Computational Poetics (IAT811) 2016-17
This course prepares students to critique and contextualize emerging ideas in media art, computational art, biological art, generative art, speculative design and the aesthetics of interaction. It enables students to question assumptions, to locate values and influences, and to determine design tools, artifacts and strategies through which they can communicate, express, perform, generate, represent and/or embody their artistic ideas. Issues such as gender, culture, virtuality, narrative, presence, identity, biology, computation, space/time and cognition will be explored in relation to the diversity of computational art practice and theory.
Particular focus is on the intersection of computation and artistic practices through comparative discussions and enactments of knowledge construction and so-called embodied practices. This includes emerging interdisciplinary, philosophical and cultural influences that currently shape and/or reflect interactive and computational art communities.
I redesigned this course to have a focus on the intersections of aesthetics, technology, and society––what Mitchel and Hansen (2010) call ‘the technoanthropological universe’. Participation in the course this semester included gallery visits and active critical writing about contemporary curation and exhibition in the greater Vancouver region. Students were encouraged to develop their own theoretically-informed research-creation projects, contextualize them in a research-paper, and present their final project in a pop-up exhibition at the end of the semester.
Each week, a different student would prepare a seminar presentation to address the week’s assigned readings––from the course textbook “Critical Terms for Media Studies”, a related entry from Shanken’s “Art and Electronic Media”, and any other assigned readings. Each week all students would contribute at least one blog post addressing the readings or related news, artworks, or readings. These posts would be used to facilitate discussion following the core seminar presentation. The blogs serve as interesting archives of the media studies and interactive arts space at that time, as well as students’ evolving interests over the course of the semester. See 2016 blog and 2017 blog.
