Welcome to the Seminar

Computational Poetics (IAT 811)

Welcome to the seminar, and welcome to our course website. I am truly excited about this course and am looking forward to the weeks ahead, where we will have the opportunity to engage with ‘critical terms’ for understanding media and for critical engagement with new media art and art histories.

I envision this as a seminar that places similar emphases on 1) learning about and discussing media theory, through the lens of Mitchell and Hansen’s Critical Terms for New Media Studies (2010); and 2) exploring computational art history and the conceptual frameworks it has advanced by looking at examples of new media art, using Shanken’s Art and Electronic Media (2010) as a guide; and 3) takes up an interest in ‘critical algorithm studies’, which demonstrates the political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the algorithm as it has become embedded in our technoanthropological universe.

The image above is from Masaki Fujihata’s Morel’s Panorama (2003), is a real-time video panorama that references 19th Century landscape painting and the panopticon, making the viewer immersed in, but never central to the work. A more recent work, Landing Home in Geneva (2005), explores trans-geographic and trans-linguistic experiences of people who have moved to Geneva, Switzerland. Mitchell and Hansen (Critical Terms for New Media Studies, 2010) describe how, using technologies such as digital camcorder, a panoramic lens, and GPS technology, Fujihata shows us how “in the midst of a rapidly accelerating surveillance society, we can use the newfound technical precision of space-time mapping as a rich and poignant means of asserting our own existential uniqueness” (2010: 112). Wow! That an art work can do so much is truly amazing–but this is what we are here to explore and even emulate. Like the dynamic panorama of Fuijihata’s Landing Home, which both places and displaces the viewer at its centre, I hope that each one of use can find our own unique way of expressing the ideas we encounter.