Where is Stephen Hawking?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFjwXe-pXvM
SANDY STONE QUOTE:
“Sitting, as he always does, in his wheelchair, utterly motionless, except for his fingers on the joystick of the laptop; and on the floor to one side of him is the PA system microphone, nuzzling into the Votrax's tiny loudspeaker...
Exactly where, I say to myself, is Hawking?...
In an important sense, Hawking doesn't stop being Hawking at the edge of his visible body. There is the obvious physical Hawking, vividly outlined by the way our social conditioning teaches us to see a person as a person. But a serious part of Hawking extends into the box in his lap… A serious part of that silicon and plastic assemblage in his lap extends into him as well...
No box, no discourse...
Where does he stop? Where are his edges?”
DONNA HARAWAY CYBORG QUOTE
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction…
Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs…who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted…
By the late twentieth century… we are all [cyborgs], theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…
The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality...
JODI My Desktop OS X 10.4.7 (2007)
http://www.ubu.com/film/jodi_osx.html
Simon Penny petit mal 1993
http://ace.uci.edu/penny/works/petitmal.html
Survival Research Laboratories
Virtues of Negative Fascination 1985 - 1986
http://www.ubu.com/film/srl_virtues.html
drone video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0gY17O1MwI
One can immediately picture a peculiar kind of armed couch potato, caught somewhere between a videogame and the news. We hold our own remote devices that give us the fictions of instant command, and sitting in front of our television sets or computer screens, we are oddly enough about as close to the action as the actual pilots get -- as well as those secret teams who have their fingers on the triggers.
Part of a distributed mass with no fixed contours, with no one person to locate at the helm, the unmanned system is no ONE yet everyone.
Its projectile: the extension of some inner combative state?
A distributed, armed intent?
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
week 3
Kustom Kar Kommandos
Kenneth Anger 1965
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_28AhRynu0A
Stelarc exoskeleton 1999
Leg movements controlled by arm gestures & controller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuzGraK_ldI&feature=related
Ballet mechanique 1924
Fernand Leger, dir, with cinematography by Man Ray
http://www.ubu.com/film/leger.html
Modern Times, 1936
Charlie Chaplin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30
Micha Cardenas
Becoming Dragon
http://secondloop.wordpress.com/
What ever happened to the couch potato?
Not so very long ago, in America, we were in danger of becoming embalmed by the image. The specter of the “couch potato,” propped up in front of the television set, haunted what seemed to be an increasingly sedentary culture. Fused with the image in a mind-meld, the body became a fulfillment vehicle for the desire-creating machine that is television. But it very often just became fat.
In the early days of cyberspace, this figure morphed into a “meatself” parked at the computer monitor -- a viewer who, released from the restraints of the body, frolicked gleefully in the matrix. In both cases, we had a nearly inert lump of flesh whose only life signs were tiny eye and finger flickers. With television, the body was immobilized; with early cyberspace, there was the premonition of its abandonment -- in a “lifestyled” culture increasingly at odds with the reality of its flesh. We wondered: what would become of the body rendered obsolete in the playgrounds of virtuality?
Those days, for better or worse, were soon over. The rallying cry became: Time to get in shape! Wrested from the chair and launched into circulation within new mobile communications landscapes, we were to get our asses in gear, outfitted with arrays of portable devices. Mobile phones that were Web-enabled. Palm PCs outfitted with modems. Wearable GPS systems. Internet-enhanced eyegoggles. Smart shoes. Personal satellites. Implants.
It made one long for the days when one could just sit there.
--
--
what the vehicle (metaphor) alludes to regarding to the history of art
The vehicle metaphor
allows us to look at almost anything in terms of how
technology - art - perception - body
come together in one 'cluster'
it allows us to look at how this 'cluster' has come to exist in different times and places
it allows us to look at changing forms of identity, movement, forces, objects, rhythms, desires, etc.
it allows us to look at how it effects & registers societal & personal change
through the vehicle, people, of various time periods, changed their view of the world and, thus, art itself. technology changed
their perception of the world (and being in the world) and as their perception changed so to did the technology (its being in the world).
