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FDM 20c: Introduction to Digital Media
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 4:00-5:45, Communications Studio C
Lindsay Kelley
lindsay.e.kelley+20c [at] gmail [dot] com
Office hours: Tuesday, 1-3pm
http://www.performative.com/fdm20c/
Teaching Assistants & Sections:
Andrew Pascoe
A Friday 9:30AM – 10:30AM Porter Acad 240
B Friday 10:45AM – 11:45AM Porter Acad 240
Dustin O’Hara
C Friday 12:00AM – 1:00PM Porter Acad 240
D Friday 1:15PM – 2:15PM Porter Acad 240
This course provides an introduction to critical studies of digital media. Students will learn how to analyze the philosophical, political, and cultural forces and foundations that constitute, contextualize and are catalyzed by the technologies and techniques of digital media. We will read a number of historically significant texts from the last sixty years that helped define digital media. Lectures, sections, and demos will complement the readings by introducing students to a number of methodologies useful for the study and presentation of digital media. Throughout the term students will work on projects that advance their “code literacy” by teaching them some of the skills necessary to participate in and produce new media art. By the end of the quarter students will be both critical observers of and participants in digital art and new media.
Required text, available at the Literary Guillotine bookstore (204 Locust St, Santa Cruz):
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (editors) The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)
Note: In the course syllabus The New Media Reader is referred to with the initials “nmr.”
Additional required texts are available from eres (password html) and as URLs throughout this syllabus.
Recommended text, available by special order from LitGit, or from amazon.com, mitpress, etc:
Mary Flanagan, Critical Play (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009)
You will also need texts to help you learn the programming techniques and implementation details of HTML and Processing. For example,
- Elisabeth Freeman & Eric Freeman, Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML (O’Reilly, 2008).
- Bill Kennedy & Chuck Musciano, HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly, 2006).
- Joshua Noble, Programming Interactivity: A Designer’s Guide to Processing, Arduino, and openFrameworks
- Casey Reas, Ben Fry, John Maeda (Foreword), Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (MIT Press 2007)
Most of these can be obtained free via O’Reilly Media’s Safari books online service. The safari service allows you to access thousands of technical books published by O’Reilly and others. It is available to us for free when we log on from campus or use the library proxy. If you’re off campus, first connect to the library server at this url: http://oca.ucsc.edu/menu. Next proceed to this url to access the O’Reilly Safari service: http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com.oca.ucsc.edu
You do not need to use the O’Reilly texts, but they are good and free. Alternatively, for example, there are hundreds of good HTML and processing tutorials on the web that you can find with Google.
If you qualify for classroom accommodations because of a disability, please get an Accommodation Authorization from the Disability Resource Center (DRC) and submit it to me in person outside of class (e.g., office hours) within the first two weeks of the quarter. Contact DRC at 459-2089 (voice), 459-4806 (TTY), or http://drc.ucsc.edu for more information on the requirements and/or process.
Course requirements
Your grade will be based on the following:
Midterm Exam: 15%
Final Exam: 15%
Paper: 25%
Projects
Project 1 10%
Project 2 10%
Project 3 10%
Attendance and participation: 15%
In order to pass this class you must complete all of these requirements. It is not acceptable to skip a requirement and “take a 0;” this will lead to an F/NP for the entire class.
Section: Attendance at section is mandatory. Three or more (excused or unexcused) absences will result in a grade of no pass. Sections are for discussing the required readings, discussing the lectures, understanding the assignments, and engaging in other supplementary activities (e.g., screening films, running demo software, studio production) designed to strengthen your understanding of the course material.
Lecture: Attendance at lecture is required. Lectures have been designed to present a set of theoretical and practical tools useful for understanding and/or decoding the assignments and readings. Lectures will usually contextualize the required readings within a larger set of work and/or texts relevant to the assigned readings. After many of the lectures, the slides for the lecture will be posted to the course website. On the midterm and the final examinations you will be tested on the required readings, the websites listed on the syllabus, and also on the materials presented in lecture. You must read all the material listed for each lecture before that lecture.
Examinations: There will be a midterm examination and a final examination. The midterm and final examination will cover the required readings, the websites listed on the syllabus, and also materials presented in the lectures. The examinations will be primarily a set of short essay questions. One week before the examination, you will be given about twice as many questions as will be on the exam. At the exam you will be asked a subset of the questions.
Paper: Your final paper is due on June 3. The paper will be in the form of a detailed proposal for a digital art work. It will be something that you might consider submitting to a competition for art commissions or as a grant proposal. You will not need to implement your artwork; it will be a proposal. Later in the term we will post specifics about how to write this paper and how we will be grading the papers. You might approach your projects as explorations of technologies or practices that you could return to in your proposal.
