digital literacy = digital media theory + digital media practice + creative, critical project (social issues in ecologies)
The idea of practice-based research, long integrated into the sciences, is relatively new to the humanities. The work of making--producing something that requires long hours, intense thought, and considerable technical skill--has significant implications that go beyond the crafting of words. Involved are embodied interactions with digital technologies, frequent testing of code and other functionalities that results in reworking and correcting, and dynamic, ongoing discussions with collaborators to get it right."
-- N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis
Digital technologies have made new forms of culture and communication. These forms rely on software, computation, informatics and algorithms. How do we begin? What makes one "literate" - derived etymologically from the verb 'to read' - in digital media?
It is a truism that digital media have fantastically altered human life in many capacities, but it will be our task to think through these conditions critically. To do this, we must be fluent in the practices and theories of digital media, and it also means we must be able 'to read' and 'to write' or practice in its languages. Some of these languages, when rendered by a browser, app or service client, look like the words, images, sounds, moving images and animation that we might study analytically, asking a question like, “what do they mean?” But also, “how do they work”?
How do they work? This second question requires that we understand - just as with text - how to read and how to write in digital media. This is our task: to learn some theory and basic composition. And perhaps most importantly, because digital media is a dynamic and rapidly changing set of modalities (software, scripting and coding languages, form factors, etc), we must learn how to learn more. We must become DIY – do-it-yourself - practitioners so that two years from now, when some of what we do in class will have changed, we will be able to teach ourselves new modes.
But learning does not happen in a vacuum. We must project, invent and critically create through practice. To this end, we will take as our theme and project basis: Social Issues in ECOLOGIES. An ecology, while most commonly understood as environmental or as a description of a set of media interactions, might be more finely understood as the tracing out of a set of relationships that intra-act, feedback, inter-depend and cascade with, through, and across one another. Thinking ecologically will allow us to understand digital media, technologies, human and nonhuman bodies in a complex of relations and it will also help us to understand practice, methods and making in creative, critical and ethical modes.
Each student will CREATE a site-specific environmental, ecological project focused on a social or social justice issue, local to New York City. This project, your research and media making for it will for the basis for the work you do in this class. We will both learn to think and build together. Theory and practice learned though project-making. You may choose your own project within environmental, ecological parameters and in discussion with Prof. Bianco and TA Hediya.
From the catalog: this course offers students a foundational understanding of the technological building blocks that make up digital media & culture, & of the ways they come together to shape myriad facets of life. Students will acquire a working knowledge of the key concepts behind coding, & survey the contours of digital media architecture, familiarizing themselves with algorithms, databases, hardware, & similar key components. These technological frameworks will be examined as the basic grammar of digital media & related to theories of identity, privacy, policy, & other pertinent themes.