Kenneth Anger 1965
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_28AhRynu0A
Stelarc exoskeleton 1999
Leg movements controlled by arm gestures & controller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuzGraK_ldI&feature=related
Ballet mechanique 1924
Fernand Leger, dir, with cinematography by Man Ray
http://www.ubu.com/film/leger.html
Modern Times, 1936
Charlie Chaplin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30
Micha Cardenas
Becoming Dragon
http://secondloop.wordpress.com/
What ever happened to the couch potato?
Not so very long ago, in America, we were in danger of becoming embalmed by the image. The specter of the “couch potato,” propped up in front of the television set, haunted what seemed to be an increasingly sedentary culture. Fused with the image in a mind-meld, the body became a fulfillment vehicle for the desire-creating machine that is television. But it very often just became fat.
In the early days of cyberspace, this figure morphed into a “meatself” parked at the computer monitor -- a viewer who, released from the restraints of the body, frolicked gleefully in the matrix. In both cases, we had a nearly inert lump of flesh whose only life signs were tiny eye and finger flickers. With television, the body was immobilized; with early cyberspace, there was the premonition of its abandonment -- in a “lifestyled” culture increasingly at odds with the reality of its flesh. We wondered: what would become of the body rendered obsolete in the playgrounds of virtuality?
Those days, for better or worse, were soon over. The rallying cry became: Time to get in shape! Wrested from the chair and launched into circulation within new mobile communications landscapes, we were to get our asses in gear, outfitted with arrays of portable devices. Mobile phones that were Web-enabled. Palm PCs outfitted with modems. Wearable GPS systems. Internet-enhanced eyegoggles. Smart shoes. Personal satellites. Implants.
It made one long for the days when one could just sit there.
--
--
what the vehicle (metaphor) alludes to regarding to the history of art
The vehicle metaphor
allows us to look at almost anything in terms of how
technology - art - perception - body
come together in one 'cluster'
it allows us to look at how this 'cluster' has come to exist in different times and places
it allows us to look at changing forms of identity, movement, forces, objects, rhythms, desires, etc.
it allows us to look at how it effects & registers societal & personal change
through the vehicle, people, of various time periods, changed their view of the world and, thus, art itself. technology changed
their perception of the world (and being in the world) and as their perception changed so to did the technology (its being in the world).
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
week 2
The Margaret Morse reading, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction" will be put on Reserve in the library. It is in the book Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture.
The two videos that we looked at today, along with descriptive texts, can be found here:
http://www.ubu.com/film/snow_wavelength.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/aitken_electricearth.html
here are the notes on the cinema/car:
The cinematic image has movement, different kinds of movements. But these movements could only be perceived because people were once put into theaters, locked into place before the screen and held in a situation of "blocked vision." These immobile people, held in "seat arrest" and slowly trained how to behave and see, became sensitive to the mobility of the world through the mediation of the screen.
They became sensitive to the technologically-fabricated illusion of movement, but also an even more complicated movement, which might be called the language or grammar of cinema: the jump from one element to the next, with the underlying theory of editing that "ensured" the transition.
Immobilized and spellbound before the screen, viewers internalize the conditions of the representational apparatus, the behaviors that it represents on its screen, and its grammar.
Think of the way Charlie Chaplin internalized the jerky pace of silent movies in his walking style, and the rapid speech patterns of early films.) Viewers and representations perform and corporealize themselves in response to what they "see" and "know" through technological and visual mediations.
Technological conditions, media norms, and represented actions are identified with, routed through the body, and used to determine acceptable parameters of movement, gesture, and behavior.
When enacted repeatedly, as in routines and rituals, these "stored" movements and gestures often no longer occupy conscious awareness: they are performed more or less automatically, as if the knowledge resided in a body part (e.g. fingers), or in physical mobility itself (dancing), rather than in the mind. As Katherine Hayles points out, it becomes difficult to intellectualize or change such habitualized practice: even if one's conscious beliefs might suggest otherwise, one is compelled to accept that which one is repeatedly compelled to perform.
This "realm of routine" therefore has political implications. Bourdieu comments that all societies wishing to make a "new man" approach the task through processes of "deculturation" and "reculturation" focused on bodily practices; hence, revolutionaries place great emphasis "on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners," because "they entrust to [the body] in abbreviated and practical, or mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture."
On the other "side," so to speak, the representation undergoes its own process of internalization. It incorporates the changing perceptual modes and activities of its viewer, as well as the changing conditions of its viewing environment. It does so by harnessing routines in interactive and analytical form. The representation "gets to know you" by opening itself up to realtime intervention, by connecting itself up to forms of surveillance, and by annexing procedures of analysis -- extending both its form and its purview. Gathering information through interactive interfaces and demographic, sociological, or market studies, including technologies of surveillance that make forms of observation and analysis increasingly precise, the image "enacts" statistics, incorporating the behaviors, conditions, and norms of both its viewers and its viewing "theater." It performs and corporealizes itself by reading its lines off the audience. It then helps to produce, modify, and mobilize that audience.
The more representations are able to mobilize and align elements in a network of heterogeneous allies the more they become, the more they "act." (In advertising, the more they "have legs.") The image, then, increases its "acting power" to the extent that it annexes routines, which are translated into useful patterns and profiles that can be sorted according to changing conditions and needs. A matrix of information flow is determined -- advancing toward realtime -- in which bodies are mobilized, oriented, and adjusted.
The viewer-navigator internalizes the routines of the image through the agency of a vehicle and is trained to "drive" as such. The image internalizes the routines of the viewer-navigator through the monitoring agency of a vehicle (GPS etc). ("The image" here of course is a frame within the "globalized cinema" of interconnecting visual media.)
In strengthening its analytical matrix, the image "learns" what the driver does, how it moves, what it wants, down to the smallest increments, eventually the tiniest eye flickers, the tiniest vacillations of desire. Armed with this knowledge, the vehicle mobilizes or "transports" an occupant through a landscape and normalizes this procedure.
It's where technology rises up to meet the body and the body pushes back, the surface in between molded by this interaction, the tension painted over in the guise of choice, comfort, convenience. Acclimating subject and representation within a technology of transport, it is a routined network of co-determining currents, cycles, codes, and channels,
This sense of enclosure need not be material, but can be induced through insertion or implantation. Think of the remote control device, the wireless communicator, or the augmented reality headgear as part of a vehicular apparatus. This protective enclosure, a "bubble" of subjectivity, becomes the condition for presence itself -- defining (and resolving) an "in here" versus an "out there," a here against a there, or a now against a later, between which its occupant is physically, mentally, or virtually transported. This "vehicle" is a figure for a condition of protected intimacy cast against a larger condition of the urban. It is a figure for technologically-mediated mobilization, as it encapsulates the body in a bubble of immediacy and shuttles it about.
Fredric Jameson writes that we read our subjectivity off the things outside. The urban is what compels one to move and to invent new forms of movement to "keep up" with its demands.
----
below is the story I gave about landing in the airplane:
Landing
We placed our tray tables, seats, and bodies in an upright and locked position in preparation for landing. We were silent, all eyes transfixed on the hypnotic images of parting clouds that filled the cabin’s projection screens, compliments of a camera mounted on the nose cone, affording us the spectacle of the very sky through which we speed. We are inside the plane's own movie. Spellbound in the eye of the projectile.
Suddenly, over the roar of the airplane, and in synchronization with the rumble of the landing gear lowering into place, a shriek cut through the calm. One man was emitting this piercing scream. His hands clenched the armrest with an iron grip; his head was thrown back, eyes closed and mouth agape. He seemed to be suspended within a fire of pleasurable danger, of the orgasmic/roller coaster/horror film variety. Was it the erotic charge of death that surged through his body? Fellow passengers shifted nervously. The screech ended. An empty plastic cup rolled up the aisle.
Needless to say, the atmosphere of the cabin has now radically changed. Passengers shift nervously in their seats. Yet, strapped into our seats, subject to the regulatory agency of air travel and of the social contract, there are only three acceptable positions.
Our heads turned sideways, we look out the window.
Our heads aimed straight ahead, we look at the monitors.
