13433

WiSe 21/22: Contemporary Art and Media

Eric de Bruyn

Additional information / Pre-requisites

weekly (on-line sessions?); may include guest speakers and field trips in Berlin; languages: German and English

Comments

This course will consider the Werdegang of digital media and networks in relation to contemporary art practice since the 1990s. We shall start with a discussion of the early, political imagination of the Internet in the 1990s, which veered between cyberutopianism and libertarianism (“Californian ideology”) and tended to associate digital networks with an emancipatory space of radical freedom. In this context, we shall discuss the emergence of so-called `new media art’, which often distinguished itself from the conventional circuits of art display, as well as the simultaneous rise of ‘video’ installations in the gallery spaces. In regard to new media art, a distinction will be made between activist (“tactical media”) and formal-aesthetic approaches (e.g. Lev Manovich). Then, we shall turn to more recent critiques of informational networks in terms of, among others, control theory (e.g. Alexander Galloway), communicative capitalism (e.g. Jodi Dean), attention economy, digital modes of labor and its valorization (e.g. streaming, digital editions, NFT’s), and affect theory. We shall also consider the social bias of digital technologies (e.g. facial recognition algorithms, A.I.) as well as certain counter-responses in the field of contemporary art (e.g. digital forensics, Trevor Paglen’s Autonomy Cube, J. P. Raether’s trans-humanist performances) as well as subject the recent phenomenon of Post-Internet art to a critical review. close