Digital Arts and New Media 202 / Music 254: Dialogues and Questions: Writing at the Intersection of Theory and Practice
Ben Carson | contact | office: Music Center 148
Meetings: Wednesdays 11:00 am - 2:00 pm, DARC 206
Office hours are on Mondays 12:30 am - 1:30 pm or by appointment.
Phone: 9-5581 (I do not check voicemail frequently.)
Catalogue description: Students engage in dialogues at the intersection of theory and practice with the goal of producing a pre-thesis proposal and essay. Readings and seminar discussions (which coalesce around the work of five guest speakers), will inform the development of project proposals and essays, which theoretically contextualize students’ work.
Prerequisites: In fall quarter’s DANM 201, students learned “methods and approaches to research and writing in digital art and new media, while exploring key theories concerning technology, art, and culture.” (In the winter quarter, students will have developed their own approaches as practicing artists, in individual and collaborative projects.)
Course description:
After your “methods and approaches” seminar in the fall, and praxis-oriented project groups in the winter, DANM 202 returns us to a conversation “at the intersection of theory and practice”, by framing your work in a series of four dialogues. These dialogues will be grounded in the research of five guest speakers: the School of Engineering’s Sri Kurniawan, Film and Digital Media’s Warren Sack and Margaret Morse, History of Art and Visual Culture’s Derek Murray, and Theater’s Brandin Baron-Nusbaum.
The dialogues, and the readings assigned to support them, attempt various disassemblies and reassemblies of the world in which new arts and media practices operate. Students and guests will meditate on attractions and repulsions in the relation between their own practices and aspects of the dialogues; through that process, we will try to develop new ways of writing about our own work. The seminar work culminates in an essay that should serve as a foundation for future grant proposals and/or the MFA thesis prospectus.
Agenda
[[ See entries below for each of our five dialogues this quarter. ]]
— A blurb from Ben about William James —
FIRST DAY:
April 4:
Optional background to be read, in greater depth, btw 4/4 - 4/18: Read a brief introduction to radical empiricism, and then William James’ “Radical Empiricism [excerpts]” (in The Writings of William James, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1967).]
Jonathan Culler’s “Performative Language,” and “Identity, Identification, and Subject” from Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Suggested [but not required] Books:
Gumbrecht, Hans Urlich, and Michael Marrinan, eds. Mapping Benjamin: the Work of Art in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University, 2003.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia, 2008.
Kondo, Dorrine. About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. London: Routledge, 1997.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Lingis, Alphonso. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California, 2000.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute — or, why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? London/New York: Verso, 2000.
Possible additional reading for (some) presentations:
Cindy Patton’s “Performativity and Spatial Distinction: The End of AIDS Epidemiology,” in Parker & Sedgwick (eds.) Performativity and Performance (cited above).
Chapters by Behnke, Lynch, Weimar, and Klima in Mapping Benjamin: the Work of Art in the Digital Age.Stanford: Stanford University, 2003.
Continue with Deleuze’s [1969] Logic of Sense, in “Second Series of Paradoxes of Surface Effects”, “Third Series of the Proposition”, and “Fourth Series of Dualities.”
A New Introduction to Donna Haraway’s Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embryos (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2004; originally New Haven: Yale, 1976).