Department of Media Study | SUNY at Buffalo | 2004
New Media Courses by Trebor Scholz 
trebor at buffalo dot edu | http://molodiez.org | http://distributedcreativity.org
On Collecting
Course Description:

Graduate students coming from different media backgrounds will critically examine their practice as it relates to collecting, archiving, categorizing, and forgetting. We will individually or collaboratively, work with you on your projects. Applied to your concrete projects the course will introduce you theories about the archive, the politics of memory, and databases. If you are an obsessive collector just like Andy Warhol and like to deepen your practice or if you like to learn how to take your database project to the web-- this will be your class. Outcomes of this class may be web-based database art, writing, installation or video work.

Keywords:
finding, tracing, bagging, tagging, collecting, obsessive compulsive cataloguing

Background:

Because media offers new techniques for registration, they log us in to reality in a way other than that in which previous generations were logged in to (or out).

Klaus Theweleit

In the Renaissance the introduction of the printing press first resulted in the need to organize knowledge and collections. Today, living in the "Information Society" our daily lives are enmeshed with technologies and it is the primary concern of many to retrieve and organize data. Our daily lives are defined by state and corporate databases and life itself is being assimilated into genetic databases. Artists collect, analyze, and manipulate data day by day.
How do we digitize our collective knowledge? Michel Foucault pronounced that using a typewriter changes our thoughts and Marshal McLuhan reiterated the change of consciousness caused by the use of media technologies. Jacques Derrida suggests that new technologies do not only change the process of analysis but also the very nature of the knowledge that we retrieve.

Databases are all around us every step of our day-to-day lives. From The Corbis Image Library, the Human Genome Project, and Brewster Kahle's archive of the Internet itself. Popular culture with films such as The Matrix even imagines our lives insight one gigantic database. The idea of an one-fits-all standard for information architectures, an overarching meta-software is deeply alarming. How does the presence of databases change the way we act in the world? Which role can artists play in this changing field of databases? What is counted as art in the tricky tension between information and aesthetics? Ted Nelson's "Xanadu" project, for example, privileges the way information is organized and stored over content. Buckminster Fuller's "World Game" aimed at organizing information about world resources.

What is the conceptual and aesthetic power of databases? Does it really need millions of entries to make a database piece interesting as Lev Manovich claims? What are alternate cultural expressions using databases? How do we structure our digital backpacks, and online briefcases? In the 1970s and 1980s Marcel Broodthaers and Martin Kippenberger commented on storage and archiving practices. How can artists who are, like Andy Warhol, obsessive collectors use archives as deliberate base for artistic endeavor and social commentary? Artists working with digital media often work in the network and are concerned with a new aesthetic that not only involves visual presentation but also invisible back-end data that are organized, retrieved and navigated. When walking through traditional Natural History Museums we see how information is categorized, classified. Artists like Mark Dion and Fred Wilson in different ways worked about this extensively. Different taxonomies divide the arts into time based art, computer art, music etc.

In the same way the standardization of database structures and the assumptions behind categorization and meta data have political implications. The vocabulary that we impose on our surroundings impact the way we think about them. Artists now have have the possibility to play an active role in building information architectures. How can we imagine and produce an art practice for ourselves that attempts to articulate, critique the potentials that databases hold.

New Media Web Cam
Luncheon Series

Course Description:

Every week we meet to listen to and debate with networked presenters from Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Finland, Ireland and the United States who will speak about new media arts education and their individual media art practice. We'll take notes and discuss with the virtual guest presenters passing on ideas from one session to the presenter of the next week.

For a full schedule and topics
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Cultural Theory &
Data-Based Art

 Course Description:

