[spectre] might I suggest

Ostrow/Kaneda so5@nyu.edu
Sun, 23 Sep 2001 09:48:37 -0400


I used the following syllabus to teach a grad seminarat NYU in 1997,
obviously it needs some updating but I do believe it is structurally sound.


THE REDEFINITION OF ART?  ART AND TECHNOLOGY
This course will discuss the  issues of technology and contemporary culture
within the context of both art hsitory and modernism's avant garde
practices. It will address not only such perenial questions as: Have art
and the avant garde been displaced by an all-pervasive generalized
aestheticism?    Has art been brought to its end or is it possible to
reconcieve it ? Does Art now  strives to re-orientate itself between the
partially connected media systems that constitute our enviromnment or is a
means of resistance? Is it still possible to concieve of oneself as an
artist in the traditional sense? How is the nature of representation and
interpertation changing? These discussions will revolve around  pertinent
articles in a wide variety of fields. Particular attention will be given to
the interconnectivity  of technological developement and changes in the
subject, content, forms and modes of cultural expression.


1)     Intro  from Guttenburg to the Digital

2)     Romanticism and  the subjective world
          Reading: Mar.shal McLuhan, Media and Cultural Change
The Essential McLuhan edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, Anansi
Press
 and  The Work of Art in ithe Age of its Technical Reproducibility by
Walter Benjamin

3)    Classicism and Realism : the age of science
           Reading: Mass Mediaura, or: Art, Aura and Media in the work of
Benjamin
 from Mass Mediauras, form, technic, media edited by Samuel  Weber, Pub.
Stanford University Press

4)    Modernism  and the fragmentation of the  data stream
           Reading: Martin Hiedegger; The Question Concerning Technology,
Basic 	Writings, Publ. Harper and Row, Edited by David Farrell Krell

5)  Avant garde and technology Cubism/ futurism, film and relativity
           Reading Chapter 4, Techniques of the Observer, on Vision and
Modernity in
                the 19 Century by Jonathan Crary, An October Book,
Published by MIT Press

6)  Dada and expressionism the revolt against reason, the chaos of
     	standardization
            Andreas Huyssen: The Hidden Dialectic: Avantgarde-Technology-Mass
                 Culture After The Great Divide by Andreas Huyssen <
University of Indianna Press.
7)   Constructivism and the Bauhaus. mass production
  	Reading:  Herbert Read


8)    Surrealism and  AbEx the problems of the delirium of representation,
information and process,
	Reading:  Chapter 4, Mythic  History: Fetish,  The Dialectics of
Seeing; 	Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project by Susan Buck
Morse,  Publ. MIT Presss

9)  IG, nouveau Realisme and pop, the spectacle of mass culture
          Reading: Society of the Spectacle  by Guy deBord

10) Fromalism Minmalism  the contimum of the  readymade
          Reading: The By Marshall Mcluhan

11) conceptual art, Fluxus  information and data as experience
           Reading: By to be announced

12)  Post modernism the first time around, modernism and the re- run
            Reading: from The Mirror of Production By Jean Baudrillard

13) post-modernism : representation in the age of the universal medium
             Reading: Freidich Kittler:The World of the Symbollic: A World
of the 			Machine
14)  The Changing Terms of Culture
Reading : Nicholas Zurbrugg: 'Apocalyptic'? 'Negativity'? 'Pessimistic'?
Baudrillard, Virillo, Techno-Culture  Pub. Photography Post Photography
(ed. Stuart Koop) Melbourne Centre for Contemporary Photography (1995)Hand
in Classroom notes