New Genre/New and Old Technologies

Class Description:
This class advances the idea of different materials, methods, and practices raised at the intermediate level in drawing, painting, and sculpture, and explores and utilizes new and traditional media in studio production of work. Emphasis on multiple media, combining traditional and electronic media, as well as different genres, in an attempt to create new directions for the student's ideas.

VIS110B
FALL 2008
Room: MANDE 201B
Tuesdays: 3:30p - 6:20p MANDE 201B
Professor: Ricardo Dominguez

Email: rrdominguez@ucsd.edu
Office Hours: TUESDAYS 11am-Noon (CAL IT2/Atkinson Hall 2nd fl - 2129)

Assessment is based on:
The core assesment will be based on the arist's risk, reflection and re-framing of media both old and new.
Artmaking (1 resolved artwork, 6 exploratory gestures) digital media, paintings,drawings,photography/film, installations and beyond = 70%
Artmaking (process) Visual Arts Process Diary about your artmaking "Process" activities (can be a BLOG) = 10%
Artist presentation of final work to the class = 10%

Artist participation in all class critiques = 10%

CLASS 1 - September 23rd - Class Orientation - What is recombinant media? Introduction to the Class.

(Gesture 1)Take an old media tactic (painting, sculpture, drawing, body movement, writing, photography) and create a gesture that reflects what it FEELS like to be on-line, youtubed, on the cellphone, txting, twittered, in the fulluptake of digital-intimacy-with-out-end. What does your data-body look like or feel like or....?

(Present work during CLASS 2).

CLASS 2 - September 30th - Installation Dreams/Streams (What is old media in new media?)

The desire to move viewers out of the role of passive observers and into the role of producers is one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century art. This tendency can be found in practices and projects ranging from El Lissitzky's exhibition designs to Allan Kaprow's happenings, from minimalist objects to installation art. More recently, this kind of participatory art has gone so far as to encourage and produce new social relationships. Guy Debord's celebrated argument that capitalism fragments the social bond has become the premise for much relational art seeking to challenge and provide alternatives to the discontents of contemporary life. What then of the 21st first century?

(Gesture 2) Create a dream-space for the future of new media - using found materials in your neighborhood. This can be a micro-installation or a new object/s or a new type of machine that does not yet exist. (Present work during CLASS 3).

CLASS 3 - October 7th - Everyday Day Second Life, the Left overs of Avatar Life.

Numerous international exhibitions and biennials have borne witness to the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday and its antecedents in the work of Surrealists, Situationists, the Fluxus group, and conceptual and feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s. This art shows a recognition of ordinary dignity or the accidentally miraculous, an engagement with a new kind of anthropology, an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture, or a meditation on what happens when nothing happens. The celebration of the everyday has oppositional and dissident overtones, offering a voice to the silenced and proposing possibilities for change. What about our post-contemporary everydayness? What are the event-zones of the miraculous or the less-than-nothing happenning in the world of Second Life or your Avatar life or of oppositional happenings?

(Gesture 3) Create an everyday reflection of what is unimportant or spiritual or oppositional about your Second Life self/your games self/your facebook self. Use mirrors, a computer and a part of your live-body during the class as part of the work.

(Present work during CLASS 4).

CLASS 4 - October 14 - Calling My Clone

As Dolly the sheep attests, the clone no longer looks like a freak, as the cyborg did, but is technology made entirely ordinary. If the properties of replication, reliability and transferability now inhere in our conceptions of digital code, then the clone, produced out the gesture of "sampling" genetic code is digital code made flesh or the reverse. We can now call our selves, leave messages to our selves, leave our selves to our selves. One way that we "cyborg" our selves is by what machines we carry near our selves, the machines that become our selves - such as, the (cell)phone - we distribute our "cell", hold our "cell" and upgrade our "cell." What can we the recombinant artist in the post-contemporary of the 21st century do with such inter-organic initimacy?

(Gesture 4) Using your "cell" phone take samples of your fluid-self, your genetic-self, your under the skin and bones self, your mutating self and post them on your Blog or whatever you use to post your digital self.

(Present work during CLASS 5).

CLASS 5 - October 21 - "para(sites) se(xx/yy)" or Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep?

In the post-contemporary new worlds are emerging rapidly, in some of these worlds the question of the erotic is becoming connected to the shape of our amibient machines - we now connected to something "hot" all the time, we are bathed in the "heat" and "cool" of our androids. Most often it is machines that tells we are desired, loved or just wanted for the brief "hook up."

Each of us is here as a link in a chain of a zillion reproductive sex acts. The pleasures of partnership and the orgasm help make us obsessed with having sex, even if we don't know or care about reproduction. We might think of sex as any path that leads to orgasm. Note here the difference between sex with a person and, say, sex via pornography. In sex with a person, you're talking about emotion, the positions of your limbs, touch across large skin areas, tastes, scents and pheromones. In the "artificial sex" of pornography, you're talking about visual images, perhaps enhanced by recorded sounds. Amazing how little we're willing to settle for! How might artificial sex improve? How as post-contemporary artist re-imagine the future of the para(sites) se(xx/yy), how can we re-contruct the "artificial" of robot pleasure and human pleasure - with pleasure that are no-longer bound to either - what would that art reflect if it could caputure it?

(Gesture 5) Use images of your favorite para(site)/s and your favorite porno(site)/s make a para-porno f/slick with it_them by melding them into large scale PROJECT space. Which means we can just just a project it onto the class wall or your can paint something very large scale or something equivlant. It can be a .mov or anything flicker like.

(Present work during CLASS 7).

CLASS 6 - October 28th - NO CLASS

CLASS 7 - November 4th - nano nano, or how small can you go?