Our heads lowered, we avert our eyes -- unsure of how to deal politely with the outburst. (How strange that in such situations -- when a fellow traveler becomes drastically unmoored, his only recourse a primal screech -- one cannot be "caught" looking. Decorum requires a furtive, sidelong glance.)
We are caught in some kind of elaborate choreography combining body, technology, and perception -- body, machine, and social environment.
They involve the overlapping of image and actuality, pleasure and fear, fixity and mobility.
This choreography is a regulatory domain whose materialization is the plane.
In one sense, it's a choreography of power. There is a machinery and institution that makes us adequate to see. There is a machinery and institution that shapes the legitimacy of our perspective. There is a machinery and institution that positions us as subjects.
There is the machinery producing this view, and the more intimate machinery that is making one adequate to see it.
And there are the ways in which one squirms within these machineries, which may result in the emission of something as grand as a shriek or as faint as a blush.
I am thinking of parallels to the screech: the outcry that erupts, that shoots upward, within a tectonics of descent. The resistance, the counterbalance, the rising against the falling.
I am thinking of that moment when the ordering forces that maintain a body’s coherency are, however briefly, overcome by its urges, as it slips out of its own bounds.
The two videos that we looked at today, along with descriptive texts, can be found here:
http://www.ubu.com/film/snow_wavelength.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/aitken_electricearth.html
here are the notes on the cinema/car:
The cinematic image has movement, different kinds of movements. But these movements could only be perceived because people were once put into theaters, locked into place before the screen and held in a situation of "blocked vision." These immobile people, held in "seat arrest" and slowly trained how to behave and see, became sensitive to the mobility of the world through the mediation of the screen.
They became sensitive to the technologically-fabricated illusion of movement, but also an even more complicated movement, which might be called the language or grammar of cinema: the jump from one element to the next, with the underlying theory of editing that "ensured" the transition.
Immobilized and spellbound before the screen, viewers internalize the conditions of the representational apparatus, the behaviors that it represents on its screen, and its grammar.
Think of the way Charlie Chaplin internalized the jerky pace of silent movies in his walking style, and the rapid speech patterns of early films.) Viewers and representations perform and corporealize themselves in response to what they "see" and "know" through technological and visual mediations.
Technological conditions, media norms, and represented actions are identified with, routed through the body, and used to determine acceptable parameters of movement, gesture, and behavior.
When enacted repeatedly, as in routines and rituals, these "stored" movements and gestures often no longer occupy conscious awareness: they are performed more or less automatically, as if the knowledge resided in a body part (e.g. fingers), or in physical mobility itself (dancing), rather than in the mind. As Katherine Hayles points out, it becomes difficult to intellectualize or change such habitualized practice: even if one's conscious beliefs might suggest otherwise, one is compelled to accept that which one is repeatedly compelled to perform.
This "realm of routine" therefore has political implications. Bourdieu comments that all societies wishing to make a "new man" approach the task through processes of "deculturation" and "reculturation" focused on bodily practices; hence, revolutionaries place great emphasis "on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners," because "they entrust to [the body] in abbreviated and practical, or mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture."
On the other "side," so to speak, the representation undergoes its own process of internalization. It incorporates the changing perceptual modes and activities of its viewer, as well as the changing conditions of its viewing environment. It does so by harnessing routines in interactive and analytical form. The representation "gets to know you" by opening itself up to realtime intervention, by connecting itself up to forms of surveillance, and by annexing procedures of analysis -- extending both its form and its purview. Gathering information through interactive interfaces and demographic, sociological, or market studies, including technologies of surveillance that make forms of observation and analysis increasingly precise, the image "enacts" statistics, incorporating the behaviors, conditions, and norms of both its viewers and its viewing "theater." It performs and corporealizes itself by reading its lines off the audience. It then helps to produce, modify, and mobilize that audience.
The more representations are able to mobilize and align elements in a network of heterogeneous allies the more they become, the more they "act." (In advertising, the more they "have legs.") The image, then, increases its "acting power" to the extent that it annexes routines, which are translated into useful patterns and profiles that can be sorted according to changing conditions and needs. A matrix of information flow is determined -- advancing toward realtime -- in which bodies are mobilized, oriented, and adjusted.
