TCS 152
Course Introduction
Tu/ Th 3:10-4:30
Olsen 207
Instructor: Sarah Lewison
socialsculpture at
yahoo dot com
sarah's website
tcs 152 syllabus
New Trends in
Technocultural Arts
This is a survey course in the creative and critical work being
done by contemporary artists working with technology and/or science. Because there is nothing
particularly new about the use of technologies by humans, there is also much to learn from the
past. In this class, therefore, we will orient ourselves by a line of technological development
that runs backwards and forwards in time, and across a strata of disciplines including soft and
hard sciences, engineering and other processes, to see what insight such a crooked journey might
produce into ways of seeing, representing and producing subjectivity.
We will look at how artists are using technologically sophisticated methods to produce
representations of subjects, and/or to produce self-reflexive critiques of the cultural biases
lying behind the objectivity of science and technology. Other artists work directly in
laboratories and collaborate with scientists, or in the field, manipulating landforms, biological
species and air as their material. Some think of their work as a form of sculpture in an expanded
arena, while others experiment more deliberately with a form of social pedagogy, exploring ways to
produce new awareness of the human environment as a system with limited resources.
We are skimming this territory by keeping to practices that intersect most tangibly with material,
lived worlds as opposed to virtual ones. Our readings correspond to implications of contemporary
technologies on real bodies and daily experiences. Readings are organized by weekly topics, and
many themes pertinent to art discourses will periodically re-surface. Can we compare artistic and
scientific method? In this class, most importantly, we will try to understand how an artist poses
questions and develops interventions into science and technology. As part of your participation,
you are encouraged to develop your own trajectories of inquiry.
A few themes are listed below as a starting point. These keywords can be treated as vocabulary words to incorporate into your writing and analysis. These include ways of thinking about form and aesthetics as well as technical terminology from science and engineering. We will continue to add to these over the quarter- please make suggestions for additions to this list!
| ********************************************** | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||