Decolonizing the Digtial

Catalog description

Digital media seems to permeate every aspect of daily life, even those moments “offline” or away from screens. They have been said to have a specific epistemology, reformatting relations, aggregating data, and compositing content. However, what exactly is the “digital” in digital media? What, if anything, makes it distinct from other forms of media? To consider these questions, this course will cover a broad range of media histories. Most begin in 19th century Europe following the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Early “computers,” optical devices, photography, film and cinema, and then digital computers are often teleologically construed, bringing us into our digitally networked reality. This hegemonic history of media is considered alongside alternative genealogies and historiographies. A particular emphasis is placed on technologies and innovations developed by QTPOC cultural producers across the Americas, from whom and where knowledge, resources, and labor were—and are—extracted to invent so-called “new media.” Media archaeology will be employed as a method, leading to discussions of “old” media and their impacts, such as the Inka khipu as an early computer, or the plantocracy of the Americas as the originary panopticon (Jeremy Bentham’s prison design theorized by Michel Foucault as a metaphor for disciplinary society, used in the present to describe a surveillance state). However, most of the artistic and cultural case studies in the course will be contemporary (post-1945), introducing students to visual production that pushes forward queer* and decolonial understandings of what constitutes “technology,” “media,” and the “digital.”