Introduction to the Art of the Social Practice

Week 1: January 18 – 24

Introduction to course topics, syllabus, Website, and the overall Open Source Studio (OSS) approach to collaborative studio art. We will review the OSS Getting Started Tutorial for Students, exploring specific techniques and strategies for online research and documentation. In order to work collectively in the OSS Website, we will cover a range of practices for working in the WordPress multi-site. Each student will learn techniques for organizing their work, designing their site, customizing the interface, and making creative use of the OSS database for the creation of collective narrative forms. We will establish user accounts in WordPress and social media sites, and discuss how these tools will be used for creative work, collective blog writing, Web-based research, online documentation, and methods ...

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Open Source Thinking

Week 2: January 25 – 31

We will take a close look at the history and concept of open source thinking, and how peer-to-peer methods of collaboration, openness, and transparency can be applied to the studio arts. Of particular interest is the cultural impact of open source methods, how techniques that encourage free sharing of information and the peer-to-peer process might inform and enrich our creative practice as artists.

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Network Culture – The Third Space

Week 3: February 1 - 7

The third space is defined as a shared electronic space with remote participants connected via the network. We will explore the psychological and conceptual dimensions of the third space, notions of distributed presence, the dissolution of the object, disembodiment, the immaterial, and the intimacy of the telematic embrace. We will discuss third space forms of collective experience via the network through live media, remote location, mobility, transformations of geographical perception in time and space, and how the third space lends itself to artistic realization.

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Maker Culture – The Collective Artwork

Week 4: February 8 - 14

We will look at concepts and formal investigations of maker culture and how it has brought about collective forms of narrative.  How might we think of recent trends in maker culture, peer-to-peer systems, and online cultural production as constituting a new model for collective narrative? Our study will involve an investigation of glitch processes: the mistakes, errors, artifacts and aberrations of digital processes have in recent years found a central place in contemporary media art, where emergent low-resolution glitch forms and other so-called “accidents” of artifacts are often native to the medium. Current hactivist and DIY movements and their techniques will be explored to better understand how glitch is a unifying concept that brings together alternative communities of collaborating artists.

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Maker Culture – DIWO

Week 5: February 15 - 21

We will continue our study of maker culture with a deeper look at DIWO (Do it With Others) as practiced by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow from the Furtherfield Gallery in London. Marc Garrett will be our guest speaker who will provide an overview of DIWO, it's concepts, practices, and ways in which it has been used to bring about social change through art and technology. How has the DIY or DIWO (do it with others) culture taken shape as a result of collaborative forms and social participation in the experience of the collective artwork? We will have an opportunity to discuss these issues in live conversation with Marc Garrett via Adobe Connect.

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Interdisciplinary Forms – Interview with Chip Lord

Week 6: February 22 - 28

THERE WILL BE NO CLASS this week as I will be attending the College Art Association Conference (CAA) in Los Angeles. However, as an introduction to our study of the Ant Farm media collective, the class will view my Adobe Connect online interview with Chip Lord at CAA, either live (February 24 at 1:00am SGT) or from the recording (to be posted). Students will look at the work of Ant Farm, co-founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michaels in San Francisco in 1968. From our studies of the collective artwork and forms of collaboration, we will look in depth at how Ant Farm pioneered the interdisciplinary fusion of media art, performance, spectacle, and sculpture in such iconic works as Media Burn, Cadillac Ranch, and the ...

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Interdisciplinary Forms – Ant Farm and the Art of the Meme

Week 7: March 1 - 7

We will review the work of the media collective Ant Farm and discuss how their work involved the creation of significant, lasting, and recognizable cultural icons, or what we would refer to today as memes. Students will work in groups to create the Art of the Meme micro-projects, reflecting on how memes are produced, transformed, and passed through the cultural stream via social media.

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Social Networks – Digital Identity

Week 8: March 15 - 21

Global telecommunications has challenged and penetrated all previous notions of the divide between public and private space. We’ll take a critical look at mobile media, webcam technology, and social media, concerning the changing nature of the self and our relation to others in the transparency and sharing of information inherent in our online interactions. We will also look at how artists have exploited social media as part of their practice, both in terms of expanding their community and as a platform for artistic creation. As our personal lives have become increasingly public, exposed, and sometimes exploited, how can we develop a critical stance on these developments and incorporate thoughtful criticism into our artistic investigations.

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Social Networks – Social Broadcasting

Week 9: March 22 - 28

We will explore the concept of social broadcasting, many-to-many interactions that creatively join artists and audiences in live, networked spaces. We will review the work of Annie Abrahams, who is creating a new performance for the upcoming Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium, to understand how artists today are using the Internet to extend the artistic potentialities of online space for live performance.

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Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium

Week 10: March 29 - April 4

There will be no class this week, instead students will participate in the three-day symposium via Adobe Connect, which has the theme: “Social Broadcasting: An Unfinished Communications Revolution.” Students will be responsible for writing a research critique based on the two keynotes and two live performances, as well as participation in the global roundtable discussions by asking questions. See Website for additional information: https://thirdspacenetwork.com/symposium2018/

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