The viewer-navigator internalizes the routines of the image through the agency of a vehicle and is trained to "drive" as such. The image internalizes the routines of the viewer-navigator through the monitoring agency of a vehicle (GPS etc). ("The image" here of course is a frame within the "globalized cinema" of interconnecting visual media.)
In strengthening its analytical matrix, the image "learns" what the driver does, how it moves, what it wants, down to the smallest increments, eventually the tiniest eye flickers, the tiniest vacillations of desire. Armed with this knowledge, the vehicle mobilizes or "transports" an occupant through a landscape and normalizes this procedure.
It's where technology rises up to meet the body and the body pushes back, the surface in between molded by this interaction, the tension painted over in the guise of choice, comfort, convenience. Acclimating subject and representation within a technology of transport, it is a routined network of co-determining currents, cycles, codes, and channels,
This sense of enclosure need not be material, but can be induced through insertion or implantation. Think of the remote control device, the wireless communicator, or the augmented reality headgear as part of a vehicular apparatus. This protective enclosure, a "bubble" of subjectivity, becomes the condition for presence itself -- defining (and resolving) an "in here" versus an "out there," a here against a there, or a now against a later, between which its occupant is physically, mentally, or virtually transported. This "vehicle" is a figure for a condition of protected intimacy cast against a larger condition of the urban. It is a figure for technologically-mediated mobilization, as it encapsulates the body in a bubble of immediacy and shuttles it about.
Fredric Jameson writes that we read our subjectivity off the things outside. The urban is what compels one to move and to invent new forms of movement to "keep up" with its demands.
----
below is the story I gave about landing in the airplane:
Landing
We placed our tray tables, seats, and bodies in an upright and locked position in preparation for landing. We were silent, all eyes transfixed on the hypnotic images of parting clouds that filled the cabin’s projection screens, compliments of a camera mounted on the nose cone, affording us the spectacle of the very sky through which we speed. We are inside the plane's own movie. Spellbound in the eye of the projectile.
Suddenly, over the roar of the airplane, and in synchronization with the rumble of the landing gear lowering into place, a shriek cut through the calm. One man was emitting this piercing scream. His hands clenched the armrest with an iron grip; his head was thrown back, eyes closed and mouth agape. He seemed to be suspended within a fire of pleasurable danger, of the orgasmic/roller coaster/horror film variety. Was it the erotic charge of death that surged through his body? Fellow passengers shifted nervously. The screech ended. An empty plastic cup rolled up the aisle.
Needless to say, the atmosphere of the cabin has now radically changed. Passengers shift nervously in their seats. Yet, strapped into our seats, subject to the regulatory agency of air travel and of the social contract, there are only three acceptable positions.
Our heads turned sideways, we look out the window.
Our heads aimed straight ahead, we look at the monitors.
Our heads lowered, we avert our eyes -- unsure of how to deal politely with the outburst. (How strange that in such situations -- when a fellow traveler becomes drastically unmoored, his only recourse a primal screech -- one cannot be "caught" looking. Decorum requires a furtive, sidelong glance.)
We are caught in some kind of elaborate choreography combining body, technology, and perception -- body, machine, and social environment.
They involve the overlapping of image and actuality, pleasure and fear, fixity and mobility.
This choreography is a regulatory domain whose materialization is the plane.
In one sense, it's a choreography of power. There is a machinery and institution that makes us adequate to see. There is a machinery and institution that shapes the legitimacy of our perspective. There is a machinery and institution that positions us as subjects.
There is the machinery producing this view, and the more intimate machinery that is making one adequate to see it.
And there are the ways in which one squirms within these machineries, which may result in the emission of something as grand as a shriek or as faint as a blush.
I am thinking of parallels to the screech: the outcry that erupts, that shoots upward, within a tectonics of descent. The resistance, the counterbalance, the rising against the falling.
I am thinking of that moment when the ordering forces that maintain a body’s coherency are, however briefly, overcome by its urges, as it slips out of its own bounds.
