had never had so many tools to play while directly interacting with us within our social realities. On the other hand, art does so while examining, distorting, criticizing and inventing new technologies as it allows us to imagine the furthest frontiers of what technology may be able to do.
This course aims to look at these inter-disciplinary cross-overs between art, design and technology while asking: how does this new technological age is changing our culture, society and life? What do these teach us about ourselves? How can we reflect through it about our pasts, presents and futures?
The course is aimed at anyone who is curious about what it means to be born and to live in “the digital age”. The course combines lectures, interviews with theoreticians and artists, artwork analysis, case studies and stimulating discussions. The course also offers some practical exercises that will introduce you to basics in programming, digital image processing and 3D printing.
You would not need preliminary knowledge of art history, but such knowledge may be helpful.
This course was created and produced by Shenkar – Engineering. Design. Art.
课程大纲
Week 1: Historical & Theoretical Tangents between Art and Technology
Definitions of art and technology & how they could be the same?
Art & Technologies interlinked: from cave paintings to the modern age
Setting the fence between art and technology: a conceptual ridge
Art and technology in the Renaissance
Photography's early histories
Week 2: Art as Media as Language
Art as media: How are can be defined a communication media? Or a language?
Nelson Goodman's theory of Digital and Analogue
The Technology of Notation and Music
The History of Music Technology and its Implications in the Digital Age
Week 3: Art at the Turn of The Mechanical Age
The meaning of images post WWW2
The contemporary meaning of images in relation to technological development
Revising Walter Benjamin's and John Berger's Ways of Seeing
The work of Culture in the age of Cybernetic Systems
The evolution of the moving image
Avant Garde movements and the moving image
Old cinema and new media art: video installations and new media technologies in the gallery space.
Week 4: After Photography
Learn about the 4 industrial and technological evolutions
Agency, The emancipation of the spectator and free will in a world governed by machines
From mechanisms of chance in art to mass customisation in design
Critical encounters between art and technology: early experiments with computers
Week 5: How to think about Technology & Mid Course Assessment
Self-Assessment mid-course
6 approaches towards the critique of media and technology in the digital age
Week 6: Art and the Internet
Net.Art
Tactical Media and subversion
Google: technological and informational biases
The conundrum of privacy in the digital age: We live in Public
Strategies to cope with surveillance capitalism: how not to be seen and obfuscation
Week 7: Digital Aesthetics
The Cut & Paste aesthetics and the remix culture
Time and space in the digital age: how to re-read spatio-temporal perceptions. After Paul Virillio and Katherine Hayles
The selfie and the narcissistic and exhibtitionary complexes of social media
Week 8: Digital Futures
Truth, Fiction and Virtual Realities
The Internet of Things
Object/subject relationship in virtual realities
Performance and virtual reality
Posthumanism and the anteoposcene
The myth of immateriality
Ability, disability, super ability
预备知识
No previous knowledge required, however mostly recommended for those who have a first degrees in the relevant topics: art, art history, design.
