Syllabus_Graduate Seminar on Media Art Theory II (Fall 2015) (original) (raw)

2015

[*Note: One of the main classes I enjoy teaching on every semester, this seminar constitutes arguably the backbone of my critical and scholarly formation as an art critic and a scholar. While updated virtually every semester, and traversing various yet a peculiar group of thinkers such as Simmel, Uexküll, Heidegger, Karatani, Dufrenne, Merleau-Ponty, Simondon, Kittler, and Agamben, this seminar nonetheless remains fixated on the central question: what is it that which makes artworks and our experiences of them possible? What is that which mediates us (as artists, spectators and audiences) and artworks? Or, put differently, what are the conditions of (im)possibilities of these entities and their relationships, which often vanish upon completing their roles? These are the questions that will lead us somewhere, if not everywhere.] "This seminar seeks to think through and reflect on 'media' less as a material or a set of means than as fundamental 'conditions of possibility' of art/aesthetics. Put differently, this class does not try to 'recall' familiar 'pedigrees' and 'idées fixes' the idea of 'media art' is bound to suggest via, say, a conditioned reflex. If art(ist)s willing to characterize themselves in terms of a 'specific medium' are becoming harder to find, it is strictly due to the situations where the relationship between 'art in general' and 'media' itself has become an object of inquiry. Hence the idea of the 'post-medium.' When the status of media as a medium, i.e., what mediates (aesthetic) entities in the middle (cf. 'in media res'), is displaced/disjointed (again), and extant material coordinates are in ruins, 'media art' must be redefined anew. With these in mind, this seminar concerns concerted efforts and works to render figural- if not ‘figurative’- something, which is- despite its essential contribution to mediating certain things to function as aesthetic objects- now somehow made virtually invisible. In this sense, we will pay attention to scattered genealogies of divisions or separations dividing 'background and foreground', 'objects and circumstances', 'subjects and environments/Umwelt', and, further, 'the visible and the invisible.'"