Tpcs Digital/New Media: Environmental Media

Documents are written texts, evidence, inscriptions, and much more. Documentary films have been used to tell stories, share experiences, spread propaganda, resist exploitation, invoke memories, and much more. How can we think of information and meaning in relation to the shared histories of document and documentary? Database management systems based on digital technologies have technically transformed ways of classifying, storing, and aggregating data, but have they really changed our experiences of mediating with our past, present, and future? Issues of agency, memory, representation, performativity, interactivity, and posthumanism are entangled in discussions of databases and archives and our engagement with them. In this course we will relate and juxtapose readings connecting documents, documentaries, and archives. We will read media and cultural theorists such as Lisa Gitelman, Akira Lippit, and Wendy Chun alongside novelists like Franz Kafka and Ismail Kadare. Assignments include one assigned/selected report from field visits to libraries and museums, one reading presentation and blogging assignment, and a final paper or practice-based art project.

This course fulfills Arts & Humanities Approaches to Environmental Inquiry elective.