Art and Design in the Digital Age

Week 1: Historical & Theoretical Tangents between Art and Technology

• Definitions of art and technology & how they could be the same?
• Art & Technologies interlinked: from cave paintings to the modern age
• Setting the fence between art and technology: a conceptual ridge
• Art and technology in the Renaissance
• Photography's early histories

Week 2: Art as Media as Language

• Art as media: How are can be defined a communication media? Or a language?
• Nelson Goodman's theory of Digital and Analogue
• The Technology of Notation and Music
• The History of Music Technology and its Implications in the Digital Age

Week 3: Art at the Turn of The Mechanical Age

• The meaning of images post WWW2
• The contemporary meaning of images in relation to technological development
• Revising Walter Benjamin's and John Berger's Ways of Seeing
• The work of Culture in the age of Cybernetic Systems
• The evolution of the moving image
• Avant Garde movements and the moving image
• Old cinema and new media art: video installations and new media technologies in the gallery space.

Week 4: After Photography

• Learn about the 4 industrial and technological evolutions
• Agency, The emancipation of the spectator and free will in a world governed by machines
• From mechanisms of chance in art to mass customisation in design
• Critical encounters between art and technology: early experiments with computers

Week 5: How to think about Technology & Mid Course Assessment

• Self-Assessment mid-course
• 6 approaches towards the critique of media and technology in the digital age

Week 6: Art and the Internet

Net.Art

• Tactical Media and subversion
• Google: technological and informational biases
• The conundrum of privacy in the digital age: We live in Public
• Strategies to cope with surveillance capitalism: how not to be seen and obfuscation

Week 7: Digital Aesthetics

• The Cut & Paste aesthetics and the remix culture
• Time and space in the digital age: how to re-read spatio-temporal perceptions. After Paul Virillio and Katherine Hayles
• The selfie and the narcissistic and exhibtitionary complexes of social media

Week 8: Digital Futures

• Truth, Fiction and Virtual Realities
• The Internet of Things
• Object/subject relationship in virtual realities
• Performance and virtual reality
• Posthumanism and the anteoposcene
• The myth of immateriality
• Ability, disability, super ability