ARTH 353 Technology and Contemporary Art
- Fridays, 9:00-11:30
- EV-1-615
- Instructor: Ernestine Daubner
Often provocative and engaging, art practices of the electronic and biotechnological age address significant issues relating to postmodern and posthuman society. Our study of such art will encompass a broad range of new media: screen-based works such as video art, internet art, generative art, as well as a variety of multi-media installations and interactive strategies, including virtual reality, telematics, and surveillance art. We will also examine diverse artificial bio-systems (robotics, A-life, artificial intelligence, swarm technologies) that simulate human behavior and other natural processes; as well as bioart where artists employ biotechnologies such as genetic engineering, cloning and tissue culture. We will proceed to consider selected techno-performances, biofeedback works, wearable computers, smart textiles and ‘cyborg’ art practices.
Such new media art will prompt us to evaluate the paradigmatic changes brought about, at the turn of the millennium, by technoscience and telecommunication technologies in our “global village” and allow us to evaluate the techno-utopian and apocalyptic attitudes elicited by technologies. Our discussions will address issues surrounding the conjunction of the organic and digital body, the cyborgian condition, theories of (the) posthuman(ism) and cyberfeminism. We shall also assess how biomedia artworks address profoundly important ethical issues dealing with human and non-human “life”: on ecological and environmental concerns; on the creation of new life forms; on the crossing of species boundaries. As we shall see, many of these art practices address the fundamental question of what it means to be human in our (bio)technological age.
Our course will consist of lectures, online assignments and (electronic) coursepack readings of iconic texts on technology by such authors as Marshall McLuhan, Lev Manovich, Donna Haraway, Kathryn Hayles and Stelarc, as well as more recent writings by new media theorists and artists.