Notes and material presented in class (and supplementary to it) will be listed on this page on an ongoing basis.

link back to course outline

Week 1 - Jan.31, Feb.2

Smooth-sailing checklist of preparations for you to do:

  • Get sticker on your ID, in Art Dept. office, Hillyer Rm 101 during regular office hours (8:30am-4pm) The purpose is for authorized access to the VCRC Lab - Hillyer 218. (This will give you more choices for when and where to get your assignments done for this course. )
  • Get your web account:

    As instructed on the Smith website development help page, you will apply for a web account by bringing your Smith ID card to the User Support Center in Stoddard 23 (2nd floor, Stoddard Hall) and filling out a form there. If you wish, you can print and fill out the application beforehand, bringing it with you to the User Support Center:

    www.smith.edu/its/tara/account_forms/sophia_account.pdf

    When your account has been created, you will receive an email message containing your Sophia username and password. Note that if you are a student from another 5-college campus, you have the option in this course to get a web account from that campus.

  • Fill out this equipment access form on-line:

    Forms for both Production Equipment Registration and for External Harddrive Registration are linked at this page: http://www.smith.edu/its/mservices/equipauthor.htm . You may submit the forms on-line. Be sure to click the checkbox verifying that in addition to borrowing cameras, that you need to be loaned an external hard-drive. And read (yes, read) the loan policy right there on the form.
     
    The instructor will separately verify and confirm with Media Services as to your eligibility to access these resources.
     
  • Get the required textbook.
       
  • Check Smith connectivity to Rhizome at www.rhizome.org and subscribe to Net Art News (mailing list).
     
  • Familiarize yourself with this website.
     

References and supplemental material for Week 1:

Nam June Paik, TV Buddha (1974) - tuning in to the "global groove" circa 1970s.

"Radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: Change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it know how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him."

-- Bertolt Brecht, The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication, 1932

technology as cultural imaginary + bridging the (virtual) gap

 

Week 2 - Feb. 7, 9

MATERIALITY OF COMPUTING and critique of COMPUTING CULTURE represented through ironic derationalization of "command and control" (patriarchal) origins of computing, plus CYBERFEMINIST interventions into utopian ideologies of cyberspace.

"The net's the parthenogenetic bitch-mutant feral child of big daddy mainframe. She's out of control, kevin, she's the sociopathic emergent system..." -- from VNS Matrix, Bitch Mutant Manifesto (1996).

PHYSICALITY OF NETWORKS:

  • The physicality of time and space that underpins "cyberspace" is illustrated with a look at 2 common Internet utilities bundled on windows PCs and on Mac OSX computers, that enable us to either visually trace or measurably time the tranmission of data across a physical network: "Traceroute" and "Ping".

    MacOSX    : Applications>Utilities>Terminal
    WindowsXP (from Start menu):
    All Programs>Accessories> Command Prompt
     
  • tsunamii Translocation Project (Singapore, 2003-04) - The tsunamii artist collective's conceptual net art speculates on what is culturally and inter-culturally represented by the networks of nodes that physically route communications on the Internet.

SCREEN SPACE - bridging 1920s Dadaist experimentation with 1990s Net Art:

"The simple square of the movie screen could easily be divided and 'orchestrated.' ...In doing so, I found a new sensation: rhythm - which is, I still think, the chief sensation of any expression of movement." -- Hans Richter, German Dadaist artist, commenting on his discoveries in the making of Rhythmus 21, produced in 1921.

"I started to make net.films. At first I thought how I could represent film on the net. After some time I understood that its not necessary to represent film itself, but if you can put your filmic way of thinking in the net, in this environment, it is more useful, more interesting. You can do more with both. So I tried to experiment with language, to combine film and net.language, but now I am more concerned with developing net.language itself. I want things to speak their own language. For me for example net.reality is not only the cyberideology. I think that many things from real life can exist in the net, many feelings, many thoughts. But they should speak the language of where they are. If so\mething is in the net, it should speak in net.language." -- from a 1997 interview with Russian net artist, Olia Lialina.

  • Hans Richter, Rhythmus 21 (originally known by the title "Film Is Rhythm"), Germany 1921, 3min.film
  • Olia Lialina created the early "net art" work, My boyfriend came back from the war! (Russia, 1996). An early interview with Olia Lialina can be found on the "nettime" discussion group archives.
  • TEXT by JODI (Joan Heemskerk (Netherlands) and Dirk Paesman (Belgium)), circa 1996.
  • Heath Bunting, Own, Be Owned or Remain Invisible (circa 1995)
  • John Simon, Every Icon (1996), plus statement about this conceptual artwork
  • Diane Bertolo, theReader (1999), "a cyborg self-portrait as a word processor filtered through the lexicon of Charcot's hysteria theater."--D.B.

HTML/XHTML WORKSHOP optional links:

 

Week 3 - Feb. 14, 16

Chronicles of everyday life; paradoxes of virtuality and materiality, intersections of the banal and mysterious. Meaning emerges out of the relation between things, not out of the things themselves.

