MPM 34 - Cultural Theory and Research Studio

Week 1 September 8 : Emergence and Participation: Key Concepts
Readings:
Mark Buchanan, Strange Connections and Week Ties
Steven Johnson, Intro + The Myth of the Ant Queen

Additional Perspectives:


Toshiyuki Nakagaki slime mold maze August 2000


The small world networks
CeaseFire: The Campaign to Stop the Shooting

Week 2 September : Art Objects; Art Audiences, Art Experience
Readings:
Peter Burger, The Negation of Autonomy in Art
Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics

Additional Perspectives:
Burger Quote:
The avant-garde intends the abolition of autonomous art by which it means that art is to be integrated into the praxis of life. This has not occurred and, presumably cannot occur, in bourgeois society unless it be as a false sublation of autonomous art.

Marcel Duchamp, Sixteen Miles of String, 1942


Nicolas Bourriaud Quote: The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space), points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art.

Week 3 September 22 : A Short History of Telematic Practice
Readings:
Roy Ascott, Is There Love In the Telematic Embrace?
Annmarie Chandler, Animating the Social: Mobile Image

Additional Perspectives:
Telematic art will come of age when we figure out how to transmit more than two senses (right now everything is visual or aural), and when people figure out that the way things behave is more important than the way they look, and that this is a proper concern for artists. [Norman White, Interview with Jeremy Turner (2003)
http://openspace.ca/web/outerspace/NormanWhiteInterview2003.html]

Week 4 & 5 - Presentations

Week 6 October 13 : The City, the Senses and the Poerty if Pattern
Readings:
Lewis Hyde, A Draft of Whitman
Steven Johnson, Street Life

Additional Perspectives:
Hyde:
The artist’s gift refines the materials of perception or intuition that have been bestowed upon himself the artist is gifted, the gift increases in its passage through the self. The artist makes something higher than what he has been given, and this, the finished work, is the third gift, the one offered to the world…

Roy Ascott:
We begin to understand that chance and change, chaos and indeterminacy, transcendence and transformation, the immaterial and the numinous are terms of the centre of our self-understanding and our new visions of reality. How then, could there be a content—sets of meanings—contained within telematic art when every aspect of networking in dataspace is in a state of transformation and of becoming?

Week 7, Democracy & Week 8, Mid-Term

Week 9 November 3 : Hybrid Spaces, Fluid Realitites: The Space of Flows
Readings:
Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity
Pierre Levy, The Four Spaces + Semiotics
Munster and Lovink, Theses on Distributed Aesthetics

Week 10 November 10 : Gift Economy
Readings:
Lewis Hyde, The Bond and the Gift Community

Week 11 November 17 : Community and Collaboration: Theory and Practice
Readings:
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community
Edouard Glossant, Poetics of Relation

Week 12 November 24 : Improvised Action and Playful Participation
Readings:
Steven Johnson, Listening to Feedback
Roberto Pinto, Collective Intelligence: The Work of Lucy Orta

Additional Perspectives:
Pierre Huyghe: http://www.pierrehuyghe.com/
Larry Crammer - Act Up

Improve Everywhere/ Flash Mob
-point is to disrupt & reflect on the routine


Howard Rheingold -  a critic, writer, and teacher; his specialties are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities
Andreas Gursky - Exampled of work: stock exchange, union rave


Burning man – Nevada desert