IM165 Videology: Art & Cybernetics

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2018
Extent and Intensity
2/0/0. 4 credit(s). Type of Completion: z (credit).
Teacher(s)
dr. Louis Armand (lecturer), doc. Mgr. Jana Horáková, Ph.D. (deputy)
doc. Mgr. Jana Horáková, Ph.D. (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
doc. Mgr. Jana Horáková, Ph.D.
Department of Musicology – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Bc. Jitka Leflíková
Supplier department: Department of Musicology – Faculty of Arts
Timetable
Mon 20:00–21:40 N21
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites.
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 50 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 1/50, only registered: 0/50, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 0/50
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 10 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Course objectives
This seminar focuses on the transformation of the relationship between art, technology and futurity through the reshaping of human consciousness in the post-industrial age. From the advent of the industrial revolution to the birth of cybernetics, artificial intelligence & quantum computing, what poet William Blake called the “human abstract” has undergone a radical evolution – & this has been reflected in a transformation both of the idea of art & its forms, from machine aesthetics to cyberculture to xenofeminism & beyond. If modernity has come to be characterized by the “end of history” (Auschwitz, the Cold War, the Anthropocene, the Technological Singularity) in which humanity “experiences” its own negation, as Walter Benjamin suggested, as an aesthetic experience of the highest order, how is this mediated through the intersection of art & cybernetics? If technology, in its broadest ramification, represents both the necessity and impossibility of a “living on” – from individual, to species, to general ecology – beyond what Buckminster Fuller famously evoked as the mission of “Spaceship Earth,” is the task of art to represent the possibility of a post-future of the post-human? The seminar will address the work of artists from Marcel Duchamp, John Cage & Nam June Paik, to Stelarc, VNS Matrix, Nina Sellars, Merz, Mark Amerika, Laboria Cuboniks & Christian Bök – among others.
Literature
    required literature
  • Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Selected Writings 1987-2007 (London: Urbanomic, 2011)
  • Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (New York: Viking, 1977)
  • Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs & Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991)
  • Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminist Manifesto (www.laboriacuboniks.net [2016])
  • Jean Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred (New York: Semiotexte, 2006)
  • Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: FSG, 2002)
  • Katherine N. Hayles, How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature & Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
    not specified
  • Jasia Reichardt (ed.), Cybernetic Serendipidity: The Computer and the Arts (1968)
  • Art Since 1900, eds. Foster, Kraus, Bois, Buchloh (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004)
  • The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Post-Modern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1983)
Teaching methods
lecture, discussion
Assessment methods
terms of the assessment: a research paper (essay) of 2,500-3,000 wds on the topic of the lecture
Language of instruction
English
Further comments (probably available only in Czech)
Study Materials
The course is taught only once.
  • Enrolment Statistics (recent)
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