« Immigration games from Ubisoft and from Owlchemy Labs | Main | rough metric/rubric for gameplay »
March 01, 2011
Fall Seminar Planning
This is a draft. I'm thinking out loud. Some of this stuff (a lot of this stuff) won't make the final cut. I may scrap it all and start all over. I've been using science fiction as an entry point that offers multivalent benefits. I'm trying to prepare something that has a more art historical bent. Our graduate students need to have access to an art historical perspective. These are (less than) half formed thoughts.
Progression:
DaDa
Duschamp
John Cage & Lamont Young
Fluxus
Nam Jun Paik
Wolf Vostell
Yoko Ono
George Vautier
George Maciunas
New Media Art (and in some cases design)
what would we read?
Jasia Riechardt, The Computer in Art
Leavitt, Artist and Computer
McLuhan?
Manovich?
Estera Milman, Fluxus: A Conceptual Country ?
Mark Tribe, New Media Art ?
Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar?
Laura Heon, Game Show ?
Alan Kay in If/Then Play?
Gyorgi Kepes?
Jorge Luis Borges, Labrynths ?
Bolter and Gromala, Windows and mirrors ?
Do we watch things?
Jean Luc Goddard, Alphaville ?
Chris Marker, La Jetté ?
Which works can we experience?
John Simon, Every Icon
Sol Lewitt...?
BIBLIOGRAPHY [tentative]
Milman, Estera ed. Fluxus: A Conceptual Country. Visible Language. Volume 26, number 1/2. 1992.
Bolter, Jay David and Gromala, Diane. Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency. MIT. 2003.
Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago. 1993.
Druckery, Timothy ed. Ars Electronica: Facing the Future. MIT. 1999.
Ascott, Roy. "Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?". 1990.
Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. Thames & Hudson. 2003.
Greene, Rachel. Internet Art. Thames & Hudson. 2004.
Lunenfeld, Peter. User: InfoTechnoDemo. MIT. 2005.
Holtzman, Steven. Digital Mosaics: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace. Touchstone. 1998.
Duguet, Anne-Marie. Smile Machines: Humor Art Technology. Transmediale. 2006.
Rothenberg, Jerome trans. pppppp kurt schwitters poems performance pieces proses plays poetics. Exact Change. Cambridge. 2002.
Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: from illusion to immersion. MIT. 2003.
Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard. 2004
Lovink, Geert. Dark Fiber.
Greiman, April. Hybrid Imagery: The fusion of technology and graphic design. Watson-Guptill. 1990.
Rath, Alan. Plants Animals People Machines. Smart Art Press. 1995.
Rath, Alan. Robotics. Smart Art Press. 1998.
Koolhaas, Rem et al. Mutations.
Leavitt, R. Artist and Computer.
Reichardt, J. The Computer in Art. Van Nostrand Rinehold.
Tribe, Mark. New Media Art. Taschen. 2007.
Maeda, John. Creative Code.
----. Maeda @ Media.
----. Simplicity.
----. Design By Numbers.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT.
Manovich, Lev. Softbook.
Toop, David. Ocean of Sound.
Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. [pdf Vasulka.org]
Lovejoy, Margot. Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the age of Electronic Media. Prentice Hall. 2nd Edition 1997.
Lunenfeld? Snap To Grid. MIT.
Laurel, Brenda. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design.
Laurel, Brenda. Computers As Theatre. Addison-Wesley.
Laurel, Brenda. Design Research: Methods and Perspectives. MIT.
Laurel, Brenda. Utopian Entreprenuer. MIT.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Fictions.
===
There is more than one entry point. It is possible to draw a line from DaDa, through Duschamp, through Cage & LaMont Young, through Fluxus, to new media; but, it is not the only line. What are the antecedents to conceptual art? How do we account for the engineers with creative practices who did not have art historical references?
===
pre-rave scene?
cinechamber at UCSD, Naut Humon is his name. Mondo 2000 sensibility.
===
Lunenfeld, Peter ed. Media Work Pamphlet series. MIT
Helfand, Jessica. Screen: essays on design and new media. Princeton Architectural Press.
