Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Introduces a discursive framework for media, design and cultural interfaces enabling students to interpret, negotiate, and engage with new media with an awareness of the significance of cultural and contextual difference. Assessment is based on written and project work. Writing/Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course develops a discursive framework and introduces media practices from many cultural settings. We begin with a characterization of 'new media', an overview of relevant historical, theoretical and critical approaches including post-modern, post-colonial theory, new media history, questions of access and democracy in the context of globalization. In the next section of the course, we will examine case studies from different contexts such as mainstream media art, Japanese new media to Indian interface design, community computing, Southeast Asian media art and Islamic networking. Throughout the course, we will engage in a dialogue that will include your personal reflections, arguments and perspectives.

Topics Will Include:

• What is New Media?
• Interface, Community and Media as Message
• Postmodernism and Postmodernity
• Orientalism and Postcolonial Theory
• New Media Historiography
• Globalization and the Digital Divide
• Numerous case studies, for example:

1. Tradition in Japanese New Media - Anime
2. Culturally Reflective Computing in India
3. Community Computing, Crossing the Digital Divide
4. Islam in the Digital Era
5. Media and Tribal Politics in Kenya
6. Globalization and culturally hybrid mediations
7. Globalization in graphic design

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

The aim of this course is to help you develop an understanding of the cultural and social specificity of forms, contents, contexts at the junction of art, design, culture and technology.  After finishing this course, you will be able to:

• Understand and reiterate key critical and theoretical approaches.
• Apply these approaches across a range of culturally-specific new media case studies.
• Synthesize the approaches and case studies to develop a position on the utility of a new discursive framework for media practices in a global context.
• Critically assess major concepts and apply them to your own creative practice.

You will demonstrate your mastery of these concepts by participating in face-to-face and asynchronous discussions, by writing a formal essay with photographic or other image support, through weekly close reading and writing exercises, and by developing a collaborative project.

This course explores new media as culture. At the completion of this course, you will have gained an ability to interpret, negotiate and engage with new media in diverse settings, with an awareness of the significance of cultural difference.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Supplemental Readings on Canvas

REQUIRED READING: