Syllabus

Week 1 (January 8): Introductions

Week 2 (January 15): What have been New Media?

• Selections from The New Media Reader (Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, J.C.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Roy Ascott, Theodor Nelson [#s 11, 21, 30], Alan Kay & Adele Goldberg)
• Adalaide Morris, introduction to New Media Poetics [ERES*]
• Watch: Doug Engelbart SRI presentation (1968)
• Context for discussion: Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999); Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2001); N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (2002)

Week 3 (January 22): Writing Systems

• Friedrich Kittler, “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter”; “The World of the Symbolic”; “Protected Mode”; and “There Is No Software,” Literature, Media, Information Systems
• Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (pp. xii-xviii, 206-229, 369-372) [intro linked as pdf; latter pages on ERES]
• Recommended: Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Nicholas Gane, “Friedrich Kittler: An Introduction,” Theory, Culture & Society 23: 7-8 (2006): 5-16.

Week 4 (January 29): Code

• Florian Cramer, Word Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination (excerpts)
• Adrian Mackenzie, “The performativity of code: software and cultures of circulation
• Rita Raley, “Code.surface || Code.depth”
• Michael Mateas and Nick Montfort, “A Box, Darkly: Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics”
• Browse: Mez, -][selec][text: co][deP][l][oetry] _ | _The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing | John Cayley, translation | Ted Warnell, Poem by Nari
  
• Browse exhibits: Code (year01.com) | “CODeDOC” (Whitney Artport) | “Obfuscated C Code”

Week 5 (February 5): Distraction (attention & perception)

• Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (“Panoramic Travel”) [ERES]
• Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (pp. 11-51, 77-78) [ERES]
• Talan Memmott, Lexia to Perplexia
• Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, “Rain on the Sea”
• Recommended: Sue Currell, “Streamlining the Eye: Speed Reading and the Revolution of Words, 1870-1940” and Charles Acland, “The Swift View: Tachistoscopes and the Residual Modern,” in Residual Media [ERES]

Week 6 (February 12): Embodiment

• Michele White, The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (introduction & afterword) [ERES]
• N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (“Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers”) [ERES]
• Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Chapter 1) [ERES]
• Recommended: Myron Krueger, “Responsive Environments,” The New Media Reader; “Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape” (special issue of Configurations); Bernadette Wegenstein, “The Medium is the Body,” Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory
• Consider: Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl; interactive art installations, haptic interfaces

Week 7 (February 19): Narrative/Database

• Victoria Vesna, ed., Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (selections include Vesna, Manovich, Paul, Dietz, Seaman, Daniel, Sack)
• N. Katherine Hayles, “The Tempestuous Relationship of Narrative and Data” [ERES]
• Artists and Data Projects: George Legrady, Pockets Full of Memories | Lynn Hershman-Leeson, “The Raw Data Diet” | Eduardo Kac, “Time Capsule”
  

Week 8 (February 26): Media Ecologies

• Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture
• Recommended: world wide watch (irational.org) | John Hilliard, A Camera Recording Its Own Condition (1971) | UK Pirate Radio Broadcasts | Interview with Germaine Koh (Mathew Kabatoff; Rhizome)

Week 9 (March 4): Socio-political Engagements

• Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (pp. 93-111, 212-226) [ERES]
• Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (“The Idea of Knowledge Work”) [ERES]
• Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (pp. 25-35, 58-63) [ERES]
• Browse: Lisa Autogena and Joshua Portway, Black Shoals: Stock Market Planetarium | John Klima, ecosystm (Vesna, ed.) | Nancy Paterson, Stock Market Skirt (Vesna, ed.)
  

Week 10 (March 11): Media Spaces (pervasive computing, locative & mobile media)

• Bruce Sterling, excerpts from Shaping Things (pp. 76-111) [ERES]
• Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard, Situated Technologies Pamphlet 1: Urban Computing and Its Discontents (free download)
• Michael Bull, “‘To each their own bubble’: Mobile Spaces of Sound in the City,” in Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy eds., MediaSpace [ERES]
• Bo Kampmann Walther, “Pervasive Gaming: Formats, Rules and Space”
• Browse: urban-scale projected graffiti, e.g. laser graffiti and SMS performances such as TXTual Healing | Tactical Sound Garden | Google Earth | iSee | Beyond the Beyond (Sterling blog) | GPS Drawing

* ERES = electronic reserve