learning goals

Our goal this semester is to develop a critical perspective on the technological age we’re living in by becoming digitally literate artists and well informed netizens. We'll establish our digital literacy by learning how computers and the Internet work (including some fundamental code literacy) as well as why they work the way they do by exploring the individuals, organizations and ideas that have shaped the development of these technologies throughout history.

Our goal is also to learn how to recognize bias in technology (embedded by the culture that produced it) and in turn understand how those technologies affect us as environments.

You will remember from the time when you first became acquainted with a petri dish, that a medium was defined as a substance within which a culture grows. If you replace the word 'substance' with the word 'technology,' the definition would stand as a fundamental principle of media ecology: A medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture's politics, social organization, and habitual ways of thinking

Neil Postman

Lastly, we’ll aim to make work that speaks to technology’s biases and/or effects on society as well as consider how we might influence the development of these digital environments through studio work rooted in a digitally literate research methodology.

I'd like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other, a hammer that can build a house or smash a skull. But there is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image. (...) We think we are creating the system, but the system is also creating us. We build the system, we live in its midst, and we are changed.

Ellen Ullman



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