Postgraduate Course: Interdisciplinary Creative Practices 2 (ARCH11085)
Course Outline
| School |
School of Arts, Culture and Environment |
College |
College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Course type |
Standard |
Availability |
Available to all students |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) |
SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Credits |
20 |
| Home subject area |
Architecture |
Other subject area |
None |
| Course website |
None
|
Taught in Gaelic? |
No |
| Course description |
This course aims to provide a programme of study for its students to develop skills and knowledge in creative practice across disciplines. Recognising the key role of convergent information and communications technology (ICT) in the facilitation of interdisciplinary modes of research and practice such technologies are treated as core to the course, including computer-aided design, interactive media, network and social technologies and other digital media. Students will become conversant with appropriate technologies and research methods and with the creative practices and social contexts within which such technologies are developed and applied. During this Semester 2 course each weekly element will consist of a reading selected from a small number of set texts, a seminar presentation or lecture and a group discussion. Students will be required to contribute to group seminar discussions and to research and co-lead one seminar presentation. |
Entry Requirements
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites |
|
| Prohibited Combinations |
Students MUST NOT also be taking
Media and Culture (ARCH11002)
|
Other requirements |
None
|
| Additional Costs |
None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Displayed in Visiting Students Prospectus? |
No |
Course Delivery Information
|
| Delivery period: 2010/11 Semester 2, Available to all students (SV1)
|
WebCT enabled: No |
Quota: None |
| Location |
Activity |
Description |
Weeks |
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
| No Classes have been defined for this Course |
| First Class |
First class information not currently available |
| No Exam Information |
Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes
On completing the programme students should be able to
a determine and develop appropriate strategies for working creatively across disciplines, allowing them to advise on the applicability of working methods and ICT systems in a variety of professional contexts
b critically evaluate various disciplinary working methods and technological systems and their applicability to particular tasks
c demonstrate through critical writing an understanding of the cultural and creative value of interdisciplinary working methods
d use information and communication technologies creatively in solving problems and formulating creative expression
e assess the value and applicability of working methods and technological systems in specific contexts
f critically assess general and specialist literature relevant to interdisciplinary creative practice and research. |
Assessment Information
| A 4000 word essay is required. The student presentation will represent 20% of the mark, the abstract for the essay 20% and the final essay 60%. |
Special Arrangements
| None |
Additional Information
| Academic description |
Not entered |
| Syllabus |
1. Informatics and media
The computer as a technical and conceptual apparatus has established itself as paradigmatic in Western culture. Media have become convergent, effecting how we use them and transforming how we work, communicate, create and play. Interdisciplinary practices have been facilitated through these changes. Our interpersonal relationships have been equally effected, with social technologies emerging as key to how we constitute ourselves as social beings. However, whilst digital systems play an important role in globalisation, access to such technology is by no means fairly distributed. This seminar will engage a number of approaches to these issues from sociological, technical and critical perspectives.
Reading:
Bolter, J. D, and Richard A. G. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press
Heidegger, M. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. trans. W. Lovitt. Harper and Row.
Winograd, T. and Flores, F. 1998. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Addison Wesley
2. Language and transliteracy
This seminar looks at language as a creative field of activity and how shifts in technologies and mediation have effected how we use and are used by language. Language consists of far more than the words and grammars we commonly employ. Our entire experience of the world can be considered as mediated by signs and symbols, many of which now exist primarily within the digital. Many artists are now explicitly engaging this area, whether in electronic literature, digital poetics or interactive art.
Reading:
Borges, JL. 2003 (1941). The Garden of Forking Paths, in New Media Reader, eds. Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, MIT Press.
Ong, W. J. 2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge.
Landow, G. P. 1994. Hypertext as collage-writing. In P. Delany, and G. P. Landow (eds.), Hypermedia and Literary Studies: 150-170. MIT Press.
3. Technologies of the social
This seminar considers the work of social theorists on the nature of technologically mediated culture. Computers are part of a complex technological apparatus that involves various institutions and practices. The computer fits within a web of interrelated equipment (the phone system, technologies of publication and supply), which is similarly connected to organisations, bureaucracies and social groupings.
Reading:
Castells, M. 1989. The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban-Regional Process. Basil Blackwell .
Latour, B. 2001. Reassembling the Social, Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, W. J. 1995. City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn. MIT Press.
4. Apparatus of the Visual
What can we see and how? When we can see the invisible we have augmented our capacity for sight, whether seeing around a corner (periscope), seeing into time (film), seeing into space (astronomy), seeing inside the body (MRI) or visualising the non-visual (digitally generated visualisation). What are the implications for the human when our senses are augmented in this manner?
Reading:
Dodge, M and Kitchin, R. 2001. Atlas of Cyberspace, Addison Wesley.
Cartwright, L. 1995. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture, University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, M. 2007. Panopticism in The Surveillance Studies Reader, Open University Press.
5. Mind and body
This module will critically engage the long assumed duality between mind and body from a number of points of view that argue for diverse models of self and being. Is the self a social construct or a duality founded on a mind/body split. Is the self limited to our biological and mental capacities or does it encompass other systems, phenomena and apparatus?
Reading:
Clark, A. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MIT Press.
Dourish, P. 2001. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press.
Haraway, D. J. 1995. Cyborgs and symbionts: living together in the new world order, in C. H. Gray (ed.) The Cyborg Handbook, xi-xx, New York: Routledge.
6. Nature and Nurture
What is natural? To what degree have we become artificial? Why are we fearful of genetic manipulation? Are we at risk of facilitating the development of a culture where people's futures are predetermined by their genetic make-up and where elite parents are able to select to ensure the success of their progeny? Does gene therapy offer new cures? What can we learn from previous attempts to engineer better humans?
