I'm teaching two sections of an undergraduate honors seminar next semester at the University of Maryland, which I'm really excited about. Here's the course description:
HONR298T: Rip, Mix, and Burn: Social Creativity Online
When the British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his opium-induced fragment "Kubla Khan" in 1816, he prefaced it with a short note complaining that the poem remained unfinished because he had been interrupted by a visitor while composing it, a mysterious "person from Porlock." Ever since then the word "Porlock" has been used to signify the intrusion of the outside world into the creative process, and the romantic conception of the artist as a brooding, solitary figure who spurns the distractions of society remains with us today. Increasingly, however, the person from Porlock has become not an obstacle to creativity, but a precondition of it. The internet and other advanced information technologies have ushered in an era of networked creativity whose importance is reflected in the proliferating number of terms we now have to talk about it: "social software," "social media," "the creative commons," "Web 2.0," "participatory culture," "folksonomies," and "p2p [peer-to-peer] technologies." The purpose of this seminar is to analyze these collaborative values; explore their relationship with knowledge production and artistic expression; experiment with the emerging class of software tools, such as blogs and wikis, that support them; identify the legal issues that dog them; and study the social behaviors that underpin them: tagging, linking, texting, modding, and mashing up, for example. We will look at popular sites such as Wikipedia, MySpace, Flickr, Del.icio.us, and YouTube; and examine the promise and perils of the unofficial slogan of the Web 2.0 generation: "rip, mix, and burn." Additional topics will include fan fiction, the line between fair use and copyright infringement, user-generated content, geotagging, and machinima (the use of video-game engines to create animated films).
Over the course of the semester, students will be asked to interact with social media in a variety of ways, from blogging to social bookmarking to remixing content in the public domain. Final projects will be designed in close consultation with the instructor; possibilities include an analysis of fictional blogs, the development of a third-party tool for Flickr, or the creation of an artwork that repurposes software or mobile technology for artistic ends (maybe you want to text message a short story or launch your own online community art project or virtually tag your physical environment).
In addition to electronic readings, the syllabus will likely contain selections from the following print sources:
Rebecca Blood, We've Got Blog
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good for You
Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs
Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture
Keith Aoki, et al, Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law?
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture
David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: a Unified Theory of the Web
Quick post:
Thanks to my student Jill for the FCremix party photos (more on the class blog).
Original assignment available here.
I'm adjuncting again for the Art and Visual Technology department at George Mason University. Last Spring I taught Writing for Artists; this time around it's a graduate-level research methodologies course. Course description below the fold.
What is research? Conceived in narrow terms, it is secondary rather than primary, derivative and scholarly rather than original and creative, verbal rather than visual in its material outcomes. One of the goals of this course is to stand such conventional wisdom on its head. A more expansive definition of research collapses many of the traditionally held distinctions between scholarship and creativity. At its best, scholarship--like artistic creation--contributes new knowledge, truth, and even beauty (and is in this sense primary); while artistic creation--like scholarship--extends, revises, and reinterprets the cultural record (and is in this sense derivative, in the most positive sense of the word). The legal, cultural, and technological conditions that must prevail for this kind of artistic paradigm to thrive are--not coincidentally--broadly compatible with those that make art history possible: reproduction, preservation, and access—cornerstones of museum and library science—demand institutional structures that strike a balance between open source and closed source; between the rights of creators and the rights of users—themselves potential creators in a dynamic feedback loop. An important theme of the course will be intellectual property law and the ways in which it supports or obstructs these fundamental artistic and curatorial values. Other topics will include metadata, standards, and documentation; the creation of durable electronic art; the artist as preservationist; the use of visual evidence; the role of technology in transforming art history; image search and retrieval systems; and science and art research.
Throughout the semester, class readings and discussion will underscore a paradox of research in the visual arts: much of what we know about images has historically been channeled through words. Whether it is a picture that has descended to us in verse or a catalogue raisonne that describes the objects it inventories or a digital image retrieved through controlled vocabularies, the lesson of art history is that language plays a pivotal role in the transmission of pictorial information.
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Full syllabus available here. There's also a course blog--still an unstrung harp, but that will change soon.
Here is my syllabus introduction to AVT 395 / Writing for Artists:
Welcome to AVT 395-–a writing class for AVT students that approaches language from a studio arts perspective. We’ll move back and forth between the writing lab and atelier over the course of the semester, treating text as both a verbal and visual medium. We won’t just write words--we’ll cut and paste them; paint them; collage them; deform, blog, compute, and code them; even eat them. Writing across media and technologies in this way goes hand in glove with writing across genres. We’ll read and in many cases produce encyclopedic entries, analytic essays, image descriptions, SMS poems, artists’ and treated books, cut-ups and codework. We’ll look at how the medium shapes the message: why you might want to text message a haiku but not an epic poem; or blog a movie review, your favorite rap lyrics—even a serial novel--but not necessarily the Freemason’s handshake or a multivolume treatise. And we won’t neglect grammar, the formal system underlying our use of language. Grammar too often gets a bad rap these days, in part because it is perceived as a straitjacket for renegade prose. But grammar, as we shall see, is as much an analytical, creative, and generative tool as it is a prescriptive tool.
An important theme of the course is the relationship between word and image. Traditionally that relationship has been expressed as a paragone, or contest, between the arts. But the word-image dynamic can be collaborative as well as adversarial. Sometimes, for example, one art survives by piggybacking off another: there are lost paintings that have descended to us in verse; and perhaps—just perhaps—spoken words in the grooves of an antique clay pot (trying to recover these archeological sounds is the task of an emergent field known as paleoacoustics).
Writing for Artists wouldn’t be complete without an excursion into the book arts. The book as material object figures prominently in the syllabus and coursework. We’ll establish a baseline definition of book and then do our best to test its tensile strain through a series of related readings and assignments.