Critical Urban Media Art

Catalog description

This course focuses on contemporary relations of medial and urban space. Through a series of urban experiments and transdisciplinary readings, students develop skills to engage the city and critically explore alternative urban activities and experiences enabled by a range of mobile, embedded, pervasive, networked and distributed media systems. Drawing on a broader discourse on the technological mediation of urban life, weekly discussions are organized around readings on topics including social theory, spatial practice, urban form, human geography, open systems and participatory structures, surveillance/dataveillance, changing relations between privacy and publicity in urban space, among others. Periodic critiques provide a platform for discussing students? ongoing project development and prototyping, with an emphasis on producing either a paper or a project proposal that can be submitted to conferences or exhibition venues and funding organizations.