Cultural Theory & Data-Based Art is a cross-disciplinary course that integrates ideas from data-based computer programming for the Internet, photography, painting, literature, biology, film studies, and cultural theory.
DMS420 SC // with Tom Leonardt
The goal of this course is to prepare the next generation of artists who will be functioning in a computer-mediated culture. It will empower them with the necessary technical, theoretical and historical understanding to meaningfully contribute to the development of new aspects of emerging digital media. In particular, this course contributes to the development of critical approaches to traditional concepts of the database in cultural production. One of the most important developments of the 20th century has been the introduction of the database into our everyday lives, from financial management to inventory processes. In recent years our daily lives became increasingly framed by state databases and life itself is genetically mapped. Jacques Derrida suggests that new technologies do not only change the process of analysis but also the very nature of the knowledge that we retrieve. The organization that organizes and reorganizes its own data, its own memory, its own archive reorganizes itself and inscribes its identity.
Since the 1960's computers were a medium for the storage of data. But it was not until the late 1990's that technologies such as MySql developed which allowed for the introduction of more experimental data-based art projects to the public sphere of the Internet. Initially, artists like George Legrady (Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War, 1994) experimented with the database on the level of archival representation using classical metaphors such as the museum, the archive, or the diary. More recent works have evolved into more experimental idiosyncratic ways of accessing database structures. Audiences access web-based narratives via keywords with the meta-dating becoming a crucial part of the creative process. The search becomes a central part of the interaction with the piece.
In data-based art often randomly collected data are juxtaposed and take on meaning similar to the collage technique employed by the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov and the American William Griffith. Going beyond interface design- data-based works can address questions and possibilities in relation to the ever-present apparatus of surveillance and control. The course encourages open source technology solutions such as Php and MySql.

Keywords:
participatory online cultures, human rights, access, data knitting, power, interfaces, participation, archiving, meta data counter-memory, visualization, interactivity, mapping, city, copyright, data clustering, data combination, activism, social network architectures.

Syllabus
Introduction to
Media Theory
 Course Description:

Media determine our everyday life. "Introduction to Media Theory" is a lecture class that gives you an overview of ideas by artists, writers and scientists who bridge(d) discourses between the arts and computer science. The class consists of lectures and discussions of the readings, screenings of films, CD-ROMs, web sites, guest presentations, software, and new media installations. We focus on historical, sociological, technological and political arguments, but also analyze many digital art works. Introduction to Media Theory gives you a framework for the interpretation of evolving media forms and themes in digital art.

Syllabus
Screen Theory Course Description:

Graduate Seminar

Keywords:
posthuman, participatory cultures, community online and off, globalization, economics of cyberspace, weblog, hypermedia, computer games, activism, surveillance, hacking, intellectual property, dotbomb economy

Syllabus
Networked Art Practice Course Description:

This production class will launch an ongoing web-based publication on critical digital issues and politics that will be carried on by future classes. In addition to the content you will create the information architecture and the web design. You will work collaboratively on technical and content related issues.

Syllabus
Netcultures: Art, Politics and the Everyday

Keywords:

activism, globalization, mailing lists, myth, immateriality, privacy, art, play, commodification, spectacle, bandwidth, data-critique, net resistance, poetry, solidarity, hypertext, net.art, HTML slaves, collaboration, e.goldrush, techno-pleasure, digirati, digital artisan, access, spamming, wireless, copyright, dotgone, open source, surveillance, web log, browser, hacking, community

Syllabus
Community Keywords:

sustainable communities, design, diletantism, activism, global social movements, virtual intellectual, mailing lists, myth, immateriality, critique, tactical media, bandwidth, play, network(ing), self-reflection, net criticism, spectacle, bandwidth, data-critique, online resistance, digital city, commodification, solidarity, virtual class, hypertext, net.art, HTML slaves, proletarianized net slave, collaboration, e.goldrush, techno-pleasure, digital artisan, community, wireless, dotgone candyland, open source, weblog.

Syllabus
A Social History of
Contemporary Art,
Cultural Theory		 Course Description:

This introductory undergraduate survey lecture course will provide an overview of artworks from 1960 to the present. The course will stress the interpretation of artistic production within its historical, political, social, cultural and theoretical frameworks, and the changing role of the artist in society. The course will give you an introduction to contemporary art, art historical terminology, philosophy, architecture, music, film, and politics.

Syllabus
Art as Social Practice

Course Description:

This series of seminars will familiarize the group with histories of politically engaged work in the public sphere. "Art as Social Practice"is a seminar and studio course.
Bringing in my cultural background, we will focus on working models in Eastern Europe, Britain, and the United States as well as linking cultural theory and art practice. Each seminar will be divided into a seminar segment and work on a site-specific group project. The art project will be a collaborative work on one interventionist project that draws from your experiential background. It is hereby linked to the demographics of the class. Issues discussed in seminars then will be applied to practice. The course encourages a sense of solidarity amongst the student's through the collaboration on this group project. In the prevailing atmosphere of the disenfranchisement of critical interventionist art practices this course argues for a critical practice that is based on a socio-economic analysis of societal processes but is inclusive of pleasure and desire as well. It aims to create an awareness of different sites in today's United States where critical art practice is taking place. Areas we will consider are gender, queer politics, and race.

Syllabus