Think small, think really small and then think even smaller and you will almost hit the little b.a.n.g (bit, atoms, neurons and genes) at the core of micro_gestures at the edge of invisibility. We are now caught in the rush of the incredible shrinking technology of nano-particles that can be found in cosmetics, baby lotions, sunscreen, fabrics, paints and inkjet paper. We now control the vertical and horizontal of structures far smaller than ever before. The nano-world derives from nanometer, a billionth of a meter, or about one 25-millionth of an inch. That is far smaller than the world of everyday objects described by Newton's laws of motion, but bigger than an atom or a simple molecule, particles ruled by quantum mechanics. We are all surrounded by little b.a.n.g's that are rapidly transforming us and world at the edge of invisablity.

This new level of micro-materiality made of b.a.n.g's (bits, atoms, neurons and genes) is allowing art to reframe older questions of the fragmentary, the miniature, the unseen and of what art can make visible. During the last century art became a space for the intense magnification of what was falling outside the frame of the eye, outside the optic drive - the process of immaterialization. From Manet to the conceptualist artists have consistently abducted the scientific needle of the real to transform, shift and disturb the molecular gaze. Post-contemporary artists are now creating micromedia, biomedia and nanomedia work that reflects a concern with the contemporary scale of technoscience and its possible aesthetic manifestations.

(Gesture 6) Try to find the smallest component/element that you have been using to make your most recent work that is not digital code. Create a frame for it as microscope that will allow us to see/sense what it this b.a.n.g is.

(Present work during CLASS 8).

CLASS 8 - November 11th - Start to development you Final project (theme, style and materials are your choice) - but the project should echo some of the gestures that we worked on before in terms of thinking and using new media and old media.

CLASS 9 - November 18th - Individual meetings.

CLASS 10 - November 25th - NO CLASS

CLASS 11 - December 2nd - LAST CLASS - Present Final Project.

CLASS 11 - December 9th - We will meet to continue Final Project presentations (if needed).

CATALOGUES AND BOOKS THAT ARE RECOMMENDED:

CATALOGUES: Out of Actions (LA MoCA) Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object (Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art)
Performance Art (edited by Roselee Goldberg)
Body and the East: Form the 60s to the Present, (Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia)

BOOKS:

Stelarc: The Monograph (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice) by William Gibson and Marquard Smith
The New Media Reader by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort
The Language of New Media (Leonardo Books) by Lev Manovich
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins
Art Works: Perform, Jens Hoffmann and Joan Jonas
The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, eds. Michael Huley and Noel Witts
Performance, Marvin Carlson
Contract with the Skin, Kathy Odell
Performing the Body, Amelia Jones
The Explicit Body of Performance, Rebecca Schneider
Performance Art from Futurism to the Present, Roselee Goldberg
Happenings and Other Arts, ed Mary Ellen Sandford
Unmarked, Peggy Phelan
Acting Act: Feminist Performances, eds. Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan
Let's Get it On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu
Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, ed. Coco Fusco Greenwich Village 1963, Sally Banes
The Blurring of Art and Life, Alan Kaprow
Imaging Her Erotics, Carolee Schneeman
The Citizen Artist: An Anthology from High Performance Magazine
Liveness, Philip Auslander
Art Works Perform by Jens Hoffmann and Joan Jonas (Paperback - May 2005)
Art Works: Place (Paperback) by Tacita Dean (Author), Jeremy Millar (Author)
Participation (Documents of Contemporary Art) (Paperback) by Claire Bishop (Editor)

Some Useful Links:

New Media Online Communities
Nettime
Rhizome
Empyre

History of New Media Art, the Internet and Computers
Little History of WWW
Media Art Net, ZKM
Martin Wattenberg's Timeline
History of Internet Art
Tim Berners-Lee
Triumph of the Nerds
Computer History Museum
The Rise of the Stupid Network

New Media Lecture Series
The Art, Technology & Culture Colloquium
The Upgrade at Eyebeam

Media Resources
Archive.org
Prelinger Archive
Wiki Commons

Research Resources
Purchase Library Art Resources
Leonardo Online
Citation Machine

Funding Guides and Grants
NYFA Interactive
The Red Project
Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Money: Technology-Based Art and the Dynamics of Sustainability
New Media Funding Models

Links to Others' Links And More Links
Stephen Wilson's Electronic Art Links
Digital Currents
Contemporary Artists Online Portfolios
International Databank for Virtual Art
2003 Net Art Links
A Pile of Net Art Links
Lisa Hutton's Links

New Media Texts / Theorists
Switch
Fibre Culture
CTheory
Little Girl, Tactical Thinking
Critical Art Ensemble
Donna Haraway
Sandy Stone
Mark Poster
Eugene Thacker
Lev Manovich
Geert Lovink
OBN
Mark Dery
Clay Shirky

Open Source / Open Ideas
GNU
Stillwater's The Pool
Should Exist
Illegal Art

Games
Gamelab
TmpSpace

Blogs
BoingBoing
We Make Money Not Art
Smart Mobs
Eyebeam ReBlog
Cult of Mac

Festivals
Ars Electronica
SIGGRAPH
ISEA
Next 5 Minutes (N5M)
Digital Salon
Transmediale
Version
Subtle Technologies
New Forms

Museums with New Media Resources
The Whitney Museum
Walker Art Center
Guggenheim Museum
SFMOMA
Variable Media Approach

New Media Online Galleries
turbulence
computerfinearts
e-2.org
Glow Lab

General Art Sites
Art 21: Art in the 21st Century
ArtKrush

Technical Resources
Make Zine, O'Reilly
HTML Tutorial
Flash Stuff
Design for Handhelds
Setting up a Wireless Network
Etherpeg
RSS Feeds