Introduction

Week 1: August 13 - 19

Introduction to course concepts, topics, syllabus, Website, and the overall Open Source Studio (OSS) approach to collaborative studio art. We will overview the OSS User Manual, which covers web-conferencing via Adobe Connect, the WordPress “multi-site, ” and other online methodologies used in this hybrid onsite/online course. 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 of social media integration.  There will be an overview of artworks for critique, readings, and student work produced in the course, including: micro projects, research posts, project hyperessay, and the final project, as well as additional opportunities for collaboration.

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Open Source Studio

Week 2: August 20 - 26

Open Source Studio (OSS) has been designed as an immersive experience in the use of online tools for creative work, research, learning, and collaboration. 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. We will also review the OSS User Manual, 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 ...

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The Collective Artwork

Week 3: August 27 - September 2

We will look at concepts and formal investigations that brought about collective forms of narrative. It had been suggested by the media theorist Roy Ascott in the early 1990s that a new type of social engagement in the arts emerged with telecommunications, with its roots in conceptual and information art, Happenings, and relational forms of the past century. How might we think of recent trends in networked art, peer-to-peer systems, and online cultural production as constituting a new model for collective narrative? How has the DIY culture taken shape as a result of collaborative forms and social participation in the experience of the collective artwork?

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Data Visualization

Week 4: September 3 - 9

With the increasing attention and concern for the function of data in contemporary society, this review of data visualization takes on a new significance. Technological advances have stimulated both an unprecedented wealth of opportunity and new anxieties about privacy and identity, as everything about an individual can be measured, quantified, analyzed and nearly permanently stored. Whereas “Big Data” corporations and governments have exploited user data for their own self-serving interests, artists today have engaged data for purposes of political and social critique as well as aesthetic forms of artistic expression. The net in particularly has become a significant medium for real-time data visualizations that tap into various forms of information from abstract network data to social media discourses. We will overview some of artistic approaches that ...

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The Third Space

Week 5: September 10 - 16

The third space is defined as a shared electronic space with remote participants connected via the network: a concept fundamental to this course. 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. We will review historical third space projects: networked art, satellite broadcasts, net.art, leading to contemporary works of online, installation, and performance.

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Glitch Aesthetics

Week 6: September 17 - 23

The mistakes, errors, artifacts and aberrations of digital processes have in recent years found a central place in contemporary media art, particularly via the Net where emergent low-resolution glitch forms and other so-called “accidents” of artifacts are often native to the medium. We will survey the key artists who have pioneered the art and theory of glitch aesthetics to better understand how this “outlier” form has become an emerging genre. We will also understand the nature of glitch through its history: from early noise musics to collage art and détournement to contemporary methods of resampling and remixing, in which the disruption of the sound or visual is a key component of the expression. Current hactivist and DIY movements and their techniques will be explored ...

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Private vs Public: Giving up our Data

Week 7: September 24 - 30

Global communication 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, reality TV, surveillance, self-publishing, and social media, concerning the loss of the private, the commodification of personal demographics, and the changing nature of social relations in the virtual community. How have artists exploited issues of privacy and Big Data to offer a critique of these sometimes dangerous practices, which permeate the lives of everyone who engages in social media and other forms of telecommunications? As our personal lives 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. Guest Speaker: August ...

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Group Project Review

Week 8: October 8 - 14

Prepare a 5-minute presentation of your final project idea for class presentation, exploring the key concept, focusing on the project’s influences based on lectures, readings, and artworks discussed in the course, and how it would be collaborative with the class. How does the concept of the project draw from and critique the various issues we have explored relating to online culture? How does the work incorporate technical and aesthetic methods discussed? And finally, how does the project bridge your own practice with net-related ideas and concerns. The goal of the presentation is to demonstrate how each student has assimilated course concepts and reintroduced them in their own work. Prepare notes for your presentation and illustrative images that support your discussion, video (optional) and post ...

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Data Culture

Week 9: October 15 - 21

In our study of data visualization and social media, we ask the question: what is the meaning of the data? How do we interpret it? What does it reveal about contemporary life in an increasingly digital culture? With over a billion participants around the world using social media, what can we glean from this activity in the cloud about social relationships, events, social upheaval, and other patterns of human behavior. This is the precisely the subject of the work of Lev Manovich, a leading theorist in the study of data visualization and its interpretation. Manovich has created a study he calls "cultural analytics, " which looks at large sets of social media data as a means of better understanding our changing culture through new ...

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Project Work

Week 11: October 29 - November 4

We will review and work on final projects. There will also be a discussion of the end of the semester show in the ADM lobby, exploring strategies for presenting everyone's work.

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Group Project Critique

Week 12: November 5 - 11

Students will present their work towards the final project for group critique. We will also work on exhibition planning and final projects.

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Final Project Exhibition

Week 13: November 12

The class exhibition will conclude on Wednesday, November 12th at 5:00 PM, followed by a wrap up discussion/party at my apartment beginning at 7:30 PM.

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