GRMN 0144 SO1
Digital Aesthetics
Information | Syllabus | Readings | URLs
Instructor | Description | Goals | Specialty | Grades | Papers | Presentation | Essay | Minutes | Participation
Box 1979
190 Hope St., Room 206
Phone: 863-2168
Roberto_Simanowski@brown.edu
www.simanowski.info
Drop in sessions: Monday and Wednesday 3:15pm-4:15pm, and special arrangements
Course Website: http://www.brown.edu/Courses/GM/GRMN144The course discusses intermediality, multilinearity, interactivity, and programming as features of digital literature and art, investigate the relationship between text, image, and performance, and read academic texts on and analyze various examples of digital aesthetics. Keywords: hyperfiction, collaborative writing, interactive fiction, text generators, concrete poetry, text-image-transfer, mapping art, digital performance, transmedial art. Courses in literary theory or visual art would help. English..As the subject itself requires an interdisciplinary approach the course will benefit from participants from various fields be it literatury studies, visual art, modern culture and media or computer science. As the subject is quite new few articles have been canonized or truths established yet. Many areas in the field of digital aesthetics are still almost untouched. The situation requires students to be collaborators and contributors rather than receivers of trustworthy information.
The course has three specific aims:
- To introduce various examples of digital literature and arts and to familiarize students with the most essential aspects and problems of digital aesthetics.
- To develop analytical skills in reading digital signs that enable students to evaluate the quality of a work of digital arts.
- To practice undergraduate research, presenting a subject in the classroom (and in a final essay) and leading an appropriate discussion.
There are two special events this course contains or is related to.
1. Part of the course is an international conference on reading digital literature held at Brown Oct. 5.-7. Students are expected to attend the opening session on Friday, Oct. 5., 4-6pm, as well as two of the Saturday sessions. There will be no other meetings during the week of October 1st.
2. Transatlantic Cooperation with a class on digital literature in Germany. There will be teams (each with two students from our course and two from the German course) undertaking special studies for the assigned piece. Students will explore the web for information, read academic papers provided by the instructor, read or even conduct interviews with the artist and summarizes the results in a presentation (Power Point, HTML, Doc) for the website. Each team presents the results in one of the sessions announced as Transcoop-Session. The final Transcoop-Session on November 28 is a joint sesssion via webcam and microfon in which students from both courses will discuss generall issues of digital literature and arts such as interactivity, intermediality, transmediality, againg with referenc to a specific exmaple. There will be website with profils for each student based on wich you may contact the German students and organize your team.
Take home papers (2 x 3 pages)
30%
Presentation (1 x 30 minutes)
20%
Final Essay (8-10 pages)
25%
Participation/Minutes
25%
During the course students will write two 3-page (double spaced) papers due to the assigned dates. Students can choose a topic out of two offered topics. One paper will be more on theory, the other rather a review of a work of digital arts.Starting with the week of October 22 there will be students presentations resulting from the Transatlantic Cooperation. The Brown part of each team will present the outcome of the research in one of the sessions announced as Transcoop-Session with about 20 minutes for the presentation and 20 minutes for the subsequent discussion. All other students will have a look at the piece at hand as well and prepare for the discussion.The final essay (about 10 pages, double spaced) on a topic of the students' choice, discussed with the instructor, is due by December 12. The topic should involve some extra reading. The purpose of this paper is to give students the opportunity to research a topic in depth.In every session one student will take the minutes (half a page) to capture the most important information, questions and answers during the session. The minutes are to be sent to the instructor the same day and will be posted to the course website.I expect students to participate frequently (if you have missed classes three times you want to consult me for additional assignment), to arrive on time and to have turned off the cell phone, to have completed the assigned readings and being prepared to answer the assigned questions. Apart from that we all know: A course is what you make it. We have lots of exciting topics and tasks. I am sure it will be an interesting and rewarding semester.