Reading:
McLuhan, M. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Paul, D. 1998. The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate, SUNY Press.
Stengers, I and Prigogine, I. 1984. Order out of Chaos, Man's new dialogue with nature, Random House.
7. Simulation and automation
It has been argued that we now live in a world of simulations where the ideas of authenticity and the original have been lost to us, if they ever existed. This point of view emerged from the areas of phenomenology and semiotics. However, in a world of automata and distributed computing it is possible that the materiality around us has been transformed into a simulacra of things. What does it mean when things carry within them complex data sets that function to situate them in the world and objects are aware of and can communicate with one another?
Reading:
Baudrillard, J. 2001. Simulacra and Simulations. In Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster. Polity.
Eco, U. 1986, Travels in Hyper-reality, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Minsky, M. 1985. The Society of Mind, Simon and Schuster
8. Nanotechnology
How small is small? When does the visible become invisible? What are the implications of nanotechnologies for the human organism and condition? Are we in danger of becoming "grey goo" or are the emergent challenges of nantechnology more to do with the augmentation of the human and fair access to life enhancing and lengthening technologies? Will such technology lead to the emergence of an over-race of super-humans?
Reading:
Milburn, C. 2002. Nanovision: Engineering the Future, Duke University Press.
Stone, A. R. 1995. The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, MIT Press.
Vesna, V. 2002. Mind Shifting and Future Bodies: from Networks to Nanosystems, Artmedia, Paris: accessible at http://nano.arts.ucla.edu/nano_pub_03/ARTMEDIA%20VIII%20-%20PARIS%20-%20Victoria%20VESNA.htm
9. Special Effects and the Uncanny
How is our sense of the real affected by advances in visualisation and other representational technologies? How do we relate to a robot that appears to be and behaves as if it is human? Does such an interaction alter the manner in which we conceived of ourselves and other humans? This seminar includes a screening of the 1982 film Bladerunner.
Reading:
Freud, S. 2003. The Uncanny, Penguin.
Kittler, F. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford University Press.
Rottman, B. 2008. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being, Duke University Press.
10. Ethics and authorship
The law is the instrument of our social agreements and contracts, our shared moral and ethical frameworks. In the multi-cultural context of today's globalised society our capacity to formulate and implement shared laws is profoundly challenged. What is the role of the creative practitioner in this? What are the limits to free speech, representation or protest, if any? Do people have absolute rights or, within a relative world-view, are our rights only those we can negotiate or seize? Whose law is the law? Is it possible to practice as an artist, fulfilling a particular social role, without being complicit? This seminar includes a screening of The Yes Men Fix The World.
Reading:
Debord, G. 1992. Society of the Spectacle. Rebel Press.
Foucault, M. 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Penguin.
Lessig, L. 2005. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, Penguin.
11. Are we there yet?
Yes, we are ... a round up of the course, where we will seek to draw connections between the various topics and disciplines engaged and reflect upon how they have affected and are engaged through the practical and written work produced by students during the programme. This week will incude a re-reading of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures.
Reading:
Snow, C.P. 1959. Two Cultures, Cambridge University Press.
|
| Transferable skills |
Not entered |
| Reading list |
Biagioli, M and Galison, P. 2003. Scientific Authorship, Routledge.
Bichlbaum A. and Bonanno, M. 2008. Yes Men Fix the World. DVD. Dogwoof Pictures.
Biggs, S. 2008. Transculturation, Transliteracy and Generative Poetics. http://hosted.simonbiggs.easynet.co.uk/texts/trans.pdf
Biggs, S. and Leach, J. 2004. Autopoiesis: novelty, meaning and value. Artwords London.
Bush, V. 2003 (1945). As we may think, in New Media Reader, eds. Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, MIT Press.
Cytowic, R. E. 1995. Synesthesia: Phenomenology And Neuropsychology $û A Review of Current Knowledge, PSYCHE, 2(10), July 1995 http://psyche.csse.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html
Douzinas, C. and Nead, L. 1999. Law and the Image. University of Chicago Press.
Electronic Book Review, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/
Feigenson, N. and Spiesel, C. 2009, Law on Display. New York University Press.
Heim, M. 1987. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Lindley, C. 2005. The Semiotics of Time Structure in Ludic Space As a Foundation for Analysis and Design, in Game Studies, Volume 5, number 1, accessible at http://www.gamestudies.org/0501/lindley/
Lyotard, J-F. 1986. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press.
Moravec, H. 1988. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, Harvard University Press.
Poster, M. 1992. The Mode of Information. Polity Press.
Rabinow, P. 1999. French DNA, University of Chicago Press.
Rabinow, P. 2004. A machine to make the future: bio-tech Chronicles, Princeton.
Ruskin, J. 2003. True and the Beautiful in Nature, Art, Morals and Religion. Kessinger Publishing.
Scott, R. 1982. Bladerunner, Warner Home Video
Turing, A. 2003 (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in New Media Reader, eds. Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, MIT Press.
Webber, S. 1996. Mass Mediauras: Essays on Form, Technics and Media, Stanford University Press.
Wiener, N. 1950. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Houghton Mifflin.
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| Study Abroad |
Not entered |
| Study Pattern |
Not entered |
| Keywords |
interdisciplinarity creativity art practice critical convergence media transliteracy |
Contacts
| Course organiser |
Dr John Lee
Tel: (0131 6)50 4420
Email: J.Lee@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary |
Mrs Catherine Carmichael
Tel: (0131 6)50 2305
Email: Catherine.Carmichael@ed.ac.uk |
|
copyright 2011 The University of Edinburgh -
31 January 2011 7:19 am
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