ART 80F - INTRO WEEK CONTENT

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Digital media was positioned as a radical new social and creative medium in the 1980s and 1990s. The ensuing decades have seen this area become ubiquitous mass media with structural inequalities, centralized ownership, environmental damage, and precarious labor conditions. At the same time, it has become the language of our time and remains a site of creativity and intervention and offers opportunities for social changes. This course provides an introduction to key issues in this area through the lens of race and ethnicity.

This course will explore the intersections of art, technology, digital media and culture. Each week will focus on a different digital media technology, platform or application and discuss from multiple viewpoints. Lectures + readings will provide a variety of technical, historical or theoretical contexts, in addition to offering multiple perspectives and experiences of digital media technologies. Lecture and sections will also present a survey of artworks that either directly engage with and/or utilize digital media technologies or formats.

Course Structure
Ideas and content from lecture and readings will be applied to weekly creative projects developed in section. Each project will relate to the weekly digital media topic and engage with one or more of the issues discussed. These projects will be creative in nature, and will include mostly visual and occasional written components. A midterm and final reading exam will also occur during 5th week and 10th week that will cover readings and lecture discussion of readings. Final projects will utilize a site builder and hosting service subscription to develop an interactive site that either showcases a digital media app, product, program / organization, network or other creative project that engages with one or more of the social justice issues discussed throughout the quarter.

 

4 CONDITIONS of the COURSE FRAMEWORK

 
 

  1. Our understanding + experience of the world is partially shaped and informed by the media we interact with, both in content and in form. This ideology includes written media, film + television media, and, now digital media.

  2. Inequalities exist, people recognize, express + experience inequalities in unequal ways.

  3. Inequalities are perpetuated by systems + individuals.

  4. There is a spectrum of difference + experience among inequalities. Inequalities are not equatable, but do intersect.