Monday, January 4, 2010
VIS159/ICAM150
Summary
The course will provide an analytical background for thinking about the history of technology and artistic practice. The course is not structured as a chronological survey; rather, it is structured as a series of seven "nodes" anchored in the present day, which are unravelled to reveal important historical patterns and connections. Each of these seven "nodes" is oriented around three "vehicle" metaphors. We will use the metaphor of the vehicle as an aid to understanding art and technology in terms of their embeddedness in processes of embodiment, movement, and subjectivity. Through readings, screenings, stories, media projects, and discussions, we will aim for a broader understanding of both technology and art, exploring the nature of technology and the changes it has brought in the realms of communication, desire, imagination, ideology, and cultural life.
Grading and Requirements
Attendance and participation: 20%
Mid-term essay: 40%
Final essay: 40%
Labs will provide an opportunity to discuss class material with your TA in a smaller group. It is important that you attend every lecture and every assigned lab session. You are expected to complete all readings before the meeting, and to participate fully in the discussions. Both the mid-term and the final have in-class components, in response to questions that will be unknown until the day of the exam. For the take-home component, you will have the option of either writing a essay, or doing a combination of an essay and an interactive video project using Korsakow.
2 pages in-class + 1000 words take-home essay + nonlinear interactive video in Korsakow
-OR-
2 pages in-class + 2500 words take-home essay
For the take-home mid-term, you will be asked to analyze and operate your own "vehicle" (whether preexisting or invented) in accordance with all 10 items in the "Vehicle User's Manual." It is very important that you understand these 10 items and respond to all 10 in your essay -- otherwise, you will fail to handle your vehicle successfully and arrive at your destination. For the final exam, you will again be asked to analyze and operate your own "vehicle"; however this time you will be asked to position your vehicle in four ways: as a frame; a stage; an apparatus; and a network.
Schedule
JAN 5: INTRODUCTION
Review of Vehicle User's Manual
JAN 12: THE VEHICLE AS ENCLOSURE
Reading: Jordan Crandall, "Convertible Vehicles"
Margaret Morse, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction"
JAN 19: THE VEHICLE AS OPTIMIZER
Reading: Jordan Crandall, "Tech Ass in Gear"
Jordan Crandall, "Bodies on the Circuit"
JAN 26: THE VEHICLE AS BODILY RELOCATOR
Reading: Lev Manovich, "The Automation of Sight"
Jonathan Crary Suspensions of Perception (Chapter One)
Jordan Crandall, "Unmanned"
FEB 2: Screenings and MID TERM
FEB 9: THE VEHICLE AS FRAME
Reading: Elizabeth Grosz, "Chaos, Territory, and Art" ("Architecture and the Frame" section)
Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Introduction)
FEB 16: THE VEHICLE AS STAGE
Readings: Victor Burgin, "Jenni's Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude"
Jordan Crandall, "An Actor Prepares"
FEB 23: THE VEHICLE AS APPARATUS
Reading: Gilles Deleuze, "Societies of Control"
Giorgio Agamben, "What is An Apparatus?"
Vilem Flusser, "Towards a Philosophy of Photography (The Apparatus section)
MAR 2: THE VEHICLE AS NETWORK
Reading: Alexander Galloway, "Protocol"
Graham Harman, Prince of Networks
MAR 9: CONCLUSION
The course will provide an analytical background for thinking about the history of technology and artistic practice. The course is not structured as a chronological survey; rather, it is structured as a series of seven "nodes" anchored in the present day, which are unravelled to reveal important historical patterns and connections. Each of these seven "nodes" is oriented around three "vehicle" metaphors. We will use the metaphor of the vehicle as an aid to understanding art and technology in terms of their embeddedness in processes of embodiment, movement, and subjectivity. Through readings, screenings, stories, media projects, and discussions, we will aim for a broader understanding of both technology and art, exploring the nature of technology and the changes it has brought in the realms of communication, desire, imagination, ideology, and cultural life.
Grading and Requirements
Attendance and participation: 20%
Mid-term essay: 40%
Final essay: 40%
Labs will provide an opportunity to discuss class material with your TA in a smaller group. It is important that you attend every lecture and every assigned lab session. You are expected to complete all readings before the meeting, and to participate fully in the discussions. Both the mid-term and the final have in-class components, in response to questions that will be unknown until the day of the exam. For the take-home component, you will have the option of either writing a essay, or doing a combination of an essay and an interactive video project using Korsakow.