Projects: Projects are a chance to make creative work using tools and technologies unique to digital media. Complete 3 projects (see “Projects” handout for details)
Hypertext self-portrait composed as a set of webpages
Wikipedia Community Participation
A processing monster (http://www.rmx.cz/monsters/)
Late assignments will not be accepted; missed exams will not be rescheduled. At his discretion, your TA may accept late work, deducting a full letter grade per day of lateness.
Academic misconduct, such as submitting someone else’s work as if it were your own, will be dealt with severely. It will result in automatic failure for the course and possible expulsion from school.
Laptop policy: Laptops are to be used in lecture or section for the purpose of taking notes or participating in websites/demos presented in class. Laptops used for purposes other than these will lead to the banning of laptops in class for specific students.
Acknowledgments: This course has been taught before by Warren Sack; his work influences the syllabus and structure of the course.
Recommended readings are italicized & underlined. Although not listed in the syllabus, consider all introductions to nmr texts to be strongly recommended.
Schedule
Week 1 Introduction and logistics
3/30/10 Histories of labor within computing, our labor within this course, work from Fall
Before section on Friday:
1) Buy the book at Literary Guillotine (204 Locust Street, Santa Cruz)
2) Read the following article on eres: Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women”
3) Very important! Set up your UCSC webspace. For detailed instructions, see http://its.ucsc.edu/service_catalog/web_personal/. Plan to host your work on your ucsc webspace until the end of the quarter. Photo hosting sites like photobucket are not recommended.
4/1/10 What is new media art? On what historical precedents does it rest?
nmr xi-xiii Noah Wardrip-Fruin & Nick Montfort, “the new media reader, a user’s manual”
nmr 3-11 Janet H. Murray, “Inventing the Medium”
nmr 13-25 Lev Manovich, “New Media from Borges to HTML”
Week 2 Licensing, Fiction, Free
4/8/10 Open source, public space, free software, GNU
nmr 36 Richard Stallman, “The GNU Manifesto”
link Richard Stallman, “Free Software Song” (http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html)
link http://creativecommons.org/
link http://www.fallenfruit.org/
link Amy Balkin, http://www.publicsmog.org/ and http://www.thisisthepublicdomain.org/
link Val Aurora (Henson), “HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux” (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/)
link Michelle Levesque and Greg Wilson, “Open Source, Cold Shoulder” (http://www.ddj.com/architect/184415216)
4/6/10 Hypertext (demo: hypertext)
nmr 01 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”
nmr cd-rom Stuart Moulthrop, “forking paths” (click on “1980s”)
nmr 02 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”
eres Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, “Closure Was Never a Goal in this Piece”
link Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, “Forward Anywhere” http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~malloy/html/beginning.html
link http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
link http://superbad.com/
link http://xanadu.com/
Week 3 Social Networks
4/13/10 Crowdsourcing
nmr 22 Augusto Boal, from Theater of the Oppressed
link Leah DeVun interviews Andrea Grover, “Looking at how crowds produce and present art” (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/crowd_captain)
link “Learning to Love You More” (http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/)
link Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, http://voxpopexperiments.org/
link Steve Lambert, “Why They Hate.US” (http://whytheyhate.us/)
link xtine burroghs, “Mechanical Olympics” (http://mechanicalolympics.org/)
4/15/10 Youth culture (demo:processing)
(project due) link Angie Waller, “My Frienemies” (http://myfrienemies.herokugarden.com/)
eres danah boyd, “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life”
link Lee Walton, “What My Friends Are Doing on Facebook” (http://www.leewalton.com/projects/fbook/index.html)
link Marisa Olson, http://americanidolauditiontraining.blogs.com/
link Anne Helmond, “Lifetracing: The Traces of a Networked Life” (http://helmond.networkedbook.org/)
Week 4 Tactical Media
4/20/10 Expanding “media”
nmr 53 Critical Art Ensemble, “Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance”
nmr 06 Allan Kaprow, “‘Happenings’ in the New York Scene”
link Steve Lambert, “Add Art” (http://add-art.org/)
link David Garcia and Geert Lovink, “The ABC of tactical media” (http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html) and “The DEF of tactical media” (http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9902/msg00104.html)
4/22/10 Data/capture/privacy, tactical media and sousveillance
eres Elizabeth Losh, “Submit and Render: Digital Satires about Surveillance and Authentication”
eres Wafaa Bilal, excerpts from Shoot an Iraqi
nmr 51 Philip Agre, “Surveillance and Capture”
link Hasan Elahi, http://www.trackingtransience.net/
link Michael Mandiberg, “How Much It Costs Us” (http://howmuchitcosts.us/)
link Michael Mandiberg, “Oil Standard” (http://turbulence.org/Works/oilstandard/)
link Michael Mandiberg, “The Real Costs” (http://therealcosts.com/)
link Institute for Applied Autonomy, “Terminal Air” (http://www.appliedautonomy.com/terminalair/)
