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new media theory courses
``` [The Art Center College of Design is a happening place in Pasadena, and Peter Lunenfeld is a happening guy who teaches new media theory there.]
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Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 13:43:31 -0800 From: peterl@artcenter.edu (Peter Lunenfeld)
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CRITICAL THEORY: NEW MEDIA THEORY
Liberal Arts & Sciences Art Center College of Design Instructor PETER LUNENFELD
What's cybersex? Is virtual architecture (un)real estate? Does a digital shaman do electronic magic? Is the newest always the best?
We have to start thinking about the new machines we use to make art and do design. We need a media theory for the Techno-culture. This course will look at the new technologies, media, and art forms that have developed around computers in the past ten years. Literature is different now that we have non-linear hypertext; photography has had to assimilate digital image processing; and the cinema ignores virtual reality at its peril. In this course we will perform a "digital dialectic" -- grounding critical theory in the nuts and bolts of new media. This course welcomes not only hackers and computer graphics specialists, but technophobic artists, filmmakers, and writers who want to see the future.
This class will function as a true seminar. It will require close attention to the readings, and active classroom participation. Attendance and discussion are mandatory. Grades are determined by class participation, and a final paper, 10-12 pages long, or its media equivalent (to be determined in consultation with the instructor).
III. Required texts and reading materials- Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art- William Gibson, Neuromancer- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
WEEK 1 COMPUTERS, MEDIA & THEORY
WEEK 2 ART HISTORY & FILM THEORY IN ONE EASY LESSON Assignments: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin "In Defense of Mixed Cinema," Andr=E9 Bazin
WEEK 3 THINKING THE NEW MACHINES I Assignments: Videodrome, David Cronenberg [video on reserve] Understanding Media, Marshall MCluhan
WEEK 4 THINKING THE NEW MACHINES II Assignments: The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (excerpts)
WEEK 5 COMICS AS HYBRID MEDIA Assignments: Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
WEEK 6 - CANCELLED
WEEK 7 COMPUTERS & TEXT Assignments: Hypertext: The Convergence of Critical Theory & Technology, George Landau (excerpts) Literary Machines, Ted Nelson (excerpts) "Ars Hypertextualia," Florian Brody
WEEK 8 DIGITAL PICTURES Assignments: The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, W.J. Mitchell (excerpts) "Synthetic Realism: The Mythology of Computer Graphics," Lev Manovich
Week 9 - VIRTUAL REALITY I Assignments: Virtual Reality, Howard Rheingold (excerpts) "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?," R. A. Stone
WEEK 10 - VIRTUAL REALITY II Assignments: "The Myth of the Cave," from Plato's Republic An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke (excerpts) Neuromancer, William Gibson
WEEK 11 - THE WIRED WORLD Assignments: WAX Or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees (video), David Blair WaxWeb and other WWW sites Articles from Postmodern Culture, the on-line journal
WEEK 12 OTHER VOICES, OTHER FUTURES Assignments: "The Question Concerning Technology," Martin Heidegger "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," Donna Haraway
WEEK 13 - STUDENT PRESENTATIONS 10-12 page paper or equivalent media project due
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THE INTERFACE TO NARRATIVE =46all 1996
Dr. Peter Lunenfeld Art Center College of Design Mondays, 1:10-4:00 PM, Room 205
The greatest story ever told: sex & violence; heroism & cowardice; medium & message...
Stories get told. They have to get told. Human beings are hard-wired to be a part of the story-telling process -- whether they are telling the tales or listening to them.
This seminar investigates how we are going to deal with narrative in an environment dominated by computer media technologies. The interface between humans and computers is where the "new" narratives will develop. Because new forms draw from earlier narrative models, we will look at the influence of oral folk tales, poetry, short stories, novels, theater, film, and television on computer-inflected media. We will then put contemporary technologies and media forms under close analysis to see how their design contributes to the experience of narrative. Each week individual students will present their critiques of hypertexts, computer games, Quicktime movies, virtual realities, Web-based narratives even operating system. The objects of these close analyses will shift, but the goal will remain consistent: how well do the interface designs help to tell stories?
=46or anyone who would question the need to concentrate on stories in this context, the answer is simple: the market has its needs. As Syd Silverman, the publisher of Variety, recently pointed out: "Nobody ever bought a ticket to watch technology."
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
There is no required text, though a number of readings will be taken from The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (hereafter known as AHCID), edited by Brenda Laurel. The required readings will be handed out in class.
Grades are determined by class participation, quality of the student's in-class critique, and a final paper, 8-12 pages long, or a media equivalent (to be determined in consultation with the instructor).
