Technoscience / Ecomateriality / Literature
Header

Home

Technoscience / Ecomateriality / Literature

This literary digital humanities course will interrogate how media technologies and our various layers of ‘reality’ converge to alter (or augment) our conceptions about the relationships between the human, the biosphere, the environment, and our digital technologies. In considering issues of ethics and emergence, we will forecast future civilizations and explore possible ways of archiving our past and present digital expression.

As a digital literary humanities course, we will be not only learning but also making. By creating our own public media artifacts and deliberately remediating others, we will be intimately encountering the ethical, social and aesthetic implications of the digital theories and technologies we will study. Past projects have included programming a chat bot; coding a new digital humanities word analysis tool; mapping EEG brain waves onto piano music scales; and creating narrative videogames.

Course texts may include William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, Rick Moss’s AR gaming novel Ebocloud, Gibson & Sterling’s The Difference Engine, Ba & Moon’s graphic novel Daytripper, Ken Wark’s Gamer Theory, Michael Joyce’s speculative gaming novel Disappearance, Dave Egger’s new social network thriller The Circle, remediated animated shorts from the Matrix, selected digital videogames, various digital humanities projects, and multimodal e-lit works. We will investigate these alongside various digital art pieces and AR data devices to question how they reflect – and simultaneously influence – our cybercultural hybridity.
Class Attributes: (EI) Ethical Inquiry ♦ (STS) Science, Technology, and Society  ♦ (W) Writing  ♦ (ALP) Arts, Literature & Performance  ♦ (CZ) Civilizations

 

Header Image: Inside look at Google’s Data Center in Lenoir, NC.
Source: http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/index.html#/locations/lenoir/7