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Schedule
- If you have any questions about an assignment, please don't hesitate to email me at [email protected]. I'm happy to help clarify any possible confusion!
- Technical Exercises are due on the week they are mentioned.
- Reading responses are due the day before the class. Reading responses should typically feature a couple of paragraphs for each of the readings that week, highlighting what you found most interesting (whether you agree or disagree with it!).
- 1 - Introduction - 04/09
- 2 - Augmenting Technologies - 11/09
- 3 - Cultural Artefacts - 18/09
- 4 - Interaction Design - 25/09
- 5 - Digital Writing - 02/10
- 6 - Museums, Technology and Education - 09/10
- 7 - Information Architectures - 16/10
- 8 - Copying Media - 23/10
- 9 - Mobile Computing - 29/11
- 10 - Networked Media - 06/11
- 11 - Augmenting Objects - 13/11
- 12 - Born-digital artefacts - 20/11
- 13 - Galleries and the Digital - 27/11
- 14 - Work Session - 4/12
- 15 - Final Presentations - 11/12
This session first covers housekeeping matters, introduces course materials, learning objectives, and technological tools. The second part introduces students to the changing landscape of cultural archival and transmission in the 21st century, as well as to the current state of technology in mobile computing. We will also ask questions about the relationship between the digital and the physical. How does technology augment the spaces, objects, and persons that it is applied to? How is storytelling, education and learning being changed by digital technologies?
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- Class Introduction
- Housekeeping
- The state of digital media in the world
- Setting up a development environment
- Writing digitally: HTML, CSS and JavaScript (JS)
What were the visions of early computer pioneers as they developed new technologies, such as the Internet and the computer screen? How did they envision humans and computers cooperating? Did it turn out to be true or not? This session traces the history of digital technologies as processes for augmenting intellect, also questioning the implications of such “augmentation.”
- Man-Computer Symbiosis, J. C. R. Licklider, IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1, 1960.
- The Computer as a Prosthetic Organ of Philosophy, D. Rokeby, 2003.
- Radical Technologies, Adam Greenfield, Verso, 2017, pp.59-76.
- Take a look at the Readings Presentation page. Write a comment with one or two choices for which week you'd like to present the readings.
- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Technical Exercise: Create a new HTML page, including at least one heading, one link, one paragraph and one image. Check our the video tutorial if needed. Post a screenshot of the result on the Technical Exercises page.
- Humans, technology and augmentation.
- Computational revolution
- Introduction to web development
What is culture? How does it circulate and how is it immobilized? How do networks of imagination get instantiated in specific artifacts? How do museums contribute to a certain conception of culture? This session will introduce students to a framework for thinking about the cultural implications of a (set of) cultural artifact(s).
- Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, Paul Du Gay and Stuart Hall, The Open University, 1997.
- In defense of the poor image, Hito Steyerl, e-flux, vol 70, 2016.
- The End of the Museum?, Nelson Goodman, Journal of Aesthetic Education, University of Illinois Press, Summer 1985, pp.53-62.
- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Technical exercise: Add a second page, some text and images to your website. Start thinking about what your website will be about. Post a screenshot of the result on the Technical Exercises page.
- Cultural artefacts
- Institutional and grassroots cultures
- Intro to JavaScript (JS)
How do we shape a dynamic system to give meaning and agency to a reader? What kinds of manipulations of possible of a digital object? How do we provide metaphors to make those manipulations understandable?
- A Cultural Approach to Interaction Design, Janet Murray, MIT Press, 2011.
- The Anti-Mac Interface, Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Group, 1996.
- Magic Ink, B. Victor, worrydream.com, 2013.
- Technical exercise: Add a simple JavaScript interaction on your website
- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Interaction design
- UI and UX
- Introduction to React
What is the difference between physical and digital writing? What are some similarities? 5000 years after the invention of the alphabet, the emergence of a new kind of connected, mathematical writing emerges as a unique semiotic system. This session traces this history and concludes on the continuous role of writing as a mnemotechnics.
- Reading Interfaces, J. Drucker, PMLA, 2013.
- Computational Poetics, D. Tennen, Stanford University press, 2017.
- ‘Electric Zine Maker’ Thrives as a Creative Open Source DIY Tool, N. Froio, observer.com, 2021.
- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Read Getting Started with React
- Technical exercise: Modify the
App.jsof your project to look like the landing page of your plain HTML website
- From speech to print to web
- Information technology as memory devices
- Components in React
How does our constant access to everything across the globe change the concept of information? of communication? of the community? This session looks at the concept of hyperlinking from a historical and epistemological perspective, from the creation of indexes in the Encyclopédie to the development of web technologies.
- Hypertext as Subversive?, David Kolb, 1997.
- Literary Machines, T. Nelson, 1981, Eastgate Systems.
- Objects of Intense Feeling: The Case of the Twitter API, T. Bucher, 2013.
- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Technical exercise: add two new components on your landing page, and pass them some data from the main page.
- Hyperlinks
- Relational models of information
- Routing and Navigation in React
What changes when we can move around with a computer? What are the pros and cons of portable devices? How do they integrate into the world, and with our bodies? This session looks at the history of mobile computing from an educational perspective, and at the current developments in contextual computing.
- Personal Dynamic Media, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, Computer, 1977.
- Mobile Computing, Interaction Design Foundation.
- The Poetics of Augmented Space, Lev Manovich, Journal of Visual Communication, 2006. (You can skip the "Electronic Vernacular" and "Learning from Prada" sections).
- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Technical exercise: add three different pages to your app with the react router.
- History of mobile computing
- Dynabook and educational media
- Media queries and responsive web design
How do technological improvements affect the creation and archival of culture? How does infinite perfect reproducibility affect the status of the artwork? How can under-represented communities and narratives use those technologies to sustain their social and cultural histories at various scales? This session focuses on the fundamental shift that digital media brings in by making information reproducible at no cost, questioning notions of authorship, authenticity and originality.
- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 1969.
- In Our Glory: Photography and Black life, bell hooks, W.W. Norton, NY, 1995.
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- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Technical exercise: Make your website responsive by adding mobile styles.
- Originals and reproduction
- Dominant media and underdog media
- Discussing the final project.
This week focuses on the idea and the reality of what an “object” is. What are some of the visible properties of an object? What are the invisible ones? If objects also symbolize things beyond themselves, how can we use digital technology to bring those aspects to the forefront? We will make distinctions between object, artifact and tool.
- Artefacts and the Meaning of Things, Daniel Miller, Routledge, 1994, pp. 96-147
- A History of the amulet in ten objects, Annie Thwaite, 2019
- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Post three ideas for your final project on the discussion topic. Come prepared to discuss them in class.
- The object, the art-object and the display.
- Objects in anthropology.
- Displaying 3D objects in React.
While an increasing number of artworks include a software component, the question of how to present and preserve them has proven to be complicated. How is the exhibition of a piece of software art faithful to its original intent and situation? What about cultural objects that were born online? This session looks at the cultural status of digital objects and connects it to the larger history of intangible heritage.
- Re-collecting the Museum, A. Dekker, Computational Culture, 2014.
- Presenting and Preserving New Media, Christiane Paul in Digital Art, Thames and Hudson, 2007.
- The Challenges of Preserving Digital Art, V. Cerf, Google Arts & Culture, 2019.
- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Write up a description of the field that you will be representing on your website (one per group). Post in on the Discussions page.
- Preserving digital heritage and web archival
- Using APIs
- Using APIs
- Using Figma for wireframing
This session focuses on the different types of interactivity which make a document dynamic, with a focus on the short term.
- Situating Constructionism, Seymour Papert and Idit Harel, 1985.
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- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Make an interactive prototype (what is a wireframe?), sketching out what your final project will look like. Post your Figma link on the discussions page.
- Typologies of interactivity
- Reactive documents
- using Hooks in React
This session focuses on the different types of interactivity which make a document dynamic, with a focus on the long term.
- The Humane Representation of Thought, Brett Victor, 2014
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- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Databases
sessionStorage
From the local computer to the world wide web. How does one publish online? How is it different from previous modes of publishing? What does it mean to “make public”? This session will look at the changes in the publishing industry, through the dual notions of platformization and open access.
- Search, compile, publish: Towards a new artist’s web-to-print practice., Paul Soulelis, 2013.
- Make progress on your final project and come ready to discuss it in class.
- Write your reading response on the google doc.
- Publishing workflows
- Making public
- using PagedJS to export a website to PDF
This session is dedicated to putting the finishing touches on the final projects.
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- Make progress on your final project.
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This session will focus on the students presenting their work, and wrapping up the semester.
DUE - FINAL PROJECT
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- Finish your final project, and submit it here
- Final project presentations
- End of semester reflection
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