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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.

graph view of the subjects explored in the course

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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pic 1-2 Week 3: Digital Object, presented by Divyanka Sadaphule, Sunidhi Naik, Purvi Agarwal / pic 3-4 Week 5: Command & Control, presented by Anusha Menon, Taylor Patterson, Yoshi Perera / pic 5-7 Week 6: Body & Emobidment, presented by David Oppenheim, Mufaro Mukoki, Victoria Gottardi

Student Research: In-class Symposium

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Selected student research papers presented in the final in-class symposium