The Course Outline for 2010 can be downloaded from the “Course Outline and Readings’ page—link is at the top of this page. There is also a full course outline online here—with all links live. This will prove useful for your class preparation.
We’re very excited to announce that the course will be taught this year by Dr Frances Dyson, Dr Dyson is a well known specialist in the area, and has recently returned from working in Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. You should talk to her about issues to do with the topics of the course, or assignments during classes, or during her consultation times on Fridays.
However, please note that Dr Dyson will not be able to deal with questions regarding which tutorial you are in, entry to the course and so on. If you have questions about such things, you should contact Andrew Murphie by email <a.murphie@unsw.edu.au>.
We’ll be discussing both Augmented and Virtual Realities (AR and VR) as examples of how connecting things up differently transforms our actions/perceptions (which are increasingly merged, precisely via technical connections between what we do and what we perceive, and vice versa, in closer to something like real-time … or, we might say, increasingly approximate in technical terms the symbiotic relationship between perception and action we have always had).
This is a also a great time to know what the sense of proprioception is (your body’s sense of itself in movement .. the “interoceptive” sense by which the body knows where it’s tendons, muscles and so on are relative to each other at any given time)is, or the haptic (to do with touch, which is a different matter to the proprioceptive, even if it involves it), if you don’t already. Here are some links.
And you might like to think of sensation from the other side of the fence, that is, from the point of view of technological sensation and perception .. e.g. robotics … and you might look at this post from the past on robotics
It’s interesting to think how the electronic and digital reworking these senses that are so very close to us.
As for this week, the Houston reading on VJing and Simondon is perhaps complex but I think one that might lead you to rethink your relationship to technology. I enjoy it more each time I read it. But the key quote for this week is probably this, from Anne-Marie Boisvert:
It is significant that we speak about a remix “culture”, for it is much more than a mere musical movement. Naturally it includes cultural products - in other words, the “works” themselves. But it is also and especially the events in which these “products”(ie, music and/or video works) find themselves not so much presented as truly (re)created and remixed each time. The remix depends, above all, on the way the artist interacts with his or her machinery; on the “samples” chosen and the way they are related … (On Bricolage: http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/remix.php?is=8&file=4&tlang=0)
Which is to say that everything can be sampled/resequenced/modulated … music and sounds, images, bits of code (whether computer or genetic), experience, friendships, brainwaves, relations, technical structures, their elements, their modes of relating to the exterior, internal resonances, even perhaps “imagination” or “intuition”. Boisvert even applies this to politics, suggesting remix culture is the “death of ideology”, and a ongoing remix of the elements of history in general (so that any kind of notion of fixed history, or of living in an easy to define “historical period” goes out the window).
The other side of this, as DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) notes, is that “Whenever you look at an image, there’s a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply to create a sense of order.” (http://www.djspooky.com/articles/rebirth.php). And the same for all the other things above I’ve suggested are open to sampling, resequencing, modulation. Here Houston’s account of Simondon’s approach to technology is very useful beyond the context of VJing!
Really interesting contemporary aspects of this re-modulation/sequencing are thought about in the fabulous issue of Vague Terrain—Biomorph (in my opinion now a leading journal in several areas).
This piece has it all …. For the geekier among us, this is a great project by the international group Aetherbits. It’s well worth while watching this short video, which covers a very wide range of topics, from datamining to synthesis, with some interesting software and operations to back it up. They’re also interested in generating a new kind of media awareness.
