Course website: http://digital.arts.uci.edu/arts11

A survey of the historical and theoretical foundations of digital media art, tracing how information technologies seeded the growth of a new expressive medium. Considers how today’s pervasive digital culture evolved through interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, engineers, scientists and scholars. Discusses how the emergence of digital media technologies has been shaped by power relations, most obviously by the politics of race, gender or class.

Through a series of lectures, discussions, individual student research projects and group activities, this course examines important texts on digital media and cyberculture spanning the past 75 years, addressing the continual overlap between artistic and scientific practices. Students will discuss critical issues related to dependence on new and emerging technologies, and will develop an appreciation of how art-making practices have shaped (and been shaped by) trajectories of technological change.