CEU: Visual Digital Culture

Visual Studies Today: Visual Culture and Convergence in the Digital Age

Instructors: Dr. Lisa Cartwright and Dr. Brian Goldfarb


tuesday	wednesday	thursday	Friday

Instructor: Dr. Brian Goldfarb

Required reading:

Allucquère Rosanne Stone, "The Cross-Dressing Psychiatrist" in The War of Desire and Technology at the End of the Century, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) 65-81, 190-194
N. Katherin Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" (October 66, Fall 1993, © October Magazine and MIT) also online: http://englishwww.humnet.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/Flick.html
Sherry Turkle, "Tiny Sex and Gender Trouble" and "Identity Crisis," Life On Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schoster, 1995) 255-269.

Questions:

Consider Stone's and Turkle's discussions of multiple and flexible subjectivity on the net. Are the forms of play they describe (virtual cross-dressing and roll-playing) beginning to permeate collective practices that are less entertainment-based (both on and off the net)? Do the forms of role-playing and gender-swapping they describe suggest new possibilities for authorship?
For Hayles the concept of the "posthuman," implies a cultural shift in which it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between human organisms and the informational circuits in which they have become enmeshed. Is it useful to conceive of producers and audiences that straddle the boundary of machine and human in this framework of a posthuman present and future?

Links / Rources:

Required reading:

"Embodiment: Human-Machine Connection" and "Identity: Where is Global," in Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network, edited by Amy Scholder and Jordan Crandall (New York: Eyebeam Atelier, 2001), 15-29; 49-68
Tiziana Terranova, "Demonstrating the Globe: Virtual Action in the Networked Society," in Virtual Globalization, ed., David Holmes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) 95-113.

Questions:

How would you describe the relationship of local and national cultures in relation to your experience of Internet?
What multiple and competing uses of the Internet are emerging?
How might you apply Tiziana Terranova’s analysis of computer mediated social movements to networked cultural formations (both existing and potential)?

Links / Rources:

Zapatistas in cyberspace: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/zapsincyber.html
The Payphone Project http://www.payphone-project.com/
Bureau of Inverse Technology (Natalie JeremiJenko) http://www.bureauit.org/
ARTMARK http://rtmark.com/gatt.html
Nettime Listserv http://www.nettime.org/
C3 Center for Culture & Communication Web Projects, http://www.c3.hu/collection/index_en.php?type=webprojekt
Culture Map:A visualization of proportion, disproportion, direction, and indirection in the content and no content of the World Wide Web.http://www.turbulence.org/Works/cultmap/index.html
John Osh's They Rule http://www.theyrule.net/
Redundant Technology Initiative http://www.lowtech.org/
Alison Cornyn and Sue Johnson 360 degrees: the American criminal justice system http://www.360degrees.org/
Critical Art Ensemble http://www.critical-art.net/
Tactical Media: Next Five Minutes http://www.n5m.org/n5m4/