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Instructor: Christiane Paul E-mail: Christiane_Paul@WHITNEY.ORG This series presents a set of lectures by prominent artists exploring digital media as a creative and expressive tool. Lectures by the visiting artists take place bi-weekly in the RISD auditorium. Every other week the class meets to discuss the lectures and related topics and readings. Attendance will be recorded for each class. Grades will be based on attendance, participation, and completed assignments. Unexcused absences, lateness, and missed assignments will negatively affect students' grades. Required course work: Optional: Required Books: Week 1 | Sept. 16Introduction to course: topics and course work.Survey of digital media art and its forms, characteristics, and aesthetics. History of technology and art. URLs: Hobbes' Internet Timeline A Little History of the World Wide Web Bruce Sterling, "History of the Internet" Lev Manovich, New Media from Borges to HTML / What is New Media: 8 Propositions from New Media from Borges to HTML Henry Jenkins, Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape Beryl Graham, A Table of Categories of Digital Art Dieter Daniels / Rudolf Frieling, Media Art Net Humboldt University (Berlin), Database of Virtual Art Langlois Foundation Archives Overview (Media Art Net) Liza Bear, Willoughby Sharp, Sharon Grace, Carl Loeffler, Two-Way Demo: Send/Receive (1977) Kit Galloway / Sherrie Rabinowitz, Satellite Arts Project 77 Douglas Davies (with Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys et al.), Last 9 Minutes Robert Adrian, Telecommunications Projects LABoral Art Center, Gijon, Asturias, Feedback YouTube documentation Rhizome The Thing Furtherfield artport (Whitney Museum) Walker Gallery 9 SFMOMA e-space Turbulence Assignments for next week: Warren Sack, Aesthetics of Information Visualization Alison Sant, Redefining the Basemap Week 2 | Sept. 23Lecture: Jack Toolin (RISD Auditorium)Bio: Jack Toolin is an artist whose work spans new media installation, digital imaging, and performance. He has worked both independently and as a member of the new media art collective C5, 1997 - 2007, which investigated our relationship to technology, and technology's relationship to culture through data visualization, installation, performance expedition, photography, and video. The Perfect View - part of C5's project Landscape Initiative - explored the sublime via 25 GPS locations around the U.S. This body of work was shown as part of Rhizome's exhibition Networked Nature at Foxy Production, New York, in 2007, and will exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art this fall. Toolin's Manhattan Cache, a new locative media project, was selected to be a part of Conflux 2008, a festival for locative media art in New York City. His individual and collaborative work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including San Francisco Camerawork; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002 Whitney Biennial); and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has been teaching at San Jose State University and other universities in the Bay Area and has lectured widely at institutions such as the University of California at Berkeley; the San Francisco Art Institute; Emerson College (Boston, MA); The School of Visual Arts (New York); Kibla Mulitmedia Center, Maribor, Slovenia; the Museum of Contemporary Art Rijeka, Croatia; and the University of Split, Croatia. He is currently an adjunct professor at the Integrated Digital Media Institute at the Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, and at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. URLs: Landscape Initiative The Perfect View The C5 GPS Media Player C5 Manhattan Cache jacktoolin.net Week 3 | cxld (makeup date tbd)Assignments for next 2 weeks: Beatriz da Costa, Reaching the Limit - When Art Becomes Science C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures Week 4 | Oct. 7Lecture: Beatriz da Costa (RISD Auditorium)Bio: Beatriz da Costa is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who works at the intersection of contemporary art, science, engineering and politics. Her work takes the form of public participatory interventions, locative media, conceptual tool building and critical writing. da Costa has also made frequent use of wetware in her projects and has recently become interested in the potential of interspecies co-production in the pursuit of resistant practices. da Costa is a former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble and co-founder of Preemptive Media, an art, activism and technology group. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Andy Warhol Museum, the Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medien in Germany, and the Natural History Museum in London. Recent media coverage includes the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Reuters and the New Scientist. da Costa is Associate Professor in the Arts, Computation, Engineering graduate program at the University of California, Irvine. URLs: www.beatrizdacosta.net Week 5 | Oct. 14Presentation:Discussion of Jack Toolin's presentation in the context of locative media, database and data visualization of landscape. URLs: Eric Paulos / Intel Research Urban Atmospheres /Participatory Urbanism Beatriz da Costa Pigeon Blog Andrea Polli, Atmospherics / Weather Works CP Database Aesthetics Directory Golan Levin, with Martin Wattenberg, Jonathan Feinberg, Shelly Wynecoop, David Elashoff, and David Becker, The Secret Life of Numbers George Legrady, Pockets Full of Memories / Slippery Traces CP Locative Media Directory Steve Dietz, Locative Media link collection Dr. Reinhold Grether, Directory to mobile art and locative media ISEA 2006 selections Discussion of Beatriz da Costa's presentation in connection to activism and biopolitics. Presentation: Jan Mun, Bundith Phunsombatlert. URLs: CP Activism Directory Critical Art Ensemble Paul Vanouse Natalie Jeremijenko, Projects Website / OOZ SymbioticA / Tissue Culture and Art Project Particles of Interest, Tales from the Matter Market Natalie Jeremijenko & Eugene Thacker, Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual Assignments for next 2 weeks: Contextual Readings for Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries' talk: Contextual Readings & Viewings for Jonathan Bordo: From Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin (eds.), Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade: *Margaret Olin, "The Winter Garden and Virtual Heaven" *Margaret Olin, "The Keeping Place - Arising from an Incident on the Land" [Excerpts from both texts are available from the online Table of Contents] Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes (DVD) Jonathan Bordo, critical notice of Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes in Material Culture journal Alan Cohen, On European Ground Week 5 | Oct. 18Lecture: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries / (Marko Niemi, 6PM (RISD Museum)(Interrupt Festival, co-sponsored by Brown University) Bio: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries are the Arists-in-Residence of the Interrupt festival in celebration of writing and performance in digital media. The Seoul-based web-art group consists of Young-Hae Chang (Korea) and Marc Voge (USA). They compose animated poems in English, Korean and French in which the text is combined with jazz music. Their technique cuts across the lines that separate digital animation, motion graphics and experimental video. URLs: www.yhchang.com Week 6 | Oct. 21Lecture: Jonathan Bordo (RISD Auditorium)Bio: Jonathan Bordo is a cultural theorist with a special interest in the study of art, monuments, and symbolic forms. He has published widely, and lectured extensively in North America, Northern Europe, and the Antipodes. He is an exponent of what might be called "Northern Theory," and the whole range of issues surrounding landscape and colonialism. He has also done important work at the nexus of anthropology and philosophy, dealing with the question of "witnessing" in pictorial representation, and the function of totemic images as signs and effectuators of kinship relations. He is currently completing a multi-volume study of the wilderness entitled The Landscape without a Witness, one volume of which will be published as Wilderness as Symbolic Form by Ridopi in 2009. "The Homer of Potsdamerplatz -Walter Benjamin in the Berlin of Wim Wenders' Himmel über Berlin" will appear in Images - A Journal of Jewish Art History and Visual Culture, Brill, Amsterdam 2009. "Weak Theory, Testimony and the Vernacular" is a contribution to The Specular Witness, a collection of essays that addresses art, testimony, and the practice of cultural study for a still emergent global civic polity. URLs: Bordo home page Week 7 | Oct. 28Presentation: Miguel Elizalde, Mary Burge, Nathan Mueller.URLs: Yael Kanarek,World of Awe Mark Amerika, Projects Judd Morrissey, The Jew's Daughter Noah Wardrip-Fruin, David Durand, Brion Moss, Elaine Froehlich, News Reader / Regime Change John Cayley Graham Harwood, London.Pl Eastgate Hypertext Resources Grand Text Auto Electronic Literature Organization Camille Utterback, Text Rain Masaki Fujihata, Beyond Pages / Digital Salon Info Tom White and David Small, Stream of Consciousness Text Mapping Projects: Ben Fry, Valence Bradford Paley, TextArc Schoenerwissen, txtkit - Visual Text Mining Tool Presentation: Laura Alesci. Discussion of Jonathan Bordo's work in the context of changing notions of landscape and its representation. URLs: Tamiko Thiel + Teresa Reuter, Virtuelle Mauer / ReConstructing the Wall Art+Com, The Invisible Shapes of Things Past (1995-2007) Architecture Operating System Alison Sant, Redefining the Basemap See "Urbanity" section on CP Locative Media Directory The C5 GPS Media Player Assignments for next week: Guy Debord + Gil Wolman, A User's Guide to Detournement Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography(1955) Week 8 | Nov. 4Lecture: Mary Flanagan (RISD Auditorium)Bio: Mary Flanagan is an artist, designer, and theorist who investigates everyday relationships in light of contemporary technology, with a particular interest in games and play. Flanagan's digitally driven artworks and installations have been shown internationally at venues including the Laboral Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SIGGRAPH, Beall Center, Steirischer Herbst, Ars Electronica, Artist's Space, The Guggenheim New York, Gigantic Art Space, and others. Her over 20 essays and articles on digital culture have appeared in periodicals and books, and her own books in English include reload: rethinking women + cyberculture (with A. Booth, MIT 2002), re:SKIN (with A. Booth, MIT 2007), and Critical Play (MIT 2009). Flanagan also prioritizes her role as an activist designer, founding and directing the Tiltfactor Laboratory, a research and creation lab dedicated to socially conscious games and software development. She created the first internet adventure game for girls, The Adventures of Josie True, in the 1990s and has helped change the discourse on gender, gaming, and technology. One of her current efforts, Values at Play, is dedicated to developing innovation techniques which support human values in the game design process in order to fully realize the potential of games to shape learning, power, and social change. Flanagan is a MacDowell Fellow and the PI or Co-PI on six National Science Foundation awards. She holds an MFA in Film and Video and a Ph.D. in Computational Media with a focus on game design from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College. URLs: www.maryflanagan.com Tiltfactor Laboratory Values at Play Week 9 | Nov. 11Presentation: Colin Williams, Soo Jin Rho, Frederick Ostrenko, Adam Gray.Discussion of Mary Flanagan's lecture in the context of approaches to games and play. URLs: Games for Change Serious Games ID Software, Doom / Quake / Castle Wolfenstein Will Wright/Electronic Arts, The Sims Will Wright/Electronic Arts, Spore [video] Everquest World of Warcraft America's Army Kuma\War HTTP Gallery, London, Game/Play Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL), Next Level: Art, Games & Reality Mediateca Caixaforum, Game as Critic As Art Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF, Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, Australia, Plaything Games, curated by Tilman Baumgärtel Institute for Contemporary Art, Cape Town, South Africa, (re:Play), curated by Radioqalia New Museum of Contemporary Art, Killer Instinct Natalie Bookchin, Intruder / Metapet Eric Zimmerman + Word, Sissyfight 2000 Josh On, Anti-Wargame Ben Langlands & Nikki Bell, The House of Osama Bin Laden John Klima, The Great Game (Epilogue) / ecogame / Jack & Jill Paul Johnson, Budaechigae et al. Brody Condon, tmpspace / Worship C-Level, Waco Resurrection Eddo Stern, Vietnam Romance et al. / Summons to surrender Joan Leandre, nostalG / RC100 Sid Meier, Civilization IV Jennifer Government: NationStates Quake Feng Mengbo, Q4U JODI, Untitled Game Tom Betts / Nullpointer, q-q-q Joseph DeLappe, Quake/Friends Playstation Alex Galloway & RSG, Prepared Playstation (2004/5) Counter-Strike Anne-Marie Schleiner, Velvet-Strike Castle Wolfenstein JODI, Wolfenstein version of My Boyfriend... / SOD Unreal Engine Mary Flanagan, [domestic] Margarete Jahrmann, Max Moswitzer, nybble-engine-toolZ Half-Life Escape from Woomera SIMS intervention Tony Walsh, Big Mac Attacked World of Warcraft Robert Nideffer, WtF?! Blast Theory, Can you See Me Now? / Uncle Roy All Around You Frank Lantz at al., PacManhattan NodeRunner Assignments for next 2 weeks: Week 10 | Nov. 18Lecture: Michael Mateas (RISD Auditorium)Bio: Michael Mateas runs the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz, where they explore the intersection of artificial intelligence, art and design. Their goal is to create compelling new forms of interactive art and entertainment that provide more deeply autonomous, generative and dynamic responses to interaction. A major thrust of this work is advanced AI for videogames, including autonomous characters and interactive storytelling. By viewing AI as an expressive medium, our work raises and answers novel AI research questions while pushing the boundaries of the conceivable and possible in interactive experiences. Current projects in the group include automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling. URLs: homepage Publications Week 11 | Nov. 25Presentation: Nipun Kumar, Taehee Kim, Linda Zhang, Kirk Mueller.Discussion of Michael Mateas' lecture in the context of approaches to AI and interactive drama. URLs: Michael Mateas, Facade Heide, Onesandzeros, Pocock, Stehle, Unmovie Eliza Eliza, Computer Therapist Alice IA Foundation Adrianne Wortzel, Eliza Redux Lynn Hershmann, Agent Ruby Ken Feingold, If/Then (2001), Sinking Feeling (2001) John Klima, Jack & Jill Harold Cohen, Aaron / also see kurzweilcyberart.com/ Gabor Papp, Connoisseur Craig Reynolds, Steering behaviors for autonomous characters Week 12 | Dec. 2Conclusion |