Critical Theory Seminars
- Art of electronic age addresses significant issues relating to post modern society
- Looking at artistic manifestations that relate to earlier technologies, as well as video art and multimedia installations
- Examining examples of internet art, computer -based installations, virtual reality, telematic presence and other interactive strategies
- Considering the significance of selected techno-performances, artificial life, robotics, wearable computers and 'cyborg' artworks.
- Assessing the impact of such technologies on the human subject; their effect upon our imaginary realm, upon our perceptions of the body and external reality, and out conceptions of gender.
- Examine the intersection of art, science and technology, the shifts in the role of art, the artist and the viewer/participant and the curator
- Discussions addressing issues surrounding the organic and digital body, the advent of cyberfeminism, theories of post-human, problematics of hyperreality and cyborgian condition.
- Evaluating techno-utopian and apocalyptic attitudes shown by these new technolodies
- Exploring emerging arts, (bio) sciences and (bio) technologies, sensational technologies and senses
- Rosalind Krauss's notion of the postmodern condition (idea brought as a response to 1960s installation art) and other emergent hybrid forms in which the arts lost their medium specificity.
- Systems Art and Aesthetics; read and discuss some of Jack Burnham's key ideas and their impact in his response to new sculptural forms in the 1960s
Main phases of Computer Art:
- Between 1950 and 1979, period which effectively mirrored the concerns of Constructivism and Modernism and faded somewhat as artistic interests turned away from high technology.
- Late 1970s to 2000, the simultaneous adevance of graphics technology and Postmodernism enabled new forms of computer-based art to arise. The end of is period also saw the internet emerge as a new art medium, becoming the dominant forum for computer-based art.
There is no single "style" or movement in the history of computer art, but rather a number of pre-existing artistic ideas that found expression on the computer.
Important and Useful Texts:
- Information Arts: Intersection of Art, Science and Technology, Stephen Wilson
- Cyber Reading: Critical Writing for the Digital Era, Neil Spiller
- The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan/Fiore
- Digital Art, Christiane Paul
- New Media in Art, Michael Rush
- The New Media Reader, Lev Manovich, 'New Media from Borges to HTML'
- The Originality of the Avant Garde and other Modernist Myths, Rosalind Krauss, 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field'
- Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century
- "Notes on Jack Burnham's Concepts of a Software Exhibition" by Robert Mallory in Leonardo, (Volume 3, Number 2, pp 189-190)
- "Systems Esthetics" in Artforum magazine (Vol 7, no.1 sept1968, pp30-35)
- "Real Time Systems" in Artforum magazine (Vol 8, no1 sept1969, pg49-55) (Reprinted in Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the meanings of Post-Formalist Art")
