Sample of Courses
Graduate Level:
Planetary Futures
Go to Course Website and Projects
Furnishing the Cloud
Go to Exhibition Website and Projects
Infrastructural Futures
Making Sense
The Eye Through Time
Time, Life, and Matter:
Becoming Other:
Readings and screenings may include Artaud,
Walter Benjamin, Michael Taussig, Susan Buck-Morss, Elizabeth Grosz, Jonathan
Crary, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour, Friedrich
Kittler, and Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-Ha
Undergraduate Level:
Power+Knowledge: Introductory Topics in the History of Science
In this class we will be taking up some of the most pressing questions facing society today—from ecology, to technology, to medicine, to genetics—and asking what history can tell us about the present, and how historical study can inform our ability to act upon these issues. Together, we will come to have a better understanding not only of science and society, but also about history. This class is an introduction to why history matters, even to those things that sometimes don’t seem to have a history like our biologies, our bodies, or ourselves.
Introduction to Cybercultures Today we live in a world that is fully visual and sensory: inundated by images, sounds, and interactive experiences and saturated by digital media that shapes minds, bodies and our daily habits. From terrorist events such as 9/11 to the Deep Water Horizon oil spill, the mediated world of representations radically effects pour understanding of the world; ideas about our environment and the globe; as well as our political and social actions and imaginaries. How did these set of conditions –– taken for granted so as to not be considered –– come about?
This course will examine this new landscape of society by providing a historical and theoretical investigation of the relationship between aesthetics, power, knowledge, and digital media: from the birth of modernism and modernity in the nineteenth century to the digital era. The course takes an experimental and interdisciplinary approach rather than a comprehensive overview, integrating the history of science, media studies, and the history of art. Examining the history of technology and theories of perception alongside critical developments in modern and contemporary artistic and cultural practices, the course follows two thematic thread: the relationship between power and perception, and the relationship between power and representation. Within these broad subject areas, weekly lectures cover a range of topics and case studies, among which include: new forms of spectatorship and attention; the politics of visuality; the representation of race, gender, and sexuality in scientific discourse and media practices; the relationship between digital media, surveillance, and terror; and the effects of globalization upon concepts of territory and space.
Design, Politics, Society Whether by providing agitprop for revolutionary movements, an aesthetics of empire, or a language for numerous avant-gardes, design has changed the world. But how? Why? And under what conditions? This course proposes a consideration of design as an historical agent, a contested category, and a practice.
Casting a wide net, the course will consider a range of geographical locations (“West,” “East,” “North,” South,” and contact zones between these constructed categories). We will examine not only designed objects (e.g., industrial design, decorative arts, graphic design, fashion) but also spaces (e.g., architecture, interiors, landscapes, urban settings) and systems (e.g., environment, economy, communications, services, governments). Together we will ask: What is design? How does it relate to society, history, economy, and politics? Students will get to engage with how histories of the past inform our contemporary media saturated lives, and experiment with new ways to do history through use of digital media, visual materials, and aesthetic practices.
Origins of Contemporary Visual Culture This course explores a history of vision, visuality, and
the screen since the 19th century.
It investigates how machines, life, and knowledge are historically
reformulated and organized. The investigation traverses avant-garde art
practices, scientific experiments, and factory floors, including new ways to
approach the history of representation, media, and the body. Cold War/Hot Mediums This course examined the relationship between technology,
subjectivity, and culture between the end of World War II and the present;
focusing on tracing the emergence of digital technologies and mapping transformations
in the relationship between bodies, machines, and minds. Topics included : psychopharmacology, the emergence of
“information” as the dominant paradigm for both economy and biology, and the
legacy of Cold War obsessions with control, communication, and security. Feminist Screen Theory The course was organized around the question: What is the
relationship between feminism and the screen? This course is an investigation
of this question; inquiring into
what feminism can offer our imagination of media technologies and practices.
And how feminist art and media
practice informs, contests, and re-creates the interface. The course was taught combining histories of science, cinema,
and colonialism with contemporary feminist theories of vision and visuality. This course was the departments
introductory general survey to feminist approaches to visual culture.
