Net Cultures: Art, Politics, and the Everyday

Net cultures have changed the landscape of cultural production over the past few years. For artists, employing new empowering tools such as hacking, communication became more important than representation. This is not a web-design class.

Networked collaborations often caused the downfall of traditional object making. The objective of this survey-like course is to provide a social framework for the Internet and to point to transient places of resistance within it. Approaching net cultures with both, the due optimism and the necessary doubt, we will then join the love of thinking with the joy of making.

We will discuss key issues such as access, privacy, e-letism, history of net art, commodification, identity, creation and eradication of public spaces, community building, narration online, sound, and biotechnology. We will study a large variety of critical art practices online, read core texts of net criticism, literature, poetry, cultural studies and discuss.

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