Grace Grace Grace

This team-taught, introductory course provides a foundation for most additional coursework in the Art and Technology Studies department. Students are given a broad interdisciplinary grounding in the skills, concepts, and hands-on experiences they will need to engage the potentials of new technologies in art making. Every other week, a lecture and discussion group exposes students to concepts of electronic media, perception, inter-media composition, emerging venues, and other issues important to artists working with technologically based media. Students will attend a morning & afternoon section each day to gain hands-on experience with a variety of forms and techniques central to technologically-based art making.

Electronic manuscripts combine images, words and potentially other media including sound and video. They include but are not limited to online narratives with interactive, hypertextual, animated, or generative elements; artists books (either online or with digital elements); innovative online portfolio pages; SoundWorks hosted on a webpage with textural or visual elements; and installations with digital narrative components. We will study issues in creating content for electronic manuscripts and explore the software, algorithms, and interfaces with which they are created, including social media platforms, HTML5/CSS; JavaScript, twine, and Inform7.

The works we will study in this course include Matt Huynh's scrolling 'The Boat,' in which a harrowing narrative of Vietnamese 'boat people' refugees unfolds amidst animated falling rain, storm-rocking graphics, voiced laments, light and dark, moving text, and floating images; Carla Gannis' triptych animation:'The Garden of Emoji Delights; Nick Montfort's generative concrete poetry 'Autopia'; Catt Small's 'SweetXheart¿, an interactive game that asks 'Can you get through a week in the life of a modern black woman?; and installed works such as Carolee Schneemann¿s 'Venus Vectors' and Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Camille Utterback's 'Talking Cure'.

Students will traverse examples; create content; learn/practice HTML5/CSS, basic JavaScript, twine, inform7, and social media-based authoring platforms, create work in the media of their choice.

Post-modernist and post-structuralist art, architecture, literature, music and performance have often made overtures to the chaotic, while admitting the creative act always requires structuration driven by a more-than-human intentionality (see Cage¿s definition of music as ¿organized sound¿). Sidestepping aesthetics altogether, Feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz understands art as a non-extraordinary rerouting of the chaotic forces of the earth to create a territory. A territory is a culture, a culture of intensities. For psychoanalyst and activist Felix Guattari, the artist, and perhaps exceptionally the improviser, must open themselves onto the cosmos ¿ which he calls the chaosmos. Despite historical adoration for chaos as a catalyst for creativity, appeals to chaos might feel exasperating in 2023. The founding scientists of chaos theory wrote ¿we grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate¿ (Prigogyne and Stengers, 1984). Unexpected loss of human life in the pandemic, the rise of stochastic terrorism fueled by extremism, and the industrialized destruction of our very lifeworld ¿ haven¿t we had our fill of chaos? In four parts, this seminar charts a path across disciplines and between chaos and order in the creative act. First we begin with the scientific origins of chaos theory (Poincare¿s ¿three body problem¿), early systems theory (Von Uexhull¿s ecology), and Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger¿s seminal Order out of Chaos. Next we will fashion a cultural thermodynamics through science fiction (Cixin Liu, Ursula K. Le Guin) and feminist art theory (Grosz, Institute for Precarious Consciousness). We turn to the chaosmos (a chaotic cosmology) as articulated by activist and in-disciplinary thinker Felix Guattari as well as radical empiricist-pragmatists (Bergson, Dewey). Finally, we revisit the cybernetic bedrock of chaos theory: computation. We turn to both arguments about what it is (Galloway, Dhaliwal, Parisi), what we imagine it can do in a chaotic world(Turner, Curtis), and what we argue it can¿t do (Simondon, Yuk Hui). Students are encouraged to bring their own practices and perspectives to the readings and to a final paper. In addition to seminar discussions and student presentations about readings, students will choose to respond, elaborate, and interject into the course¿s discourse either through creative projects or papers.