Critical Studies CS-220-1 Networks and Desires: Contemporary Art and Digital Games Laura Fantone Prerequisite: ENGL-101 In the last three decades, millions of people have experienced a new type of activity, taking place in a new space: video games. Today, games have invaded everyday life, and represent a powerful site of desire, imagination, and performance of new embodiments. In this class, video games will be considered as material and symbolic objects that are capable of materializing worldviews, bodies, and environments, and of repositioning knowledge and beings. Theories of performance, temporality, and visuality (Virilio, Grosz, Walkerdine), as well as interracial and queer embodiments, will provide the key concepts for discussing various video games. Throughout the semester, we will look critically at the evolution of electronic arts, specifically focusing on the work of artists who use video games and digital platforms such as Second Life to produce animation that “softly” subverts this commercially-developed visual technology. This course draws connections between video games and art by exploring metaphors as well as analyzing concrete dimensions of games such playability, performativity, and engagement with the audience. This course engages in a critical discussion of the prevailing aesthetic of hyper-realism and baroque fantasmagorias. Video games can be seen as a pastiche where new and old genres are recombined (often with interesting mixtures of elements of abstraction, exoticism, and grotesque), and authorship is redefined by evolving connections and transversal conjunctions of humans with machines. Satisfies Critical Studies Elective Satisfies Urban Studies Elective Satisfies Studies in Global Cultures Requirement Satisfies Design and Technology Elective CS-290-1 Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium Thor Anderson Prerequisite: HUMN-201 In this course, students will become familiar with a range of investigative and research methodologies (interviews, observation, participation, archives, etc.) and approaches to presentation (public interventions, exhibitions, performances, photography, video, etc.). The course is open to BA and BFA students who are encouraged to work within their emphasis area. Importantly, students will look at a wide range of issues: What role does the researcher play in research? Who is the subject, who the object? What is the impact of research itself on the researched? What are the ethical and moral considerations of research? This course is offered during the fall semester only. BA students in History and Theory of Contemporary Art and Urban Studies are required to take this course in either their junior or senior year. Satisfies Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium Requirement for History and Theory of Contemporary Art and Urban Studies Satisfies Critical Studies Elective Satisfies Studies in Global Cultures Requirement
FALL 2012
CS-300 Critical Theory A TBA (CS-300-1) Eddie Yuen (CS-300-2) Terri Cohn (CS-300-3) Prerequisite: HUMN-201 CS-300 (Critical Theory A) provides students with a strong foundation in the theoretical projects that most contribute to an analysis of the contemporary world, including semiotics, Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory. While these modes of critical inquiry greatly enhance understandings of social life in the broadest possible sense, the course focuses on analyzing multiple forms of cultural production including visual images, various genres of writing, and the “texts” of commercial culture. The course develops written and verbal analytic skills with the goal of enriching the quality of students’ thought, discourse, and artistic production. Satisfies Critical Theory A Requirement CS-301-1 (Critical Theory B) Theory and Technoscience: Peer to Peer Dale Carrico Prerequisite: CS-300 Technoscientific change is an ongoing provocation on our personal and public lives. In this course we will focus on some of the ways critical theory has tried to make sense of the ongoing impact of technodevelopmental social struggle on public life, cultural forms, creative expression, and ethical discourse. We will focus our attention on the shape and significance of the ongoing transformation from a mass-mediated public sphere into a peer-to-peer networked public sphere. We will study the broader institutional and practical history of modern media formations and transformations before fixing our attention on the claims being made by political economists, critical theorists, policy makers, and media activists about our own media moment. We will also cast a retrospective eye on the role of media critique from the perspective of several different social struggles in the last era of broadcast media, the better to contemplate changes we may discern in the problems, tactics, and hopes available to these struggles in the first era of an emerging peer-to-peer public sphere. Satisfies Critical Theory B Requirement Satisfies Critical Studies Elective Satisfies Urban Studies Elective