2 pages in-class + 1000 words take-home essay + nonlinear interactive video in Korsakow
-OR-
2 pages in-class + 2500 words take-home essay
For the take-home mid-term, you will be asked to analyze and operate your own "vehicle" (whether preexisting or invented) in accordance with all 10 items in the "Vehicle User's Manual." It is very important that you understand these 10 items and respond to all 10 in your essay -- otherwise, you will fail to handle your vehicle successfully and arrive at your destination. For the final exam, you will again be asked to analyze and operate your own "vehicle"; however this time you will be asked to position your vehicle in four ways: as a frame; a stage; an apparatus; and a network.
Schedule
JAN 5: INTRODUCTION
Review of Vehicle User's Manual
JAN 12: THE VEHICLE AS ENCLOSURE
Reading: Jordan Crandall, "Convertible Vehicles"
Margaret Morse, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction"
JAN 19: THE VEHICLE AS OPTIMIZER
Reading: Jordan Crandall, "Tech Ass in Gear"
Jordan Crandall, "Bodies on the Circuit"
JAN 26: THE VEHICLE AS BODILY RELOCATOR
Reading: Lev Manovich, "The Automation of Sight"
Jonathan Crary Suspensions of Perception (Chapter One)
Jordan Crandall, "Unmanned"
FEB 2: Screenings and MID TERM
FEB 9: THE VEHICLE AS FRAME
Reading: Elizabeth Grosz, "Chaos, Territory, and Art" ("Architecture and the Frame" section)
Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Introduction)
FEB 16: THE VEHICLE AS STAGE
Readings: Victor Burgin, "Jenni's Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude"
Jordan Crandall, "An Actor Prepares"
FEB 23: THE VEHICLE AS APPARATUS
Reading: Gilles Deleuze, "Societies of Control"
Giorgio Agamben, "What is An Apparatus?"
Vilem Flusser, "Towards a Philosophy of Photography (The Apparatus section)
MAR 2: THE VEHICLE AS NETWORK
Reading: Alexander Galloway, "Protocol"
Graham Harman, Prince of Networks
MAR 9: CONCLUSION
VEHICLE USER'S MANUAL
Important: Read this information before operating the vehicle.
1. Vehicles enable the presence of interiority, whether it involves an actual enclosure or an intimate proximity to the body. This interiority is a model for subjectivity: a here-and-now of immediate presence. It helps to institute a self against an other; a here against a there; a now against a later.
2. Such an interiority or intimacy must be sustained over time. The vehicle acts as a "coherency device" that allows the occupant to be stabilized, held, and moved from one place to another. At times this requires a degree of destabilization or productive friction.
3. Vehicles help to structure articulation, apprehension, and attention in ways that are always intertwined with material structure and practice. They sometimes employ representations -- screens, windows, signs -- but they also work non-representationally through sensation and rhythm. Vehicles are connected not only through language but through protocols and standards, working through sameness as much as difference.
4. The vehicle is means of transport and convertibility, movement and mutation. Vehicles drive the transition between places, between moments, or between states of being. Vehicles translate between language and embodiment; form and process; movement and stillness; and signification, sensation and rhythm.
5. Vehicles are controlled by small, repetitive, semi-automatic bodily motions while the spaces across which they transport and the systems that bind them are gigantic in scale. These tiny motions can generate enormous changes in an "outside" world. The vehicle attempts to materially bridge these disjunctions of scale.
6. Vehicles trace and adjust parameters in ways that engender embodied forms. The vehicle's molded parts and components restrict and contour ranges of movements, disciplining the bodily faculties, orientations, behaviors, and perceptions of their inhabitants. They condition the their occupants by compelling them to adjust to the demands of the movements, locations, and relations that they enable.
7. Vehicles are themselves embodied through practices: in order to endure, they must adjust themselves according to the changing use-patterns and values of their users. Their form is linked to their relation to the human body as well as with other vehicles with whom they intersect, along with the means of production from which they stem.
