Advanced SIS: Sculpture After the Internet

Catalog description

Hito Steyerl asked, "Is the internet dead? ...[it is] completely surveilled, monopolized, and sanitized by common sense, copyright, control, and conformism... what happened to the internet after it stopped being a possibility?" This course assumes it is the artist's role to find and create possibilities in all contexts, and investigates what it means to create new possibilities by making physical objects, experiences, sculptures, installations, and systems in an era post-internet. As a project-based experimental lab, this class asks students to navigate back and forth between digital and physical creative tool sets to create new works. We will take inspiration from the history, theory, ideologies and technologies surrounding the internet, as well as from artists, animators, and engineers working on and around the internet today. We will explore issues surrounding automation, digital fabrication, and online maker / fabricator culture as tools to be used, but also as socio-political forces. Other concepts we will explore as a group include the relationship between body and technology; cybernetics, robotics, AI, and the uncanny valley; the relevancy of hand-making and physical construction post-automation; "image-objects;" scripted spaces; the producer-consumer continuum; the divisiveness and productiveness of online subcultures; anonymity; accessibility of information and production tools; and the spatial and temporal effects of inhabiting both digital and physical worlds. If we understand our current epoch as an era dominated by onscreen and networked experiences, this course investigates what it means to embrace, explore, explode, celebrate, negate, critique, reverse, or oppose that through the making of sculpture, broadly defined. This course assumes knowledge of at least very basic 3d modeling, and/or physical computing, and/or coding, and/or 3d media…