Communities

Understanding today's tools is not enough. Is web design dead? Content has been tragically flattened under the bulldozer of technological hype. This course critically addresses technology and content. We will neither follow the model of the idealist who falls for the progress of tools for their own sake, nor will we endulge in a neo-luddite, anti-technological position. We will strive for a self-reflective, creative atmosphere allowing for critique, well-informed debate and production. Approaching net cultures with both, the due euphoria and the necessary criticism, we will investigate the potential for creative, innovative and surprising uses of the Internet.

We will learn about networks and communities such as <nettime>, and look at current work conditions in the current new media economy: from (net)workers, digital artisans, and proletarianized pixel pushers, to immaterial casualized laborers. The course offers you an overview over new modes of cultural production related to emerging technologies: from the virtual intellectual, the media critic to the online guerilla hidden in the digital wilderness. We will look at sutainable models of networked collectivity. Drawing from net criticism, cultural studies, anthropology, critical theory, poetry, and the news we will look at ways in which artists are employing such media as tools and artforms through theoretical and examinations of recent works, exhibitions, and festivals.

Class format: Periods of technical demonstrations and hands-on web work will alternate with weeks of reading and debate. Web design, readings, discussions, presentations of short text summaries and responses, group critique of your work, analysis of web-specific artworks, offline exhibitions, fesrtivals, and initiatives. We will set up a class mailing lists to which we will invite critical net artists. 4 quizzes. 4 assignments.

KEYWORDS: sustainable communities, web 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.