Art in the Age of Digital Media

Catalog description

While stories require some medium to be expressed, how they affect us is complicated by our digital age: we have too many options and demands on our attention. Not only that, but films and novels are designed to satisfy our taste and values, which will only be exacerbated by AI generated fiction. So if art exists to transform our taste and values by expressing what is unexpected and new, memorable, ambiguous, and even sacred, artistic fiction may be hard to find in our digital age: why seek out something that unsettles us, defies explanation, or is "difficult," anyway? Added to that, how do we come to a genuine critical consensus--rather than the self-selecting, biased kinds online that exclude the controversial --about what makes some fictional works more artistic than others? In this course, students learn theories and philosophies of aesthetics that seek to discern artistic qualities and features of novels and films; topics may include dream experience, normativity, world-building, media specificity (visual art, video games, music), and expressions of time. Our goal will be to consider why any given work of fiction in our "postmodern" age of digital media should be considered a work of art. Senior standing required.