Digital Media Theory articles

[nomadologist]

I'm in a really good class now, and the teacher is providing us with all of these articles for a limited time. If anyone wants any of them in a pdf, I'd be glad to share. This is officially as dorky as it gets...

Course Materials week 1: Technology and Media
Martin Heidegger; “The Age of World Picture”
Vannevar Bush; “As We May Think”

week 2: Postmodern Condition
Jean François Lyotard; The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Frederic Jameson; Post-modernism: Cultural Logics of Late Capitalism
Gilles Deleuze; “Postscript To Societies of Control”

week 3: Postmodernity and Media: Spectacle and Simulacrum
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations
Paul Virilio; “Lost Dimension”, Aesthetics of Disappearance
Jonathan Crary, “Modernity And The Problem of Observer”

week 4: Ontological Transformation –Analog vs. Digital
Jean-Louis Comolli; “Machines of the Visible”
Raymond Bellour; “The Double Helix”
Optional reading: Paul Virilio; The Vision Machine

week 5: Ontological Transformation –The Problem of Representation
William J. Mitchell; “Intention & Artifice”, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, 1992
Lev Manovich; “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography”
Peter Lunenfeld; "Digital Photography & Electronic Semiotics"

week 6: Virtuality
Allucquere Roseanne Stone; "Virtual Systems"
Gilles Deleuze; “The Actual and the Virtual”, Dialogues II, 1987
Pierre Levy; Being Virtual, chapter 1

week 7: Virtual Space
Michel De Certau; “Spatial Stories”,
Anne Friedberg; “The Mobilized And Virtual Gaze in Modernity: Flaneur/Flaneuse”
Michel Foucault; “Of Other Spaces”
Eric Davis; “Acoustic Cyberspace”

week 8: Hyperpolis -Virtual Communities
Julian Dibbel; "A Rape in Cyberspace -or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society"
Steven Shaviro; "Hyperpolis"

week 9: Hypertextuality
George Landow; “Hypertext & Critical Theory” (presentation)
Jon Dovey; “Notes Toward a Hypertextual Theory of Narrative” (presentation)
Esper J. Aarseth; Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (presentation)
Janet H. Murray, "Hamlet On A Holodeck" (optional reading)

week 10: Digital Embodiments
Georges Canguilhem; "Machine and Organism" (presentation)
Donna Haraway; “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (presentation)
Teresa de Lauretis; "Becoming Inorganic"

week 11: Rhizomatics and Body w/o Organs
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari; “Introduction: Rhizome”, A Thousand Plateaus

week 12: Immersion
Anne Balsamo; “Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture”
Katherine Hayles; “The Materiality of Informatics” (presentation)
Don Ihde; “A Phenomonology Of Technics” (presentation)

week 13: Electronic Production Circuits
Saskia Sassen; "The Topoi of E-Space: Private and Public Cyberspace"
Richard Barbrook; “Californian Ideology”

week 14: New Forms of Production: Immaterial/Affective Labor
Maurizio Lazzarato; “Immaterial Labor”
Maurizio Lazzarato; “New Forms of Production & Circulation”
Michael Hardt; “Affective Labor”

week 15: Digital Politics
Louise K. Wilson – Paul Virilio; “Cyberwar, God and Television: Interview with Paul Virilio”
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri; “Biopolitical Production”
Maurizzio Lazzarato; “Struggle, Event, Media”
Laura U. Marks; “Invisible Media”

Willam Gibson; Pattern Recognition (presentation + discussion)

 

[dHarry]

Would it be greedy and/or cheeky to request them all, week by week... ? It might create an interesting cyber-virtual compossible simulacrum of the course right here in this thread

 

[nomadologist]

hehe. sure, i'll put up what's there. i think most of them are already up. so i'll put up the first three weeks.

 

[Guybrush]

They all look very interesting. May I ask what the course’s aim is (I’m to illiterate to tell from the authors’ names )?

 

[gek-opel]

This is a very kind offer! I've not heard of any of the authors of the later weeks stuff (ie- the stuff more specific to digital media rather than the philosophy/theory stuff earlier)...

 

[nomadologist]

http://www.sendspace.com/file/wtgqm6

Readings for weeks 1-3. I'll update it weekly so you can leech off my learning--for how much I paid I deserve to share. Let me know if the file doesn't work (used winzip, can also do it on my mac at home). This class is excellent, wish you could all be there.

 

[nomadologist]

They all look very interesting. May I ask what the course’s aim is (I’m to illiterate to tell from the authors’ names )?

It's about theories of virtuality and how new media/technologies relate to them. It's mostly a survey course that aims to get you deep into the literature, but we're taking it in lots of interesting directions in class...

 

[tht]

This is a very kind offer! I've not heard of any of the authors of the later weeks stuff (ie- the stuff more specific to digital media rather than the philosophy/theory stuff earlier)...

that looks interesting i agree

i'll take these anyway thanks nomado'logist

useful site for reading pdfs

 

[nomadologist]

hmm are pdfs an American thing? sorry guys. hope the link works.

