Media Metaphors

Catalog description

This course focuses on the mutually constitutive relationship between media technologies and society, approaching media not as a set of technologies but as a set of practices, infrastructures, and struggles over meaning and power. Central to the course is a practice of reading one thing and/as another. We will read media objects in terms of their visual, aural, spatial, or informational registers, but also as sites of mediation structured by systems of power and difference. Throughout the course, we will think with artists and/as theorists, attending to arguments made through artistic gestures and to the creative, at times deeply experimental practices of scholars whose need and ability to hold two ideas in various forms of relation to one another mirrors an artistic practice.