- 2023 winter
- Digital Theory
- OCAD University
- Toronto, CA
- grad seminar
- BACK
DIGF-6019 Digital Theory
This course commences with an examination and mapping of the historical precedents of digital media, taking into consideration the social, cultural and political contexts of its emergence. Students will identify major significant movements which rapidly coincided with the shift from analog to digital culture. In digital media, conceptual and theoretical trends tend to respond to technical developments. Accordingly this course covers topics of digital reality, simulation and virtuality; interactivity and agency; media archaeology and migration; subjectivity, race, gender, and online identity; the politics of cyberculture; indigenous interventions; globalization and the political economy of digital media.
Syllabus (abridged)
Week 1: Contextualizing the Digital
Keywords: #digital_humanities #digital_theory #philosophy_of_technology #STS #software_studies #technoscience #cosmotechnics #the_stack #planetary_computation
Week 2: Defining the Digital
Keywords: #digital_media #new_media #media_technology #post-digital #computational_media
Week 3: Digital Object
Keywords: #data #code #algorithm #software #interface #search_engine #digital_object #algorhythmics
Week 4: Techno-infrastructure
Keywords: #network #cloud #platform #infrastructure #techno-infrastructure #infrastructural_violence
Week 5: Command & Control
Keywords: #cybernetics #surveillance #digital_labor #datafication #platform_capitalism #political_economies_of_digital_media
Week 6: Body & Embodiment
Keywords: #body #embodiment #agency #posthumanism #cyborg #the_technological_body #the_technologized_body #cyberfeminism #distributed_embodiment #networked_bodies #technogenesis #posthuman #transhuman
Week 7: Virtuality & Simulation
Keywords: #simulacra #simulation #virtuality #mixed_reality #worlding #world-building #game_studies #embodiment
Week 9: The Morphing Intelligence
Keywords: #intelligence #artificial_intelligence #algorithmic_perception #hybrid_agency
Week 10: The Material Turn
March 10th at 2 PM, class tour of the exhibition "more-than-human" at Onsite Gallery
Keywords: #new_materialism #object_oriented_ontology #object_oriented_feminism #posthumanism #the_anthropocene #hyperobject #assemblage #intra-action #agency
Week 11: The Anthropocene
Keywords: #the_anthropocene #ecocritical_digital_humanities #geoengineering #geopolitics #planetary_computation #terraforming
Week 12: Future & Resistance
Keywords: #digital_futures #speculative_design #sci_fiction #hacktivism #fiction_as_method #parasitical_resistance #glitch #queer_computation
Weekly Reading Presentations & Discussions
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Student Research: In-class Symposium
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