 

[gek-opel]

The link works fine, thanks Nomadologist.

 

[tht]

there are some people who dislike proprietary software formats that's all, the link is fine

 

[turtles]

This looks really cool. Would you be able to recommend which of these papers would be of interest to a person actually in computer science, but with an interest in theory? This stuff kind of looks like a weird parallel universe to the CS academic field, topics like embodiment, virtual spaces, virtual communities etc etc are very big, yet I get the feeling that there's probably very little communication between the people who actually make these technologies (we computer nerds ) and the people who theorize about them...

 

[nomadologist]

Ahh, ok Tht.

Turtles, that kind of thing will come a little later in the semester, and I'll alert you to it. I think people with a programming background would be especially interested in the virtual end of contemporary theory. You have the intuitive advantage knowing computer logics/architectures like the back of your hand.

 

[nomadologist]

I just finished the Virilio stuff from "Lost Dimension" and it's mind-blowingly brilliant. Takes Lyotard to task on the death of the grand narrative and instead posits a loss of Euclidean geometrical space and with it any "space-time continuum" sort of orientation for the Real under virtuality.

I have to say I may completely agree with him here. He really gets beyond any sort of pat dismissals of "post-modernism" by dismissing token pomo displays as cheap attempts to bypass the problem of Time. He's a great example of how the project after modernism need not be about loss in a "negative" sense, but in the sense of a shift. He uses really beautiful language and descriptions of the changes in the experience of the "urban", the city, traces a line from old cities with "gates" through Foucault's panopticon and manages to draw a parallel between photography and capital in Marx's (and the post-structuralists) formulations vis-a-vis the Real.

Give me some questions to ask in class tomorrow, guys. I have to post some on the class website later.

 

[Numbers]

Nice programme! It is quite weird, though, that the Toronto-school is neglected entirely in this course. So is German media theory (maybe Bolz, certainly Kittler, why not Benjamin?).

Personally, I can't wait for you to reach the last course on digital politics. The italian scholars you will be teached are amazing, so I heard. They have all fancy concepts as well: cognitive capitalism, multitudes, etc.

 

[nomadologist]

Hmm.. I think there's no Adorno, Horkheim, Veblen (who founded the school and the program, essentially) or Benjamin, et al, because the Frankfurt School predates the scope of the course (which I would historically place pretty neatly post-WWII)

I've studied them extensively (and the Toronto School, by which I assume you mean Innis, McLuhan, and co to death) in the Foundations of Media Theory for the first year of the program, not counting all the emphasis on them in my contemporary art minor/in undergrad in general, but in this program the Frankfurt School, Benjamin, the Germans, Weber, etc. get their own specific seminars. There are several classes that focus for a whole semester just on Adorno, one supercomprehensive one that's one of the classic courses in the program just for McLuhan, with some special topics seminars on more obscure people popping up once in a while. they're the ones with pre-reqs for second-year students who want to take them.

 

[Numbers]

Agreed. That's true for the Frankfurters. Apart from Benjamin, I would probably not classify them as media theorists though.

Kittler and Bolz do write about digital media and if you wouldn't know them -although I assume you do- check them out. Especially Kittler is a rocking badboy academic par excellence. For some examples of his idiosyncratic writing, check here.


Edit: I don't know in what program this course is organised, but I wished every university had at least one such seminar. Sounds really too cool.

 

[borderpolice]

This looks really cool. Would you be able to recommend which of these papers would be of interest to a person actually in computer science, but with an interest in theory? This stuff kind of looks like a weird parallel universe to the CS academic field, topics like embodiment, virtual spaces, virtual communities etc etc are very big, yet I get the feeling that there's probably very little communication between the people who actually make these technologies (we computer nerds ) and the people who theorize about them...

But why would a CS person want to read this media theory stuff? it is pedestrian! all the stuff wirtten by the media theory crowd about virtuality, hyperreality ... completely failed to anticipate how the internet would work out, let alone help shape, influence the development. media theory tends to be reactive, summarising what the programmers created a few years earlier. the creative side of things is really the programmers! why bother with media-theorists who renarrate?

of course some media theory is good, i don't want to diss the whole field. just wanted to point out that if you have the choice between CS and modern media theory about internet and the like, it's got to be the former every time, becaue that's where the action is.

 

[dHarry]

Thanks Nomadologist, this is great! (This reminds me of Deleuze's point that a society isn't defined by its structures but by what escapes, flees, leaks!)

Some of the stuff is obvious to anyone with an interest or background in this area (Baudrillard, Deleuze - Postscript on the Societies of Control is fantastic, and is on the web in a couple of places, Lyotard), but others less so, and it's nice to have them organised thematically.

 

[Dunninger]

just wanted to point out that if you have the choice between CS and modern media theory about internet and the like, it's got to be the former every time, becaue that's where the action is.

I don't think so. I'm a software developer and very interested in media theory. Of course CS is were the action is, but it's important to evaluate this from another perspective than the purely technological point of view. Thanks nomadologist, I hope I find the time to actually read all that stuff.