American Artist
Code Societies, Winter 2019
School for Poetic Computation
January 23, 2019 6:30 – 9:30PM
We will look in depth at Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s theory of software as an analogy for ideology and how she traces early computational design to existing dynamics of gender, power and control. We will also read the essay Black Gooey Universe by American Artist which considers how the erasure of Blackness (both formally and racially) was significant to the development of early computer interfaces. We will look at examples of artists and artworks that operate within these modes of critique.
Agenda:
- Intro 6:30 - 6:40
- Lecture 6:40 - 8:00
- Break 8:00 - 8:10
- Artwork Screening 8:10 - 8:40
- Discussion 8:40 - 9:30
Required:
- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge”
- American Artist, “Black Gooey Universe”
Further Reading:
- Alexander Galloway, “Software as Ideology”, from The Interface Effect
- Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), "Technology and Ethos Vol. 2 Book of Life" from Amistad2
- Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
- Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure" (pp. 75-82), from Marx and Literature
- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
- Friedrich Kittler, “There is No Software”
- Jared Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign.” Critical Sociology 42
- Willie Osterweil “What Was the Nerd?” Real Life, February 28, 2017
- Frank B. Wilderson III “‘We’re trying to destroy the world’ Anti-Blackness & Police Violence After Ferguson.” IMIXWHATILIKE