8. When leaving the vehicle, the body is equipped with an array of access modes and "mobile peripherals" and a drive to be continually plugged in through them. In this sense occupants do not really leave vehicles but move from one vehicle to another in the places where they overlap. The occupant of a vehicle may not be located inside it, or may not be visible in a conventional sense -- though its patterns and forms can be interpolated as a function of the vehicle's operation.
9. Vehicles do not work in terms of conventional distinctions between interior and exterior, inside and outside, embodied or disembodied, so much as through zones of transition, networks of linkage, and thresholds of emergence or mutation. Often the vehicle is only "revealed" in a crisis. The mutational moment can be glimpsed in the crashing of vehicles -- the moment when interior and exterior, flesh and code interpenetrate and the vehicle becomes something radically other.
10. Vehicles are embedded in, and constituted by, historically specific sets of technologies, code-structures, materials, and bodily capacities, ensconced in a normalizing mode of transport. The vehicle attempts to generate and register a fit between societal conditions and the conditions of the occupant: it helps to "optimize" routines and forms according to social and economic demands, often in the name of progress, fitness, self-improvement, and adequacy. The vehicle is an engine of optimization. It transports that which matters. One inhabits it in order to matter.
1
Vehicles enable the presence of interiority, whether it involves an actual enclosure or an intimate proximity to the body. This interiority is a model for subjectivity: a here-and-now of immediate presence. It helps to institute a self against an other; a here against a there; a now against a later.
2
Such an interiority or intimacy must be sustained over time. The vehicle acts as a "coherency device" that allows the occupant to be stabilized, held, and moved from one place to another. At times this requires a degree of destabilization or productive friction.
3
Vehicles help to structure articulation, apprehension, and attention in ways that are always intertwined with material structure and practice. They sometimes employ representations -- screens, windows, signs -- but they also work non-representationally through sensation and rhythm. Vehicles are connected not only through language but through protocols and standards, working through sameness as much as difference.
4
The vehicle is means of transport and convertibility, movement and mutation. Vehicles drive the transition between places, between moments, or between states of being. Vehicles translate between language and embodiment; form and process; movement and stillness; and signification, sensation and rhythm.
5
Vehicles are controlled by small, repetitive, semi-automatic bodily motions while the spaces across which they transport and the systems that bind them are gigantic in scale. These tiny motions can generate enormous changes in an "outside" world. The vehicle attempts to materially bridge these disjunctions of scale.
6
Vehicles trace and adjust parameters in ways that engender embodied forms. The vehicle's molded parts and components restrict and contour ranges of movements, disciplining the bodily faculties, orientations, behaviors, and perceptions of their inhabitants. They condition the their occupants by compelling them to adjust to the demands of the movements, locations, and relations that they enable.
7
Vehicles are themselves embodied through practices: in order to endure, they must adjust themselves according to the changing use-patterns and values of their users. Their form is linked to their relation to the human body as well as with other vehicles with whom they intersect, along with the means of production from which they stem.
8
When leaving the vehicle, the body is equipped with an array of access modes and "mobile peripherals" and a drive to be continually plugged in through them. In this sense occupants do not really leave vehicles but move from one vehicle to another in the places where they overlap. The occupant of a vehicle may not be located inside it, or may not be visible in a conventional sense -- though its patterns and forms can be interpolated as a function of the vehicle's operation.
9
Vehicles do not work in terms of conventional distinctions between interior and exterior, inside and outside, embodied or disembodied, so much as through zones of transition, networks of linkage, and thresholds of emergence or mutation. Often the vehicle is only "revealed" in a crisis. The mutational moment can be glimpsed in the crashing of vehicles -- the moment when interior and exterior, flesh and code interpenetrate and the vehicle becomes something radically other.
10
Vehicles are embedded in, and constituted by, historically specific sets of technologies, code-structures, materials, and bodily capacities, ensconced in a normalizing mode of transport. The vehicle attempts to generate and register a fit between societal conditions and the conditions of the occupant: it helps to "optimize" routines and forms according to social and economic demands, often in the name of progress, fitness, self-improvement, and adequacy. The vehicle is an engine of optimization. It transports that which matters. One inhabits it in order to matter.
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