Week 5 Midterm, Ownership and Participation
4/27/10 Midterm (bring blue books)
4/29/10 Ownership and Participation
nmr 32 Bagdikian, “The Endless Chain”
link Henry Jenkins, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture” (http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/starwars.html)
link Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog (http://www.hulu.com/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog)
nmr 46 Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, “The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat”
Week 6 Interaction (DA/NM MFA show open in DARC building: go! Opening is Friday 5:30-7:30PM)
5/4/10 AI
nmr 03 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
nmr 41 Lucy Suchman, from Plans and Situated Actions
nmr 44 Lynn Hershman, “The Fantasy Beyond Control”
link Gordon Brown, Statement on Alan Turing http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571
eres Margaret Morse, “The Poetics of Interactivity”
nmr 24 Joseph Weizenbaum, from Computer Power and Human Reason
McHenry res. Mary/Shelley and herself, Patchwork Girl (on reserve in Media Center)
5/6/10 Searching and finding
(project due) nmr 54 Tim Berners-Lee et al., “The World-Wide Web”
link Google Art, or How to Hack Google (http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/googleshow/)
link Geert Lovink, “The society of the query and the Googlization of our lives: A tribute to Joseph Weizenbaum”
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-09-05-lovink-en.html
link http://en.wikipedia.org/, http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/, and http://wikiweb.anthonymattox.com/
link “IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View” by Jon Rafman http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/
Week 7 Future of the future: Advanced Digital Media Production & Feminist Craft Corner
5/11/10 Margaretha Haughwout & student panel, “FDM 170a”
link “Art as Antibody,” Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito http://intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol6_No2_transvergence_ippolitoblais.htm
nmr 13 Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message”
eres Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, sections 4 & 7
link http://fdm2.ucsc.edu/~mhaughwo/170a/s10/index.html (be sure to read the class blog)
link http://fdm2.ucsc.edu/~mhaughwo/171d/s10/index.html (be sure to read the class blog)
5/13/10 Miki Yamada Foster, “Feminist Craft Corner”
eres excerpts from Zeros and Ones by Sadie Plant
eres Sara Ahmed, “Disorientation and Queer Objects”
eres Elisabeth Strowick “Cyberfeminist Rhetoric, or the Digital Act and Interfaced Bodies”
eres Adrian Piper, “Concretized Ideas I’ve been Working Around”
Week 8 Narrative
5/18/10 Warren Sack, “Story Generator Project”
nmr 7 Burroughs, “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin”
nmr 12 Six Selections by the Oulipo
link Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009. (Chapter 5: The Tale-Spin Effect) http://danm.ucsc.edu/~wsack/DANM249/wsack-jan12-nwf.pdf
link Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Introduction to Meehan’s and Sack’s Micro-Tale-Spin. Electronic Literature Organization. January 2006. http://www.eliterature.org/2006/01/meehan-and-sacks-micro-talespin/
link Sack, Warren. Reimplementation of James Meehan’s Micro Tale-Spin
http://eliterature.org/images/microtalespin.txt
link Warren Sack & Marc Davis, “IDIC: Assembling Video Sequences from Story Plans and Content Annotations,” in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems, Boston, MA, May 14-19, 1994.
http://danm.ucsc.edu/~wsack/Writings/wsack-mdavis-ieee94.pdf
link Sack, Warren and with Abbe Don (for a course given by Henry Lieberman and Hal Abelson) “Splicer: An Intelligent Video Editor,” MIT Media Laboratory, Intelligent Interface Software Design Workshop (Spring 1993)
http://danm.ucsc.edu/~wsack/Writings/wsack-adon-splicer.pdf
5/20/10 Aaron Reed, “groundbreaking works of interactive fiction”
link http://lacunastory.com/excerpt
nmr 42 Michael Joyce, “Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts”
link Nick Montfort, “Interactive Fiction”
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/fictive
nmr 48 Stuart Moulthrop, “You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media”
Week 9 Critical Play
5/25/10 Games (student demos)
nmr 34 Sherry Turkle, “Video Games and Computer Holding Power”
link Henry Jenkins, “Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces” (http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/complete.html)
eres Mary Flanagan, “Critical Computer Games,” from Critical Play
link Joseph DeLappe, “dead-in-iraq” (http://tinyurl.com/delappe)
eres Introduction to Critical Play by Mary Flanagan
5/27/10 Non-linear media
(project due) eres Lev Manovich, Soft Cinema (http://www.manovich.net/books_images/booklet-reader-spreads-v7.pdf)
nmr 50 Scott McCloud, “Time Frames” from Understanding Comics
nmr 31 Bill Viola, “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?”
nmr 52 Espen Aarseth, “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory”
Week 10 Digital Media & Interdisciplinarity
6/1/10 I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess
nmr 35 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (hint: read outloud in groups)
6/3/10 Course Review: Show student work & prepare for final (proposal due)
Final exam: Thursday, June 10, 12:00–3:00 pm, Studio C (bring blue books)
