Thursday, December 06, 2007

Writing New Media Syllabi, Part 1 -- Examples

One little task before you head off...

To kick off our syllabus-writing project, we'd like to collect some existing examples of new media syllabi, for humanities courses taught at the college or graduate level either here or at another institution.

So, in lieu of meeting in person before we leave for the semester break, please help us 'gather' here by posting (as a comment below) a syllabus or link to a syllabus for a general new media course.

You can interpret this however you find helpful; the goal is to provide a list of models that we can collectively use to take stock of what seems to be taught and how. Over the time from now until the new semester in January, please look at what everyone has posted, and begin to prepare your own new media syllabus. Try to think carefully about how to organize the reading, examples, units, and assignments. While the course will obviously be inflected by your background and interests, try to produce a syllabi that 'takes a stand,' offering a conceptual, historical, and disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) model for framing this elusive field.

We'll solicit your syllabi at the start of the new semester, and circulate them to the group. Our first meeting in January will be a discussion of these syllabi and the challenges of producing them.

Thank you for a fantastic semester...hope to see you all back for more in the Spring!

P.S. If you want to put a link in your comment, use an anchor tag so it will be clickable
(what??)

5 comments:

Critical Collaborations said...

Here's a link to a page on rhizome where new media syllabi are archived:
http://rhizome.org/resource/syllabi.php

This is one submitted to the above collection by Lev Manovich, for a survey course he taught last year called "Introduction to Computing in the Arts":
http://www.manovich.net/icam40_spring2006/icam40_spring2006.html

Marisa Olson said...

Hey, gang. Sorry I can't be there to join you, but here are a few links to syllabi and programs. The list we made for Rhizome was an abbreviated collection, pulled from my del.icio.us links:

http://del.icio.us/marisaolson/syllabi

Sequoia Hax said...

how is this course syllabus going to be different than the one put out by the Berkeley Center for New Media? either way, I'd definitely recommend INFO296 Participatory Media/Collective Action taught by Howard Rheingold and Xiao Qiang:

http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/programs/courses/296a-pmca

thanks ;)
*s

John said...

and now for something completely different...

or not. below is copied the syllabus for the course taught in the english department this past semester entitled "Medium Theory/Media Archaeologies." It's decidedly less "tech-ey" and will perhaps provide another point of view...

John

Sequence of Readings

Tuesday, Aug 28: Introductions; question: What is a (multi) Medium?

Section One: The Medium of Language

Thursday, Aug. 30: F. Kittler, “Gramophone Film Typewriter”; J. Derrida, “Signature Event Context”
C.S. Peirce, “What is a Sign? [http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/peirce1.htm]

Tuesday, Sept. 4: Ong, “The Orality of Language,” “Writing Restructures Consciousness,” from Orality and Literacy; M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: 3-73; 77-118
J. Derrida, “The Word Processor”

Thursday, Sept. 6: [Letter, Number, Paper]
J. Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud”
B. Rotman, “Thinking Dia-grams: Mathematics, Writing, and Virtual Reality”
J. Derrida, “Paper or Me, You Know…. (New Speculations on a Luxury of the Poor)”

Tuesday, Sept. 11: J. Bolter and R. Grusin, Remediation (2-84); B. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” “The Bleed” from Parables of the Virtual.

Section Two: The Medium of Art

Thursday, Sept.13: J.L. Nancy, from The Muses: “Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?”
G. Lessing, selections from Laocoon
R. Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” [http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/lingpoetics.htm]

Tuesday, Sept. 18: N. Luhmann, Art as a Social System: “Perception and Communication: The Reproduction of Forms,” (5-51); “Medium and Form” (102-132); “The Function of Art and the Differentiation of the Art System” (133-184); “Self-Organization: Coding and Programming” (185-210)

Section Three: Mediation and Translation

Thursday, Sept. 20: Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900: “Foreword” by David E. Wellbery, “The Scholar’s Tragedy,” “The Mother’s Mouth”

Tuesday, Sept. 25: J. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: p. 1-73
M. McLuhan, “Media as Translators”
W. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”

Thursday, Sept. 27: J. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. 75-139
H. Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media”
Patricia Crain, “Children of Media, Children as Media” (61-90)

Section Four: Voice and Gaze as Love Objects

Tuesday, Oct. 2: F. Kittler, Gramophone Film Typewriter: “Gramophone” (21-114)
G. Ligeti, “Poeme Symphonique” [ http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=-mUv705xj3U]

Thursday, Oct. 4: M. Dolar, from A Voice and Nothing More: “The Metaphysics of Voice,” “The Physics of Voice”
T. Adorno, “The Curve of the Needle”
R. Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”

Tuesday, Oct. 9: J. Sterne, from The Audible Past; Thomas Y. Levin, “A Sound from out of Nowhere”

Thursday, Oct. 11: Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of Listening”; W. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Whitney Davis, “How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age” October 117 (Summer 2006), 71-98.

Tuesday, Oct. 16: F. Kittler, “Film” (115-182)
Daniel Rosenberg, “Joseph Priestley and the Graphic Invention of Modern Time,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 36:1 (2007), 55-103.
Geoffrey Batchen, “Electricity Made Visible”



Thursday, Oct. 18: E. Pound/ E. Fenellosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry
S. Eisenstein, “The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram”
W. J. T. Mitchell, “What is an Image?,” “There Are No Visual Media”
J. Drucker, “The Art of the Written Image”

Section Five: Engendering Media, Mediated “Man”

Tuesday, Oct. 23: D. P. Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (3-196)
either: Charles Babbage, Ch. 9 of The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
[www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/bridgewater]

or: Norbert Wiener, “Cybernetics and Psychopathology”

Thursday, Oct. 25: Schreber, Memoirs
J. Marsden, “Cyberpsychosis: The Feminization of the Post-Biological Body”
J.F. Lyotard, “Can Thought Go on without a Body?”
[D. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”]

Tuesday, Oct. 30: F. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, p. 179-346.

Thursday, Nov. 1: Kittler, “Typewriter”(183-263)

Section Six: Mediating Information: Analysis and Synthesis

Tuesday, Nov. 6: W. Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication”; L. Liu, “iSpace: Printed English after Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida.”Critical Inquiry 32, iii (Spring 2006): 516-50

Thursday, Nov. 8: L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 19-115

Tuesday, Nov. 13: L. Manovich, The Language of New Media , p. 117-333

Thursday, Nov. 15: M. Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1-137, 169-184)

Tuesday, Nov. 20: R. Williams, “The Forms of Television,” “Programming: Distribution and Flow”; S. Weber, “Television: Set and Screen”; B. Stiegler, “The Discrete Image”

Thursday, Nov. 22: THANKSGIVING

Section Six: Money and the Dense Medium of Daily Life

Tuesday, Nov. 27: K. Marx, “Commodities and Money” (43-144); McLuhan, “Money” (131-144)
R. Williams, “From Reflection to Mediation;” “From Medium to Social Practice,” “Means of Communication as Means of Production”

Thursday, Nov. 29: G. Arrighi, from The Long Twentieth Century: “Hegemony, Capitalism, and Territorialism”; McLuhan, p. 234-259; Bolter and Grusin, “Mediated Spaces” (169-183); J. Drucker, “Language in the Landscape” (90-99)

Tuesday, Dec. 4: R. Barthes, selections from The Neutral

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