Week 1 - Stories Get Told Reading: Saki, "The Open Window," from Beasts and Superbeasts
Week 2 - Screenings Media: Dziga Vertov, The Man With the Movie Camera Alain Renais, Last Year at Marienbad
Reading: J. Hillis Miller, "Narrative," from Critical Terms for Literary Study Dziga Vertov, Kino Eye
Week 3 - Narrative Technologies Media: Peter Paul Rubens, Marie de'Medici Cycle (slides) =46rom Alice to Ocean
Reading: Michael Heim, "The Theory of Tranformative Technologies," from Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing Mark Leyner, "I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot" from My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
Week 4 - Lessons from the Avant-Garde Reading: Italo Calvino, Upon a Winter's Night a Traveller
Week 5 - Performative Narrative: Theater,Film, Television Media: Sergei Eisenstein, "The Odessa Steps Sequence" from Battleship Potemkin Lucille Ball & Ricky Ricardo, I Love Lucy
Reading: Sergei Eisenstein, "A Dialectical Approach to Film Form" from The Film Form Sarah Kozloff, "Narrative Theory and Television," from Channels of Discourse
Week 6 - Creating an Oral/Aural Environment Media: Various Audio Books John Cage, Roaratorio CD
Reading: Mountford & Gaver, "Talking and Listening to Computers," AHCID Douglas Kahn, "Histories of Sound Once Removed" from Wireless Imagination: Sound Radio and the Avant-Garde
Guest: Maja Thomas, Producer, Time-Warner Audio Books
Week 7 - Hypertext and Non-linearity Media: Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden
Reading: Jay David Boulter, "The Computer as a New Writing Space" from Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing
Week 8 - Web-Based Narratives Media: TheSpot.Com Alice Ra's "Untitled"
Week 9 - Reconfiguring Narrative Media: Adriene Jenik, Mauve Desert CD-ROM Hard Days Night Interactive CD-ROM Electronic Books from Voyager
Reading: =46lorian Brody, "Expanding the Book: Text & the Personal Computer" from Cyberarts: Exploring Art & Technology
Week 10 - Games and Gaming Media: Myst
Reading: Chris Crawford, "Lessons from Computer Game Design," AHCID Marshall McLuhan, "Games," from Understanding Media
Week 11 - Animation, Comix & Interactive Agents Media: Will Eisner, The Spirit
Reading: Brenda Laurel, "Interface Agents: Metaphors with Character," AHCID Will Eisner, "Writing & Sequential Art," from Comics & Sequential Art
Week 12 - Open
Week 13 - PAPERS/PROJECTS DUE Dec. 2
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INTERACTIVE ENVIRONMENTS
PETER LUNENFELD peterl@artcenter.edu
Office Hours: By appointment
As video walls, LCD panels, video projections, and large scale computer graphic displays become greater and greater parts of our lived environments, we enter a new era of architecture, one in which the design of our lived spaces reflects and incorporates the electronic information and imaging technologies which are ever more central to our lives. Architects must come to terms with a bifurcation within architecture: between the hardscape, a term I appropriate from the discourse of landscape architecture, and what I refer to as the imagescape. The hardscape is the physical space of buildings and sites; the imagescape is comprised of the electronic facades, linings, and elements on, in and throughout this hardscape.
Just as architects will have to adjust to this influx of imagery, image makers will have new challenges as they function in these hybridized spaces. The place of photography, and its relation to and with architecture will form a central theme in the seminar. The desire to hybridize imaging technologies and architecture is as old as the cave painting and only very rarely outdoes the frescoes of Renaissance Florence. If we are to build hybrids of hardscapes and imagescapes, we must constantly return to the question of the body -- as it exists in both real and virtual spaces, and how it is represented in media from photography to film to virtual reality.
This class is intended to function on a number of levels: as a seminar about these ideas, as a studio to generate work inflected by these new technologies, and as a critique, both of each others' work and of the environments and images around us. There will be field trips to locations around Southern California to immerse ourselves in the kinds of spaces we'll be surveying. There will also be guest speakers with their own takes on the materials.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
Grades are determined by class participation, class presentation, and a final paper, 8-10 pages long, or its media equivalent (to be determined in consultation with the instructor).
Week 1, Jan 20 No Class
Week 2, Jan 27 Mr. Gates Builds His Dream House
Media: H.C. Potter, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (parts) =46rancois Truffaut, Farenheit 451 (parts) Richard Prelinger, You Can't Get There From Here (parts)
Week 3, Feb 3 The City and the Machine Go Digital
Media: SimCity Alfred Hitchcock, Rear Window (parts)
Reading: Stephen Graham & Simon Marvin, Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places (excerpts) =46rancois Truffaut, Hitchcock (excerpts)
Week 4, Feb 10 Shifting Visions of Space
Media:
Kim Abeles, Equidistant
Reading: Ed Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imaginined Places (excerpts)
Week 5, Feb 17 No Class
Week 6, Feb 24 Space and Vision: The Work of Julius Shulman
Reading: Joseph Rosa, The Constructed View: The Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman (excerpts)
Week 7, Mar 3 Spaces To Be Looked At -vs- Places To Be In
Media: Jaques Tati, Playtime (parts) =46ritz Lang, Metropolis (parts)
Reading: Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (excerp= ts)
Week 8, Mar 10 How Architecture Influences Cyberspace
Media: Steven Lisberger, Tron (parts) Robert Longo, Johnny Mnemonic (parts) Johnny Mnemonic (CD-ROM)
Reading: William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic" Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash (excerpts) Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace First Steps (excerpts)
Week 9, Mar 17 How Cyberspace Infiltrates Architecture I
Media: James Cameron, Terminator II (parts) Christian Moller, Interactive Architecture
Week 10, Mar 24 How Cyberspace Infiltrates Architecture II
Reading: Charles Jencks, The Architecture of the Jumping Universe (excerpts)
Week 11, Mar 31 Away and Back, A Field Trip to the Getty
Week 12, Apr 7 The New City & the Breakdown of Postmodernism
Media: Ridley Scott, Bladerunner (parts)
Reading: Kandel & Lunenfeld, "The Beverly Hills Post-Moderne" Lunenfeld, "Click: Imagescape As Ruin"
Week 13, Apr 14 Virtual Shopping Malls & Site Based Entertainment
Reading: Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park (excerpts)
Week 14, Apr 21 Wrap Up, Final Projects Due ```
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