20% Presentation Everybody will have an opportunity to present a review or field report in class. The presentation can be stand-alone or it can feed into your final project. The presentation should do two things: familiarize your classmates with the artifact/text you have been working with, and provide a critical framework within which to interpret it. Length: 20-25 minutes  

70% Final Project
The final project can take a form that allows the participant to best pursue hir interests: a critical reading of an appropriate text or texts; a Web-based study or performance; a piece of professional writing; a hypertext. The topic of project is completely open, but you should make a good faith effort to keep it within the bounds of seminar theme. Length: app. 18-20 pages for papers. Other projects can vary, but the scope and effort should match that of a research paper. All projects will be linked to this website at the end of the term.

List of Materials for Presentations 

This is the complete, universally sanctioned set of texts (conveniently available as a list) for your in-class presentations. You should discuss with me at your earliest convenience which one of these items you wish to work on. You may also, with minimal cajoling, study a non-listed alternative text for your presentation. 

Print: Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines

Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace

Richard Grusin and Jay Bolter, Remediation

Mark America, Grammatron (online: www.altx.com)

Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein, Data Trash

Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth

Stephen Johnson, Interface Culture

N. Katherine Hayle, How We Became Posthuman

Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@
Second_Millennium 

Non-print:

www.icebox.com

www.britannica.com  

www.cybertown.com

Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zone  (TAZ)  

The Dead Media Project

Stelarc

Quake 3 Arena

Sony Playstation/ N-64

www.suck.com or www.word.com

Supplementary readings are listed on the schedule, but they are suggested readings only. That is, they are readings that I am suggesting pertain in some way, shape, or form to the required readings for the week. They should most definitely not be read by those who do not wish to pursue the required readings further. And even those who do wish to pursue the required readings further are warned that a “supplement” is by definition a “surplus” or, said another way, an unnecessary addition to an already existing whole. Yet--for those who dare to chance this rhizomatic option--at the same time a supplement is, like a vitamin, an apparently necessary addition to that which stands revealed as still incomplete in its (deceptive) comprehensiveness.

Introduction

Week One: Jan. 4 
Typing practice
Gregory Benford, “Time Shards”

Unit One: The Media Situation

Week Two: Jan. 11
Readings: Harold Innis, “Minerva’s Owl”; Marshall McLuhan, “The Hot and Cool Interview”; Friedrich Kittler, "The History of Communication Media" 

Supplementary: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Week Three: Jan. 18
Readings: Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (introduction and “Gramophone” chapter); Regis Debray, “The Medium's Two Bodies”

Supplementary: Marcel O'Gorman, "Friedrich Kittler's Media Scenes: An Instruction Manual"

Week Four: Jan. 25
Readings: Kittler, GFT ("Film" and “Typewriter” chapters); Mark Poster, The Mode of Information, “Introduction”

Supplementary: Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" 

Unit Two: New Media: Cybertexts and Digital Performances 

Week Five: Feb. 1
Readings: Hobart and Schiffman, excerpt from Information Ages; Espen Aarseth, “Aporia and Epiphany in Doom and The Speaking Clock”; Julian Stallabrass, "Just Gaming"  

Supplementary: More on Aarseth and "ergodic" texts

Week Six: Feb. 8
Readings: Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl; Barbara Page, "Women Writers and the Restive Text" (also available online)

Supplementary: Carolyn Guertin, "Queen Bees and the Hum of the Hive: An Overview of Feminist Hypertext's Subversive Honeycombings"; N. Katherine Hayles, "Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl"

Week Seven: Feb. 15
TRON; Vivian Sobchack, "The Scene of the Screen"

Supplementary: Michael Joyce, "Nonce Upon Some times: Rereading Hypertext Fiction," MFS (1997); Michael Joyce, "Notes toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text: ‘The Ends of Print Culture’ (a work in progress)" 

Reading Week: Feb. 22 (no class)

Unit Three: Virtual Realism

Week Eight: March 1
Readings, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; Michael Ostwald, "Virtual Urban Futures" 

Supplementary: David Porush, "Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson's Snow Crash"

Week Nine: March 8
Readings: Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark; Janet Murray, excerpt from Hamlet on the Holodeck  

Supplementary: More from Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck; Debate between Murray and Sven "The Gutenberg Elegies" Birkets

Week Ten: March 15
Readings: Powers, PTD con’t; N. Katherine Hayles, "The Condition of Virtuality"

Supplementary: Michael Heim, "Transmogrification"

Unit Four: The Condition of Virtuality

Week Eleven: March 22
Readings: John Varley, Steel Beach; Donna Haraway, "When Man™ is on the Menu" 

Supplementary: Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"; cyborgmanifesto.org

Week Twelve: March 29
Readings: Brenda Laurel, "Musings on America, or What I Did on My Summer Vacation"; Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein,"The Theory of the Virtual Class"

Supplementary: Terry Harpold, Dark Continents: A Critique of Internet Metageographies; Arthur and Marilousie Kroker, "Code Warriors"; more of Brenda Laurel's thoughts on humane HCI   

All
critical
readings
available
in the 
graduate
secretary's
office. 

Please
bring a
photocopy
of each
week's
assigned
reading
to class.