💽 FA/ARTH 3999 - New Media Art: From Duchamp To The Postdigital

A second-year undergraduate online lecture focused on introducing the history of new media art to students. Assessment methods included weekly discussion board entries, reading responses, key term quizzes, a group presentation, and a final take-home exam.

Course Summary: This course examines the history of new media art with the goal of providing students with a wide ranging, yet in-depth survey of key figures, artworks, and texts from the last seventy years. The course begins by theoretically interrogating the notions of medium, media, and new media, looking to key figures such as Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Clement Greenberg, before taking a thematic rather than strictly chronological tour through new media art history. Classes consist of a blend of slide lectures, video screenings, student presentations, and group discussion. Classes are organized thematically with weekly topics that will include combinations of the following topics: print, performance, photography, television, cinema, video, animation, systems, networks, surveillance, the body, games and play, social media, virtual worlds, simulation, ecologies, digital decay, and the postdigital. To support this topical breadth this course draws readings from a variety of disciplines that include art history, cinema and media studies, game studies, anthropology, and environmental criticism. By the end of this course students will have gained a broad understanding of the many fluid theoretical relationships between contemporary art and technology, as well as a more specific historical knowledge of key figures and objects with the new media art canon. Open to non-majors.

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