===
Vasari, framing mechanism(s) that led to, documented renaissance perspective. Hockney claims that there were secret lens based devices. Looking at the world through the screen (view[find]er) reiterates the privileged point of view of vaishing point(s) perspective.
Schjeldahl on Cezanne in New Yorker, 28 2011, p78. Using both eyes breaks the tyranny of perspective and gives birth to cubism.
===
entry points through the senses, in isolation... vs in aggregate...
vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste (to a lesser degree)
gestalt and gesamkunstwerk
cognition, cartesian and embodied
===
Antikythera Device. Babbage and Watt, Turing. How do we consider the pre-history of calculation, computation, and programming.
===
Curation is selection. I don't think it can be considered natural.
===
Watson & Crick, biology as code.
===
Saussure, natural language as code.
===
Derrida, perceptions of codes are unreliable, autodestructive.
===
McLuhan introduces the method of probes and aphorisms. These are metaphorical probes similar to Leonardo's and Einstein's thought experiments. Technologists who handcrafted electronics used physical probes to detect and measure pulsing signals. Biologists -- Leonardo among them -- used knives and probes (literally pointy sticks) to percieve and measure the nature of organs and organisms. Lunenfeld, Dunne, and Bleecker have self-consciously adopted/adapted probes to their methods.
===
Marie Curie, Philo Farnsworth (I think), Large Hadron Collider...
===
The commission and the speculation are economic models that artists have worked within for the last 1000 years.
===
Cinematic imaginings of nets and info shadows:
Eagle Eye
Enemy of the State
End of Violence
The Conversation
===
We need to engage in a meta-survey, a survey of surveys. We can and should diagram the overlaps and intersections among the surveys to create a visualization of the emergent canon(s), of what will be remebered and of what is likely to be forgotten.
===
Timetables of history, comparative visualization of strands in the tapestry of time. The Giloth essay offers us a forty-five year long strand. The book by the Eames Office for IBM, A Computer Perspective, offers a strand.
===
Deleuze & Guatari encourage us to adopt new(er) biological metaphors to organize knowledge production and understand networks. They offer us a contrast to the old(er) arboreal model. They validate breadth in the realm of depth.
===
Lunenfeld in Snap To Grid suggests that Art History itself will have to be recast. It is an interestingly Modernist statement, the sweeping away of history. At the same time he, and the other authors in the meta-survey, points out antecedents that compare, contrast, and validate. These are parallel works in other, recognized media forms. There is a list of narrative films, of paintings, of poems, of media artifacts all presented as if the wizened blind were -- with hands outstreched -- attempting to describe elephants of parable. [c.f. p 66]
===
Films continued...
Blade Runner
Johnny Mnemonic
Farenheit 451
A Scanner Darkly
===
Holtzman's Digital Mosaics, published in 1998, suffers from the passage of time even as it argues for a position that has been thought to be timeless in other contexts. Holtzman seeks the expressions and properties that are unique to the province of digital electronic computers and networks. He introduces the notion that these should be regarded as instruments more so than tools. He also invoke cinema, but for its failing to recognize early that a motion picture camera could itself be put into motion through a scene. With this invocation of _mis en scene_ he also invokes the theatical proscenium, the camera obscura, and the renaissance single point perspective. He reminds us of the screen as a framing device.
===
Swords and plowshares. Ballistic tables, Calculators.
===
Alternative or forking path (back to the comfortable realm of fiction):
Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. 1992. aprox 500 pages
Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon. 1999. aprox 900 pages
Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler. 1979. aprox 250 pages
Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think". The Atlantic Monthly. 1950s.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labrynths. New Directions Books. 2007. aprox 250 pages
------. "The Garden of Forking Paths" pages 19-29
------. "The Library of Babel" pages 51-58
------."Partial Magic in the Quixote" pages 193-196
------."On the exactitude of science" from another collection.
Eco, Umberto. The Name Of the Rose.
Burton, Sir Richard trans. 1001 Nights.
More films:
Nolan, Christopher. Memento
Nolan, Christopher. Inception
Lynch, David. Mulholland Drive
Noe, Gaspar. Irreversible.
Carruth, Shane. Primer.
Posted by Rafael Fajardo at March 1, 2011 10:00 PM