  • Diane Bertolo, Daily Thing 2004 (2004), and getDate(), (U.S., 2002)
      
  • Jess Loseby, places I have never been, people I have never seen (U.K., 2004). She describes her work as thematically linked by a "cyber-domestic aesthetic", that is, her "fascination with borderlands and ‘beautiful seams’ between the ubiquitous worlds of computing and the ‘real’ (domestic)... Loseby’s unashamedly low-tech approach to new media builds comparisons of the network and digitally (in its frustrations, attention to triviality and repetition) as absurdly compatible to the female domestic routine." (quoted from her website)
  • David Crawford SMS (Stop Motion Studies), (U.S., begun 2003, ongoing). From the artist's statement, Crawford describes how he uses the urban subway "as a stage upon which social dynamics and individual behavior are increasingly mediated by digital technology. As one of the most vibrant and egalitarian networks in our cities, subways bring people from a wide range of social and cultural backgrounds into close contact with each other."
  • Two Brothers, story developed by Lisa Bloomfield and Rod Val Moore, using appropriated imagery (US, circa 2000)

Some recommended readings:

  • Recommended technical reading: Anne Morgan Spalter book, The Computer in the Visual Arts, Chapt.2 "Digital Painting and Photoediting- 2D Raster Graphics" Note that this book is currently on reserve in the Hillyer Art Library listed under the instructor's name.
  • Writing With Images - The semiotics of the image (i.e., how images construct meaning) is richly discussed and illustrated in this on-line book by George Dillon. To sample the range of visual culture presented in the book, it is recommended that you check the introductory chapter, Imagetext, Multiples, and Other Mixed Modes.

Week 4 - Feb. 21, 23

The media art of George Legrady (U,S., Hungary) has often involved archival documents and reflections on the idea of the archive itself. One example is his interactive cdrom project "Slippery Traces" (1996). Note that "Slippery Traces" is on reserve in the Hillyer Art Library: it is on a cdrom of his collected works, From Analogue to Digital: Photography and Interactive Media, and is also included in another collection of interactive multimedia titled Artintact 3.

"Slippery Traces is a multi-linear visual narrative in which viewers navigate through a network of over 240 interconnected postcards classified into 24 categories or chapters. The intention of the work has been to explore database structures as a means of generating multi-linear narratives at a time when web search engines were introduced. I wanted to produce a narrative work in which three sets of cultural messages could intersect or collapse into each other. First, the archive consists mostly of commercial postcards selected out of 2000 to represent 20th century culture. The second level consisted of my evaluation of these images encoded through keywords and cross-listed through a database to maximize movement between categories. Third, the collection of these images signifies in a dispersed way my autobiography. Amongst the images can be found 1920’s to 1940’s family portraits printed on postcards, places I have been, and cultures that shaped me in various ways."

-- statement by George Legrady of the interactive work, "Slippery Traces: The Postcard Trail".

The media art of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy also addresses the database as a cultural form.

  • Every Episode - Check the Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's description of collecting and categorizing 10,000 shots from the Starsky and Hutch TV series. Here is another view from the project.
  • In How I Learned, each shot from the TV show "Kung Fu" was catalogued to address the question: "if everything you knew from the world came from the TV show "Kung Fu," what would you know? Each shot from the original program is isolated and cataloged to be interpreted as a lesson learned." --quoted from McCoy statement on "Every Episode" installation

Some temporary reference images from Tufte's "Envisioning Information" book (on reserve in Hillyer Art Library) to be discussed in class:

Week 5 - Feb. 28, Mar.2

In class, we will be catching up with some of the citations not discussed from last week.

In addition, here is a notice from Rhizome's Net Art News: a software application called "The Art of Detouch" that analyses and visualizes modifications of photographs by "photo retouch artists" whose portfolios of "before and after" images are found on the web.

The Art of Detouch is entirely relevant to a critical exploration of the bitmapped image and to image processing within Photoshop (and similar photo editing tools) that allows us to modify an image pixel by pixel, distancing that image ever further from the prior referent. What is the truth value of the photographic image when it is so removed from the Real? What are the values actively encoded by the retouch artists who work at the ambiguous boundary between photographic reality and industrialized ideals of physical appearance - especially that of the female body?

 

Week 6 - Mar. 7, 9

 

Week 7 - Mar. 14, 16

Linda Dement, Typhoid Mary (cd-rom, circa 1995).

  • Some images from Typhoid Mary (scroll webpage to the right to see all of them)

Graham Harwood

Walid Raad, The Atlas Group Archives

Dylan Reiff and Joe Korsmo, Velocity Gnome - a 3 year project, culminating in 2005, in which the artists tracked a computer gamer through his activities on the internet, creating an entire mythology and world around the gamer, Kolin (the Velocity Gnome).

Week 8 - Mar. 21, 23

 

Week 9 - Mar. 28, 30

 

Week 10 - Apr. 4, 6

 

Week 11 - Apr. 11, 13

Color aesthetics and color theory reconsidered through the lens of identity politics:

Color aesthetics reconsidered through the abstract lens of pseudo-scientific or hyper-rational research, performed as a kind of paradoxical language game:

  • Color Balance by John F. Simon (1997)
  • IKATUN (collective of artists and technologists, including Catherine d'Ignazio), rSpectrum 2.0 - a reimagining of the Newtonian color spectrum (U.S. 2004)

Hybrid graphic compositions (both bitmap and structured graphic aspects):

Structured (vector-based) graphics used in these examples of artists game projects:

 

Week 12 - Apr. 18, 20

 

Week 13 - Apr. 25, 27

 

Week 14 - May 2, 4