Contemporary Art After Digital Media: Course

From January 27 to 30, from 7 to 10 p.m., I will teach the course Arte Contemporânea Pós-Mídias Digitais at Sesc Pompeia.

Registration is open and must be completed at Sesc Pompeia’s Creativity Workshop. Information here.

The course proposal and detailed program follow:

Overview

This course is not interested in returning to the worn-out art-and-technology pairing or the conceptual emptiness of “new” media. We aim to discuss the vectors of current creative practice, their lines of force and the ways they put contemporary life under tension. Particular attention will be given to how artists have been politicizing uses of technological media and creating new aesthetic circuits through networks. Divided into four thematic strands, the course will analyze subversions of traditional authorship, emerging audiovisual models, the aesthetics of informational code and the politics of the virtualized body.

Program

1. Death of the author? Or “I am only interested in what is not mine”

The creative dimensions of the Industrial Revolution. Duchamp, Man Ray and Dada: a culture of appropriation and resignification. Pop and the irony of originality. The fascination of the culture industry and the language of consumption: Warhol and Lichtenstein. Copying, plagiarism, remix and mash-up: creative strategies in a networked world. The raves of Berlin and Detroit from the 1970s to the 1980s and the acclaim of DJ Christian Marclay at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Brazil: from the Manifesto Antropófago to Rosangela Rennó.

1. Interactive cinema and audiovisual work on an urban scale

Image machines from the Renaissance to cinema. The long history of art’s dematerialization and spatial distribution. Radio, television and video art. Nam June Paik and the cinema of the man without a camera. Virtual reality, immersive caves and the search for the image of the “fourth dimension.” Images on the Internet and the mobile phone revolution. Augmented reality and video mapping: the city as a cinema screen.

1. Arts of Code

**//Code_Up, by Giselle Beiguelman

From concrete poetry to cyberliterature. Brazil’s historical importance and the particular case of São Paulo. Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos and Decio Pignatari. A hypertextual world: readers, players and executable poetics. Alphanumeric, programmable text. The Internet as a field of noise and sonic and visual dysfunction. Cyberpunk countercommunication.

1. Bodies under surveillance, dissenting and free from biological atavism

The society of control envisioned by Deleuze. Mobile phones, cameras and machinic eyes. A culture of paranoia and the aesthetics of dissent. Social networks: walled gardens and territories of subversion. Cinema made with drones, anti-selfie apps and antisocial networks. The genome project revolution and the critical paradigms of transgenic art. “Artivism” and science: creation and subversion in a post-digital world.